"Climate Change and Virtue Ethics" in Handbook of Philosophy of Climate Change (original) (raw)

Virtue ethics and climate change

I discuss how virtue ethicists might respond to the problem of climate change. DRAFT paper for Dale Miller and Ben Eggleston, edd., Moral Theory and Climate Change (Routledge, forthcoming); comments welcomed.

The Ethical Adventures of climate Change:

There seems to be many ethical dilemmas, in regards to finding a sustainable solution to climate change. It has been suggested, the crux, of most of these climate change ethical dilemmas, is how we live now within our world. As a result, this essay argues that there needs to be a global, conciseness process that tackles Climate Change, from an ethical consensual, co-evolutionary, systems orientated, sustainable development ethical perspective. So that then there is a better understanding, how we can live and cope with the crisis of climate change at present and in the future.

Climate Virtues Ethics: A Proposal for Future Research

Religious Inquiries, 2019

Climate virtue ethics points to the subjective/personal dimensions of climate ethics, which have been largely neglected by previous research. There is a lot of research from diverse fields that pertains to the cultural and the individual dimensions that come along with climate virtue ethics, but, as of yet, these dimensions have hardly been examined together. Future research on climate virtue ethics should draw from religions, as religious traditions contain "thick" ideas that may inspire our thinking about how we can envision a life of personal moral integrity and what sustainable life styles may look like in the future. In order to unearth the potentials (Habermas) of these "thick" ideas that are contained in religions, we need to perform close readings of our traditions and ask those traditions which visions of human life they may offer in light of current moral challenges. Future climate virtue ethics is an endeavour that asks for the cooperation of theological ethics, comparative theology, moral psychology/behavioural business ethics, environmental psychology, social theory, and so forth.

Climate change and virtue: an apologetic

Humanities (submitted version) Vol.3(3), 299-312; doi:10.3390/h3030299, 2014

The prominent Australian earth scientist Tim Flannery closes his recent book Here on Earth: a New Beginning with the words “… if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further progress is possible here on Earth”. This is a remarkable conclusion to his magisterial survey of the state of the planet. Climatic and other environmental changes are showing us not only the extent of human influence on the planet, but also the limits of programmatic management of this influence, whether through political, economic, technological or social engineering. A changing climate is a condition of modernity, but a condition which modernity seems uncomfortable with. Inspired by the recent ‘environmental turn’ in the humanities—and calls from a range of environmental scholars and scientists such as Flannery—I wish to suggest a different, non-programmatic response to climate change: a reacquaintance with the ancient and religious ideas of virtue. Drawing upon work by Alasdair MacIntyre, Melissa Lane and Tom Wright I outline an apologetic for why the cultivation of virtue is an appropriate response to the challenges of climate change.

The Turn to Virtue in Climate Ethics: Wickedness and Goodness in the Anthropocene

Ethicists regularly turn to virtue in order to negotiate features of climate change that seem to overwhelm moral agency. Appeals to virtue in climate ethics differ by how they connect individual flourishing with collective responsibilities and by how they interpret Anthropocene relations. Their intelligibility depends on connecting what would be good for the species with what would be good for an individual life.

Does Climate Change Put Ethics on a Collision Course with Itself?

2021

The purpose of this paper is to outline an intuitive ethics of climate change, one that understands our maximizing values, according to which it makes things better to make things better for people, to be tempered by our existential values, according to which existence is just different: making things better for a person by way of bringing that person into existence doesn’t, on its own, make things better. Such a reconciliation, I argue, avoids the collision course we can otherwise anticipate between population ethics on the one hand and climate ethics on the other. The work of reconciliation is commenced by reference to what we can call the person-affecting, or person-based, intuition. It’s hard to get that intuition right; we need a formulation of the intuition that avoids the many pitfalls that many earlier formulations have fallen into. The principle I propose is, however, hardly immune to objection. In this paper, I consider and reply to two such objections both of which rely o...