The moral complexity of climate change and the need for a multidisciplinary perspective on climate ethics (original) (raw)
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Ethics in Progress, 2014
Climate change poses one of the most serious challenges for humanity due to the increasing complexity of both factual and ethical dimensions. Although the debate over climate change is usually framed as a debate about scientific facts, climate change is also fundamentally an ethical issue; the challenges that climate change poses cannot be addressed simply by accumulating more factual knowledge since it also refers to the meaning we make out of the world and the values we identify as important. Among climate ethicists, there are no doubts that even in the face of uncertainty regarding the severity, scope, and form of climate change impacts, the moral problems it poses are real. For example, future generations are subjected to severe harms and risk, and there exists a great deal of conflict in international climate negotiations. There is general agreement that actions undertaken to deal with the problem of global climate change are not sufficient. Addressing climate issues is usually conceived in terms of political decision making, with adaptation and mitigation as the primary goals. The fact of scientific uncertainty regarding the severity and scope of the problem fuels general disagreement about the appropriate actions to undertake. As a result, the persistent tendency to polarize the discourse often undermines the moral importance of human action, especially that which relates to the global commons and future generations.
Ethical Challenges Posed by Climate Change: An Overview
This chapter provides an overview of key moral issues posed by climate change. It first considers overarching issues: the appropriate target for harm prevention; the distinction between duties of mitigation and duties of adaptation; instances in which efforts to fulfill these duties will be self-defeating or at work cross-purposes; and the distribution of the economic burdens of fulfilling those duties. The remainder of the chapter reviews challenges to the capacity of traditional moral theories to come to grips with questions of moral responsibility. Some challenges are generic; they are applicable to both individual and institutional agents under any moral theory, while others are specific to agent-types or particular theories. The chapter then surveys differences in the way wrongness is conceptualized, including theories that view wrongness as necessarily linked to harming someone, wronging someone without harming, and doing wrong without wronging anyone. The chapter concludes by showing how the challenge of developing a plausible theory of climate change ethics is magnified by the fact that the adverse consequences are a function of what numerous individuals and institutions do or fail to do, having both international and intergenerational impact.
Climate ethics at a multidisciplinary crossroads: four directions for future scholarship
In recent years, the field of climate ethics has grown into a truly multidisciplinary endeavor. Climate ethics scholars are pursuing both normative and positive questions about climate change using many different approaches drawn from a wide diversity of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Now, the field stands at a multidisciplinary crossroads, delineated in large part by two interrelated considerations: what are the key research questions most in need of multidisciplinary attention and what can be done to move the insights and implications of climate ethics scholarship into real-world climate decision-making. Here, we identify four directions for near-future climate ethics research that we believe are both in need of further examination and likely to be of interest to a diverse coalition of decision-makers working Bon the ground^: geoengineering; scope of ethical consideration; responsibility of actors; and, hazards, vulnera-bilities and impacts. Regardless of the specific questions they choose to pursue, multidisciplinary climate ethics researchers should strive to conduct accessible and actionable research that both answers the questions decision-makers are already asking as well as helps shape those questions to make decision-making processes more inclusive and ethically-grounded.
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.
Ethical Issues of Climate Change
The fundamental ethical issues with respect to climate change involves the concept of intergenerational ethics and problems of corruption, as well as Monbiot’s theory of the “denial industry.” The natural environment can be perceived as having intrinsic and instrumental value, however, if certain issues do not appear to have anthropogenic concerns, most egoistic human beings do not see the incentive to do much about it. Although various laws have been enforced to help resolve climate change, it is ultimately up to society to take responsibility towards preventing future harm and preserving the environment.
The 'consequentialist' and 'welfarist' approach − the assessment of a policy in terms of its consequences for individual welfare − that is embodied in standard welfare economics is highly relevant to the ethics of climate change. In Section 2.3, we described the standard approach to ethics in welfare economics i.e. the evaluation of actions in terms of their consequences for consumption by individuals of goods and services. We emphasised that 'goods and services' in consumption were multi-dimensional and should be interpreted broadly. In this appendix we examine that approach in a little more detail and compare it with different ethical perspectives of relevance to the economics of climate change. For many applications of the standard theory, the community is defined as the nation-state and the decision-maker is interpreted as the government. Indeed this is often seen as sufficiently obvious as to go unstated. This is not, of course, intended to deny the complexities and pressures of political systems: the results of this approach should be seen as an ethical benchmark rather than a descriptive model of how political decisions are actually taken. Nevertheless, questions such as 'what do individuals value', 'what should be their relation to decisions and decision-making', 'what is the decision-making process' and 'who are the decision-makers' arise immediately and strongly in the ethical analysis of climate change. These questions take us immediately to different perspectives on ethics. Economics, together with the other social sciences, has in fact embraced a much broader perspective on the objectives of policy than that of standard welfare-economic analysis. Amartya Sen 1 , for example, has focused on the capabilities and freedoms of individuals to live a life they have reason to value, rather than narrowly on the bundles of goods and services they consume. His focus is on opportunities and the processes that create them, rather than on outcomes only. Similar emphases come from discussions of equity 2 (with its focus on opportunity), empowerment 3 , or social inclusion 4. While such perspectives are indeed different, in practice many of the indicators arising from them would overlap strongly with the areas of focus in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and other indicators commonly used by international institutions. Indeed, the MDGs were the outcome of analyses and discussions which themselves embraced a range of ethical approaches. Impacts of climate change on future generations and other nations raise very firmly questions of rights. Protection from harm done by others lies at the heart of many philosophical approaches to liberty, freedom and justice. 5 Protection from harm is also expressed in many legal structures round the world in terms of legal responsibility for damage to the property or well-being of others. This is often applied whether or not the individual or firm was knowingly doing harm. A clear example is asbestos, whose use was not prohibited 6 when it was placed in buildings with the worthy purpose of protecting against the spread of fire. Nevertheless insurance companies are still today paying large sums as compensation for its consequences.
Ethical perspectives on climate change and implications for global mitigation responses
This paper argues that much of the problems facing global mitigation mechanisms against climate change are derived from contrasting ethical and moral positions on the main issue of responsibility. Specifically, these competing attitudes handicap the fulfillment of any promises and commitments to combating anthropogenic climate change. Additionally, this paper suggests that successful mitigation mechanisms ultimately need to be founded on an individual responsibility, morality and respect for nature.