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  1. Externalities and the Limits of Pigovian Policies.Rebecca Livernois - forthcoming - Ethics, Policy and Environment.
    Pigovian policy is developed in economic theory as an efficient resolution to externality problems. The use of this type of policy to resolve real-world externality problems, including climate change in the form of carbon taxes, assumes that the Pigovian policy result derived in theory holds in the real world. By examining the bridging conditions from theory to the real world, I argue that this assumption holds only in an ambiguously defined subset of externalities. It is thus unclear when Pigovian policy (...)
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  • Existential Risk, Astronomical Waste, and the Reasonableness of a Pure Time Preference for Well-Being.S. J. Beard & Patrick Kaczmarek - 2024 - The Monist 107 (2):157-175.
    In this paper, we argue that our moral concern for future well-being should reduce over time due to important practical considerations about how humans interact with spacetime. After surveying several of these considerations (around equality, special duties, existential contingency, and overlapping moral concern) we develop a set of core principles that can both explain their moral significance and highlight why this is inherently bound up with our relationship with spacetime. These relate to the equitable distribution of (1) moral concern in (...)
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  • (1 other version)Moral demands and the far future.Andreas Mogensen - manuscript
    I argue that moral philosophers have either misunderstood the problem of moral demandingness or at least failed to recognize important dimensions of the problem that undermine many standard assumptions. It has been assumed that utilitarianism concretely directs us to maximize welfare within a generation by transferring resources to people currently living in extreme poverty. In fact, utilitarianism seems to imply that any obligation to help people who are currently badly off is trumped by obligations to undertake actions targeted at improving (...)
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  • The forward-looking polluter pays principle for a just climate transition.Fausto Corvino - forthcoming - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
    Climate justice demands polluters to take responsibility for both present and future harm caused by past GHG emissions and for future harm caused by future GHG emissions. One problem with this is double climate taxation: people living in historical polluting countries must both shoulder the burden of an effective and inclusive climate transition and repay the climate debt incurred by their predecessors. Although double climate taxation might be defensible on normative grounds, it risks making climate justice politically infeasible. I therefore (...)
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  • Reducing Human Numbers and the Size of our Economies is Necessary to Avoid a Mass Extinction and Share Earth Justly with Other Species.Philip Cafaro - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (5):2263-2282.
    Conservation biologists agree that humanity is on the verge of causing a mass extinction and that its primary driver is our immense and rapidly expanding global economy. We are replacing Earth’s ten million wild species with more of ourselves, our domesticated species, our economic support systems, and our trash. In the process, we are creating a duller, tamer, and more dangerous world. The moral case for reducing excessive human impacts on the biosphere is strong on both anthropocentric and biocentric ethical (...)
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  • (1 other version)Moral demands and the far future.Andreas L. Mogensen - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (3):567-585.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  • The only ethical argument for positive δ? Partiality and pure time preference.Andreas Mogensen - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (9):2731-2750.
    I consider the plausibility of discounting for kinship, the view that a positive rate of pure intergenerational time preference is justifiable in terms of agent-relative moral reasons relating to partiality between generations. I respond to Parfit's objections to discounting for kinship, but then highlight a number of apparent limitations of this approach. I show that these limitations largely fall away when we reflect on social discounting in the context of decisions that concern the global community as a whole, such as (...)
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  • Climate Change, Individual Preferences, and Procrastination.Fausto Corvino - 2021 - In Corey Katz & Sarah Kenehan (eds.), Climate Justice and Feasibility: Normative Theorizing, Feasibility Constraints, and Climate Action. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 193-211.
    When discussing the general inertia in climate change mitigation, it is common to approach the analysis either in terms of epistemic obstacles (climate change is too scientifically complex to be fully understood by all in its dramatic nature and/or to find space in the media) and/or moral obstacles (the causal link between polluting actions and social damage is too loose, both geographically and temporally, to allow individuals to understand the consequences of their emissions). In this chapter I maintain that both (...)
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  • Time discounting, consistency, and special obligations: a defence of Robust Temporalism.Harry R. Lloyd - 2021 - Global Priorities Institute, Working Papers 2021 (11):1-38.
    This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept. I also defend Robust Temporalism against several common objections, and I highlight its relevance to a (...)
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  • Public debt and intergenerational ethics: how to fund a clean technology 'Apollo program'?Matthew Rendall - 2021 - Climate Policy 21 (7):976-82.
    If the present generation refuses to bear the burden of mitigating global heating, could we motivate sufficient action by shifting that burden to our descendants? Several writers have proposed breaking the political impasse by funding mitigation through public debt. Critics attack such proposals as both unjust and infeasible. In fact, there is reason to think that some debt financing may be more equitable than placing the whole burden of mitigation on the present generation. While it might not be viable for (...)
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  • A philosopher’s guide to discounting.Kian Mintz-Woo - 2021 - In Budolfson Mark, McPherson Tristram & Plunkett David (eds.), Philosophy and Climate Change. Oxford University Press. pp. 90-110.
    This chapter introduces several distinctions relevant to what is called the “discounting problem”, since the issue is how (future) costs and benefits are discounted to make them comparable in present terms. The author defends the claim that there are good reasons to adopt Ramsey-style discounting in the context of climate change: the Ramsey rule is robust, flexible, and well-understood. An important distinction involved in discounting—“descriptivism” and “prescriptivism”—is discussed. It is argued that, even if we adopt prescriptivism, and accept that this (...)
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  • Effective Altruism and Extreme Poverty.Fırat Akova - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Warwick
    Effective altruism is a movement which aims to maximise good. Effective altruists are concerned with extreme poverty and many of them think that individuals have an obligation to donate to effective charities to alleviate extreme poverty. Their reasoning, which I will scrutinise, is as follows: -/- Premise 1. Extreme poverty is very bad. -/- Premise 2. If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do (...)
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  • Human Enhancement and the Proper Response to Climate Change.James Fanciullo - 2020 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 23 (1):85-96.
    Several philosophers have argued that human enhancements should be considered a potential solution to climate change. In this paper, I consider one such argument offered by S. Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache. I argue that, while their argument is plausible, we have an even stronger reason to consider enhancements a potential solution. In particular, enhancements could align our interests with the promotion of a proper response to climate change: if enhancements were in our interest to adopt and also (...)
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  • Principled Utility Discounting Under Risk.Kian Mintz-Woo - 2019 - Moral Philosophy and Politics 6 (1):89-112.
    Utility discounting in intertemporal economic modelling has been viewed as problematic, both for descriptive and normative reasons. However, positive utility discount rates can be defended normatively; in particular, it is rational for future utility to be discounted to take into account model-independent outcomes when decision-making under risk. The resultant values will tend to be smaller than descriptive rates under most probability assignments. This also allows us to address some objections that intertemporal considerations will be overdemanding. A principle for utility discount (...)
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  • On the Possibility (and Acceptability) of Paternalism towards Future People.Andreas Bengtson - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (1):13-25.
    This article argues that it is possible to act paternalistically towards future people, as long as the following requirements are met: the act/choice is not such that it will prevent the future person from coming into existence; the action/choice is such that it can be taken by the future person herself without significant disadvantage to her; and the act/choice is not such that there is significant uncertainty at the time of choice about the preferences of the future person. I argue (...)
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  • Pure time preference in intertemporal welfare economics.J. Paul Kelleher - 2017 - Economics and Philosophy 33 (3):441-473.
    Several areas of welfare economics seek to evaluate states of affairs as a function of interpersonally comparable individual utilities. The aim is to map each state of affairs onto a vector of individual utilities, and then to produce an ordering of these vectors that can be represented by a mathematical function assigning a real number to each. When this approach is used in intertemporal contexts, a central theoretical question concerns the evaluative weight to be applied to utility coming at different (...)
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  • Engineering Social Justice into Traffic Control for Self-Driving Vehicles?Milos N. Mladenovic & Tristram McPherson - 2016 - Science and Engineering Ethics 22 (4):1131-1149.
    The convergence of computing, sensing, and communication technology will soon permit large-scale deployment of self-driving vehicles. This will in turn permit a radical transformation of traffic control technology. This paper makes a case for the importance of addressing questions of social justice in this transformation, and sketches a preliminary framework for doing so. We explain how new forms of traffic control technology have potential implications for several dimensions of social justice, including safety, sustainability, privacy, efficiency, and equal access. Our central (...)
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  • Carbon Leakage and the Argument from No Difference.Matthew Rendall - 2015 - Environmental Values 24 (4):535-52.
    Critics of carbon mitigation often appeal to what Jonathan Glover has called ‘the argument from no difference’: that is, ‘If I don’t do it, someone else will’. Yet even if this justifies continued high emissions by the industrialised countries, it cannot excuse business as usual. The North’s emissions might not harm the victims of climate change in the sense of making them worse off than they would otherwise be. Nevertheless, it receives benefits produced at the latter’s expense, with the result (...)
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  • Establishing and Defining an Approach to Climate Conscious Clinical Medical Ethics.Andrew Hantel, Jonathan M. Marron & Gregory A. Abel - forthcoming - American Journal of Bioethics:1-14.
    An anthropocentric scope for clinical medical ethics (CME) has largely separated this area of bioethics from environmental concerns. In this article, we first identify and reconcile the ethical issues imposed on CME by climate change including the dispersion of related causes and effects, the transdisciplinary and transhuman nature of climate change, and the historic divorce of CME from the environment. We then establish how several moral theories undergirding modern CME, such as virtue ethics, feminist ethics, and several theories of justice, (...)
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  • Values in Time Discounting.Conrad Heilmann - 2017 - Science and Engineering Ethics 23 (5):1333-1349.
    Controversies about time discounting loom large in decisions about climate change. Prominently, a particularly controversial debate about time discounting in climate change decision-making has been conducted within climate economics, between the authors of Stern et al. and their critics :977–981, 2006; Weitzman in J Econ Lit XLV:703–724, 2007; Nordhaus in J Econ Lit XLV:686–702, 2007). The article examines the role of values in this debate. Firstly, it is shown that time discounting is a case in which values are key because (...)
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  • High Stakes: Inertia or Transformation?Henry Shue - 2016 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 40 (1):63-75.
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  • Carbon Pricing and Intergenerational Fairness.Fausto Corvino - forthcoming - Moral Philosophy and Politics.
    John Broome and Duncan Foley have proposed an ingenious way to transfer benefits backwards in time, from people who are not here yet to people who will not be here in the future. Present people can crowd out conventional, and often brown, investments by issuing global climate bonds (GCBs). The debate about GCBs has focused on whether it is justified to use this financial instrument to allow future people to buy off present people for climate mitigation. In this article, I (...)
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  • Climate Economics and Normative Expertise.Kian Mintz-Woo - unknown
    I discuss three families of methodologies that could be used to assign values to the normative parameters relevant to social discounting in welfare economics generally, and climate economics more specifically. First, I argue that in particular circumstances, there cannot be philosophical argumentation for normative questions; specifically, this occurs when the particular values being sought are both non-critical and from a quantitative range. Second, I argue that social preferences are insufficient if we take the problem to be normative and that proposals (...)
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  • Global egalitarianism and climate change: against integrationism.Alex McLaughlin - forthcoming - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
    A central question in debates about climate justice concerns how the global emissions sink should be shared among the global population over time. This paper considers how global egalitarians should answer that question. In particular, it defends emissions egalitarianism from a view known as ‘integrationism’, according to which shares of the emissions sink should follow from a more general egalitarian theory of distributive justice. First, I show that emissions egalitarianism can draw on a source of functional support not adequately acknowledged (...)
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  • Social bias, not time bias.Preston Greene - 2024 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 23 (1):100-121.
    People seem to have pure time preferences about trade-offs concerning their own pleasures and pains, and such preferences contribute to estimates of people's individual time discount rate. Do pure time preferences also matter to interpersonal welfare trade-offs, including those concerning the welfare of future generations? Most importantly, should the intergenerational time discount rate include a pure time preference? Descriptivists claim that the intergenerational discount rate should reflect actual people's revealed preferences, and thus it should include a pure time preference. Prescriptivists (...)
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  • Ecocentrism and Biosphere Life Extension.Karim Jebari & Anders Sandberg - 2022 - Science and Engineering Ethics 28 (6):1-19.
    The biosphere represents the global sum of all ecosystems. According to a prominent view in environmental ethics, ecocentrism, these ecosystems matter for their own sake, and not only because they contribute to human ends. As such, some ecocentrists are critical of the modern industrial civilization, and a few even argue that an irreversible collapse of the modern industrial civilization would be a good thing. However, taking a longer view and considering the eventual destruction of the biosphere by astronomical processes, we (...)
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  • Life Cycle Assessment and Judgement.Christopher Nathan & Stuart Coles - 2020 - NanoEthics 14 (3):271-283.
    It has become a standard for researchers carrying out biotechnology projects to do a life cycle assessment. This is a process for assessing the environmental impact of a technology, product or policy. Doing so is no simple matter, and in the last decades, a rich set of methodologies has developed around LCA. However, the proper methods and meanings of the process remain contested. Preceding the development of the international standard that now governs LCA, there was a lively debate in the (...)
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  • Kritikk av den rene tidsdiskontering.Trygve Lavik & Kjetil Skjerve - 2020 - Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift 55 (2-3):157-169.
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  • The Singular Plurality of Social Goods / La singolare pluralità dei beni sociali.Marco Emilio - 2022 - Dissertation, Université de Neuchâtel
    According to some philosophers and social scientists, mainstream economic theories currently play an unprecedented role in shaping human societies. This phenomenon can be linked to the dissemination of methodological individualism, where common goods are interpreted as reducible to aggregates of individuals' well-being. Nonetheless, some emergent difficulties of economics in coping with global institutional issues have encouraged some authors to revise that paradigm. In the last three decades, there has been a parallel growing philosophical interest in investigating social sciences' epistemological and (...)
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