Ethics of a Green Future: a Research Agenda (original) (raw)

Towards the Ethics of a Green Future (Open Access)

2018

What are our obligations towards future generations who stand to be harmed by the impact of today's environmental crises? This book explores ecological sustainability as a human rights issue and examines what our long-term responsibilities might be. This interdisciplinary collection provides a basis for understanding the debates on the provision of sustainability for future generations from a diverse set of theoretical standpoints. Covering a broad range of perspectives such as risk and uncertainty, legal implementation, representation, motivation and economics, Towards the Ethics of a Green Future sets out the key questions involved in this complex ethical issue. The contributors bring theoretical discussions to life through the use of case studies and real-world examples. The book also includes clear and tangible recommendations for policymakers on how to put the suggestions proposed in the book into practice. This book will be of great interest to all researchers and students concerned with issues of sustainability and human rights, as well as scholars of environmental politics, law and ethics more generally.

Intergenerational justice in the context of developing countries

Towards the Ethics of a Green Future, 2018

What are our obligations towards future generations who stand to be harmed by the impact of today's environmental crises? This book explores ecological sustainability as a human rights issue and examines what our long-term responsibilities might be. This interdisciplinary collection provides a basis for understanding the debates on the provision of sustainability for future generations from a diverse set of theoretical standpoints. Covering a broad range of perspectives such as risk and uncertainty, legal implementation, representation, motivation and economics, Towards the Ethics of a Green Future sets out the key questions involved in this complex ethical issue. The contributors bring theoretical discussions to life through the use of case studies and real-world examples. The book also includes clear and tangible recommendations for policymakers on how to put the suggestions proposed in the book into practice. This book will be of great interest to all researchers and students concerned with issues of sustainability and human rights, as well as scholars of environmental politics, law and ethics more generally.

Towards the Ethics of a Green Future

2018

norms and principles or sympathy with far-off people might function as motivational substitutes. Indirect motivations are defined as motivations that are not directed at future people themselves but at other and more immediate aims the attainment of which can be expected to have a favourable influence on future people. The great advantage of indirect motivations is their more reliable emotional basis. This is because they mostly belong to the category of ‘quasi moral motives’ that support genuinely moral motives such as responsibility, dutifulness and moral integrity, without being themselves of a distinctly moral character (see Birnbacher 2009: 283). Classical examples of ‘quasi-moral motives’ are love, pity, care and solidarity. They tend to be equivalent to moral motives as far as their consequences are concerned but are more strongly bound up with affective relations and needs. They are more a matter of the heart than of cold intellect. The most well-known model of an indirect m...

4. Climate Engineering and the Future of Justice

Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies

This chapter discusses the societal and ethical challenges of climate engineering or large-scale intentional intervention in the climate system. Climate engineering is highly controversial, and raises many questions about the values of human societies and the desirability of technological visions of the future. Yet existing ethical theories and concepts may not be equipped to deal with the resulting ethical issues. To understand the potential social and political disruptiveness of climate engineering, we argue it must be placed in the context of global environmental changes caused by human activity. Yet climate engineering is also accompanied with a high degree of uncertainty and risk in terms of potential and actual unintended impacts on natural processes and society. An important challenge stems from epistemic and normative uncertainties about the reversibility and variability in spatial and temporal scales of deployment. Epistemic uncertainties arise in the methodological framewo...

Human rights and future people — Possibilities of argumentation

Journal of Human Rights, 2016

Questions of sustainability will be of crucial importance for the twentyfirst century. But do we have to think about questions of responsibilities regarding future people in terms of human rights? And if duties regarding sustainability fall outside the scope of human rights, what would this imply for the moral and political importance of human rights in general? This article investigates conceptually how we should see the relationship between human rights and long-term global ecological challenges. We will discuss how a human rights approach to questions of sustainability would be different from other approaches and what would be required to see those ecological challenges as human rights questions. We will discuss the possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between human rights and sustainability. And we will briefly draw some conclusions in terms of topics for further debate.

Prudence, justice and the good life : a typology of ethical reasoning in selected European national biodiversity strategies

Communication, participation and education (CEPA) are considered key to the implementation of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). To improve biodiversity communication, the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation commissioned an ethical expertise on good arguments in favour of biodiversity in 2011. This final report presents findings from an analysis of the German, Austrian, Swiss and EU biodiversity strategies with regard to their concepts of communication and ethics. The triad “Prudence, Justice and the Good Life” serves as an analytical tool to group and evaluate the arguments to be found in the strategies analysed. The study is addressed to people working in the field of biodiversity communication and education who are interested in ethical aspects of biodiversity politics. It provides an insight into the field of environmental ethics for non-philosophers and is meant to promote and enhance ethical debate in biodiversity communication.

PUBLIC REASON Journal of Political and Moral Philosophy PUBLIC REASON Journal of Political and Moral Philosophy

2013

Public Reason is a peer-reviewed journal of political and moral philosophy. Public Reason publishes articles, book reviews, as well as discussion notes from all the fields of political philosophy and ethics, including political theory, applied ethics, and legal philosophy. The Journal encourages the debate around rationality in politics and ethics in the larger context of the discussion concerning rationality as a philosophical problem. Public Reason is committed to a pluralistic approach, promoting interdisciplinary and original perspectives as long as the ideal of critical arguing and clarity is respected. The journal is intended for the international philosophical community, as well as for a broader public interested in political and moral philosophy. It aims to promote philosophical exchanges with a special emphasis on issues in, and discussions on the Eastern European space. Public Reason publishes two issues per year, in June and December. Public Reason is an open access e-journal, but it is also available in print.

Climate Engineering and the Future of Justice (Teabi & Lenzi et al.)

Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies: An Introduction, 2023

This chapter discusses the societal and ethical challenges of climate engineering or large-scale intentional intervention in the climate system. Climate engineering is highly controversial, and raises many questions about the values of human societies and the desirability of technological visions of the future. Yet existing ethical theories and concepts may not be equipped to deal with the resulting ethical issues. To understand the potential social and political disruptiveness of climate engineering, we argue it must be placed in the context of global environmental changes caused by human activity. Yet climate engineering is also accompanied with a high degree of uncertainty and risk in terms of potential and actual unintended impacts on natural processes and society. An important challenge stems from epistemic and normative uncertainties about the reversibility and variability in spatial and temporal scales of deployment. Epistemic uncertainties arise in the methodological framework of climate science, while normative uncertainties arise faced with the challenge of reconciling a plurality of values. A key question is how forms of climate engineering enforce or hinder disruption in social practices and institutional settings in the direction of a sustainable future. Climate engineering technologies can affect and potentially disrupt existing conceptions of climate and environmental justice, due to the scale and scope of impacts upon people currently alive, future generations, and non-human species and ecosystems. The availability of climate engineering may also require rethinking the responsibility for mitigation, as well as applications of the precautionary principle. Climate engineering also raises the question of how the perspectives of affected communities can be adequately represented. While it remains unclear whether climate engineering techniques can genuinely assist in lessening the impacts of climate change, the question is whether and to what extent it should be used as a complementary approach to systemic changes in social, economic and political practices. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters' authors. This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).