The risk posed by anthropogenic climate change is generally accepted, and the challenge we face to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to a tolerable limit cannot be underestimated. Reducing GHG emissions can be achieved either by producing less GHG to begin with or by emitting less GHG into the atmosphere. One carbon mitigation technology with large potential for capturing carbon dioxide at the point source of emissions is carbon capture and storage (CCS). However, the merits of CCS have been questioned, (...) both on practical and ethical grounds. While the practical concerns have already received substantial attention, the ethical concerns still demand further consideration. This article aims to respond to this deficit by reviewing the critical ethical challenges raised by CCS as a possible tool in a climate mitigation strategy and argues that the urgency stemming from climate change underpins many of the concerns raised by CCS. (shrink)

Papers from the Pacific islands, India, Bangladesh and elsewhere illustrate the ethical dilemma of environmental policy, sustainable development and the needs of communities to make a living.

In this paper I make the following claims. In order to see anthropogenic climate change as clearly involving moral wrongs and global injustices, we will have to revise some central concepts in these domains. Moreover, climate change threatens another value that cannot easily be taken up by concerns of global justice or moral responsibility.

Most normative advice to individuals about what they should do to help prevent climate change focuses on reductions in personal emissions. This is consistent with an accountancy model of morality, with perpetrators held responsible for the harms they individually cause. An alternative focus receiving less popular and philosophical attention, but with greater potential to achieve substantial mitigation outcomes, is citizen activism for systemic reforms. Rather than perpetration priority moral concern can be directed to bystanding. To more effectively guide action, reformist (...) ethics need to be informed by psychosociological research on motivation and societal transformation. (shrink)

Very few moral philosophers have written on climate change.1 This is puzzling, for several reasons. First, many politicians and policy makers claim that climate change is not only the most serious environmental problem currently facing the world, but also one of the most important international problems per se.2 Second, many of those working in other disciplines describe climate change as fundamentally an ethical issue.3.

Anthropogenic climate change creates unique challenges for policy and ethics, but also new opportunities for conceptualizing moral community. Through the lens of valuing, I develop a framework for approaching climate change through the lens of expanding those whom we consider relevant to our own lives and evaluative processes. Distant humans are an important to this expansion, but the ultimate goal includes non-humans in our moral community. In becoming more receptive to the interests of those very unlike ourselves, we create opportunities (...) for greater resilience, both for ourselves and for other organisms and ecosystems. (shrink)

Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) is an insightful deliberation on the layered inequities and asymmetries created by the intersection of colonialism and anthropogenic activities. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh conceives the present-day climate and ecological crisis as fallouts of colonial thinking and its manifestations in dominant epistemic and ethical constructions. This article underscores Ghosh’s critique of the Eurocentric discourses for their instrumentality in producing the totalitarian binaries of human and non-human, in which the ‘human’ was always the whites and (...) the ‘non-human’ comprised all ‘others’—the non-whites, indigenous people, nature and ecology. In attributing agency and signifying authority to the white capitalist, this dualistic thinking has always conceived of the ‘others’ as non-humans—those who could be objectified, commodified and tampered with. This article explores how Ghosh repudiates this colonialist monolithic demarcation, which, in compliance with the discourse of the Anthropocene, had annihilated non-Western forms of signification, knowledge and ethics. The article focuses on how the systemic othering of Western modernity’s episteme had been incremental, leading to occurrences of ‘testimonial injustices’ and ‘hermeneutical injustices’—which had culminated in severe forms of epistemicide and unleashed, what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms ‘cognitive injustice’—relegating indigeneity and ecology to precarious conditions. In accordance with this, this article argues that Ghosh envisages a critical necessity to dismantle the matrix of Western capitalist modernity and its associated narrative of the Anthropocene and claims for a conceptualization of decolonial ecological ethics that would prioritize an encompassing of the episteme produced by the ‘other’. An engagement with the indigenous voices and a restoration of non-Western modes of knowledge production are crucial, as they can offer new ethical dimensions to envision ecology and life with its multiplicities and facilitate ‘cognitive justice’ for the oppressed and unrepresented ‘other’. (shrink)

This paper adopts justificatory moral pluralism – a multilevel framework for justifying the choice by different agents of the most appropriate norms and values to guide their decisions and actions – to climate change. Its main objective is to investigate how ethics may effectively help achieve a better result in deciding how to mitigate, adapt, or compensate by enhancing the moral acceptability of the available policies or actions that are most likely to counter the effects of climate change. JMP presents (...) agents – individuals, nonstate, and state – with a thorough yet flexible process of matching policies and actions with ethical theories, raising the robustness of moral reasons for politically efficient and individually motivating courses of action against climate change. JMP triggers climate responsibility and sensibility in agents, engaging them in discussing and finding out individually and collectively the most acceptable paths for the decarbonisation transition that is fast approaching. (shrink)

Changing values may give rise to intergenerational conflicts, like in the ongoing climate change and energy transition debate. This essay focuses on the interpretative question of how this value change can best be understood. To elucidate the interpretation of value change, two philosophical perspectives on value are introduced: Berlin’s value pluralism and Dworkin’s interpretivism. While both authors do not explicitly discuss value change, I argue that their perspectives can be used for interpreting value change in the case of climate change (...) and the energy transition. I claim that Berlin’s pluralistic account of value would understand the value change as an intergenerational conflict and therefore provide a too narrow and static ground for understanding ongoing value change. Instead, by exploring Dworkin’s standpoint in moral epistemology, this essay distills a more encompassing perspective on how values may relate, converge, overlap, and change, fulfilling their functions in the course of climate change and energy transition. This perspective is further detailed by taking inspiration from Shue’s work on the interpretation of equity in the climate change debate. I argue that the resulting perspective allows us to see value change as a gradual process rather than as a clash between generations and their values. (shrink)

There is a common belief that genuine awareness and acceptance of the existence of anthropogenic climate change (as opposed to either ignorance or denial) automatically leads one to develop political and moral positions which advocate for collective human action toward minimizing suffering for all and adapting human societies toward a fossil-free future. This is a mistake. Against the idea that scientific awareness of the facts of climate change is enough to motivate a common ethical project of humanity toward a unifying (...) good, I argue that climate change awareness can just as well equally motivate heightened divisions of humanity into anti-egalitarian, xenophobic, class-differentiated zones of competitive survival. I call this climate barbarism, and seek to explain its conceptual grounds. (shrink)

While many aspects of human life are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, values related to selfhood and community are among the most challenging to preserve. In what follows, I focus on the importance of values and valuing in climate change adaptation. To do so, I will first discuss two alternate approaches to valuing, both of which fail to recognise the loss of valued objects and practices that both of which help to generate a sense of self and deserve (...) to be respected and mourned. Ultimately, I argue that an approach to valuing that is responsive to change and open to loss will enable humans to be more resilient in the face of anthropogenic climate change, in order that we may move forward and construct selves that fit the context in which we live. (shrink)

Radical virtue serves two distinct purposes: consolation in unfavorable circumstances, and prescription to achieve better ones. This paper maps out the theoretical nuances important for practical guidance. For a Stoic, radical virtue is a way to live well through environmental tragedy. For a consequentialist, it is an instrument to motivate us to combat climate change. For an Aristotelian, it is both. I argue that an Aristotelian approach fares the best, balancing the aim of external success with the aim of living (...) well through practical wisdom. This involves criticizing assumptions about living well that underlie behaviors that contribute to climate change. Some might object virtue theory suffers from application problems, and an Aristotelian approach suffers even more because it does not tell the virtuous person how to negotiate her aims. In response, Aristotelian revision starts with moral perception that adds valuable content by navigating through the messiness. (shrink)

Vaikka suurin osa viimeaikaisesta ilmaston lämpenemisestä on ihmisten aiheuttamaa antropogeenista lämpenemistä, yksittäisten ihmisten kausaalinen vaikutus ilmastonmuutokseen on minimaalinen, jopa mitätön. Tämän takia jotkut väittävät, että on harhaanjohtavaa pitää yksilöitä vastuussa ilmastonmuutoksesta. Tällainen argumentointi perustuu perinteisiin vastuutulkintoihin ja -käsitteisiin, joissa vastuun perustana painotetaan toimijan näkökulmaa ja hänen kausaalista rooliaan: jos toimijan teot tai tekemättä jättämiset eivät vaikuta lopputulokseen, hän ei ole vastuussa siitä. Ilmastonmuutoksessa on toinenkin vastuukäsitysten kannalta ongelmallinen seikka, intentionaalisuus eli tahallisuus: ihmiskunta tai yksittäiset ihmiset eivät ole tietoisesti lähteneet muuttamaan (...) ilmastoa. Päinvastoin ilmastonmuutos on syntynyt teollistumisen ja nykyisen elämäntyylimme tahattomana – ja pitkään myös tiedostamattomana – sivuvaikutuksena. Koska omien tekojemme kausaalinen vaikutus sekä niiden tahallisuus tai tahattomuus on luonnollisesti keskiössä arvioidessamme omaa vastuutamme, mahdollinen osallisuutemme vahingon tuottamiseen jää helposti vähemmälle huomiolle. -/- Keskityn tässä artikkelissa osallisuusvastuun (complicity) käsitteeseen ja argumentoin samalla liian yksilökeskeistä ajattelua vastaan. Kollektiivinen toimijuus on otettava huomioon siinä missä yksilökeskeinenkin. Vastuunkantaja ja vastuun peruste ovat analyyttisesti erillisiä käsitteitä, ja niiden tarkastelu voi valottaa vastuukeskustelua ilmastonmuutoksesta. Vastuun peruste voi olla yksilöllinen silloinkin, kun vastuunkantaja on kollektiivinen. Lisäksi argumentoin, että vastuusta puhuttaessa ei riitä katsoa asiaa vain toimijan itsensä kannalta, vaan myös uhrin ja sivustakatsojan näkökulmat on otettava huomioon. Vasta kun vastuukäytäntöjä tarkastellaan ihmisten keskinäisten (usein monimutkaisten) verkostojen ja linkitysten kautta, voidaan saada tasapainoinen kuva vastuumme määrästä ja sen rajoista. -/- Yksilön vastuu ei poista vastuuta kollektiiveilta, kuten valtioilta, ja voimme tehokkaimmin hillitä ilmastonmuutosta esimerkiksi lainsäädännön kautta. Ennen kuin kollektiiviset ratkaisut ilmastonmuutoksen hillitsemiseksi saadaan toimimaan, vastuu palautuu kuitenkin yksilöille. Vastuun peruste on aina yksilötasolla ja sitä voidaan ainoastaan delegoida kollektiiveille. Ilmastonmuutoksen kohdalla delegointi ei ole vielä toiminut. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists have been arguing for decades that swift action to protect our natural environment is morally paramount, and that our concern for the environment should go beyond its importance for human welfare. It might be thought that the widespread acceptance of moral anti-realism would undermine the aims of environmental ethicists. One reason is that recent empirical studies purport to show that moral realists are more likely to act on the basis of their ethical convictions than anti-realists. In addition, it (...) is sometimes argued that only moral realists can countenance the claim that nature is intrinsically valuable. Against this, we argue that the acceptance of moral anti-realism is no threat to the environmentalist cause. We argue, further, that the acceptance of moral realism is potentially an obstacle to delivering on a third core environmental ethicist demand: namely, that successful action on climate change and environmental destruction requires us to change some of our commonly-held ethical views and to achieve a workable consensus. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists have not reached a consensus about whether or not individuals who contribute to climate change have a moral obligation to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, I side with those who think that such individuals do have such an obligation by appealing to the concept of integrity. I argue that adopting a political commitment to work toward a collective solution to climate change—a commitment we all ought to share—requires also adopting a personal commitment to reduce (...) one’s emissions. On these grounds, individuals who contribute to climate change have a prima facie moral duty to lower their personal greenhouse gas emissions. After presenting this argument and supporting each of its premises, I defend it from two major lines of objection: skepticism about integrity’s status as a virtue and concerns that the resulting moral duty would be too demanding to be morally required. I then consider the role that an appeal to integrity could play in galvanizing the American public to take personal and political action regarding climate change. (shrink)

Existing institutions do not seem well-designed to address paradigmatically global, intergenerational and ecological problems, such as climate change. 1 In particular, they tend to crowd out intergenerational concern, and thereby facilitate a “tyranny of the contemporary” in which successive generations exploit the future to their own advantage in morally indefensible ways (albeit perhaps unintentionally). Overcoming such a tyranny will require both accepting responsibility for the future and meeting the institutional gap. I propose that we approach the first in terms of (...) a traditional “delegated responsibility” model of the transmission of individual responsibility to collectives, and the second with a call for a global constitutional convention focused on future generations. In this paper, I develop the delegated responsibility model by suggesting how it leads us to understand both past failures and prospective responsibility. I then briefly defend the call for a global constitutional convention. (shrink)

The urgent need to address climate change poses a range of complex moral and practical concerns, not least because rising to the challenge will require cooperation among countries that differ greatly in their wealth, the extent of their contributions to the problem, and their vulnerability to environmental and economic shocks. This thesis by publication in the field of climate ethics aims to characterise a range of national responsibilities associated with acting on climate change (Part I), and to identify proposals for (...) fulfilling those responsibilities through fair and feasible institutional arrangements (Part II). I aim not only to address substantive gaps in scholarly understanding of those responsibilities, but also to strengthen the ability of climate ethics to engage meaningfully with climate policy. Chapter 2 addresses the question of whether wealthy countries owe a “climate debt” to poor countries. It finds that even if climate debt (suitably interpreted) may provide a coherent and morally plausible concept, its political value as a discursive frame that can provide a basis for cooperation is limited. Chapter 3 investigates the role that equity may play in negotiations on a long-term climate change agreement. It argues that developed and developing countries may reach a “principled bargain” if both converge on a way of differentiating their responsibilities that places less emphasis on a rigid dichotomy between the two groups and more emphasis on objective criteria relating to their contribution to the problem and capacity to address it. Chapter 4 explores a question largely overlooked in climate ethics, namely whether wealthy countries owe compensation to those who are adversely affected by the climate policies which they enact. I find that enacting countries have responsibilities to compensate both domestic and foreign citizens who would suffer disproportionate losses from the effects of policies. Chapter 5 assesses whether wealthy countries may legitimately adopt unilateral (or “fragmented”) rather than multilaterally coordinated approaches to raising climate finance for developing countries. It finds that coordinated target-setting, effort sharing and oversight arrangements are essential, but that a mix of unilateral and coordinated approaches to raising funds will be necessary for securing legitimacy. In Chapter 6, through addressing the broader question of what should count as official aid, I consider whether wealthy countries may draw on aid budgets to support developing countries’ efforts to address climate change. I find that the current definition of official aid should be retained but supplemented by specified exclusions from eligibility in order to preserve the aid regime’s integrity. Nevertheless, some climate finance may justifiably be counted as aid provided that concerns relating to the diversion of aid funding are addressed. In addressing these research questions, the thesis seeks not only to make original theoretical contributions to climate ethics but also to strengthen broader scholarly understanding of the ways in which ethics and international public policy may inform one another, particularly by highlighting the role of framing considerations (Chapter 2), feasibility considerations (Chapter 3), and the ways in which principles of fairness and legitimacy map onto institutional functions (Chapters 4, 5 and 6). (shrink)

Both intertemporal and intratemporal equity are central to the examination of policy towards climate change. However, many discussions of intertemporal issues have been marred by serious analytical errors, particularly in applying standard approaches to discounting; the errors arise, in part, from paying insufficient attention to the magnitude of potential damages, and in part from overlooking problems with market information. Some of the philosophical concepts and principles of Paper 1 are applied to the analytics and ethics of pure-time discounting and infinite-horizon (...) models, providing helpful insights into orderings of welfare streams and obligations towards future generations. Such principles give little support for the idea of discrimination by date of birth. Intratemporal issues are central to problematic and slow-moving international discussions and are the second focus of this paper. A way forward is to cast the policy issues and analyses in a way that keeps equity issues central and embeds them in the challenge of fostering the dynamic transition to the low-carbon economy in both developed and developing countries. This avoids the trap of seeing issues primarily in terms of burden-sharing and zero-sum games – that leads to inaction and the most inequitable outcome of all. (shrink)

Cet article vise à justifier, puis à appliquer une éthique climatique centrée sur les intérêts des acteurs économiques. Après avoir expliqué pourquoi le changement climatique pose un problème important de motivation, je montre pour quelles raisons les incitations peuvent au moins partiellement y remédier. Je développe ensuite deux possibilités d’institutionnalisation de l’éthique des incitations. La première consiste en une taxe internationale augmentant progressivement le coût des émissions de dioxyde de carbone, un dispositif auquel il convient d’ajouter des subsides pour la (...) recherche, le développement et le déploiement des énergies renouvelables. La seconde consiste en un marché global du carbone qui vise également à décourager l’utilisation des combustibles fossiles et à encourager l’utilisation de sources alternatives d’énergie. L’objectif est de montrer qu’une éthique climatique prenant en compte le problème de la motivation est plus efficace qu’une position qui se limite aux devoirs moraux incombant aux consommateurs et producteurs, soit de réduire leurs émissions. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change has become a hot button issue in the scientific, economic, political, and ethical sectors. While the science behind climate change is clear, responses in the economic and political realms have been unfulfilling. On the economic front, companies have marketed themselves as pioneers in the quest to go green while simultaneously engaging in environmentally destructive practices and on the political front, politicians have failed to make any significant global progress. I argue that climate change needs to be framed (...) as an ethical issue to make serious progress towards the path to a sustainable human civilization. In an effort to motivate the urgency needed to confront climate change, I argue that climate change seriously affects human beings living here and now, and if one cares about unnecessarily harming fellow innocent living human beings, then one should care about one’s own environmental impact related to climate change. Since this argument does not depend upon any specific philosophical, religious, or ethical tradition but applies regardless of one’s particular background, I hope to induce genuine concern among all human beings regarding this issue. (shrink)

The global community faces ecological problems with the natural environment and cultural impediments to solving them. Natural systems are constantly changing and so are cultural practices. Humans need to address both: the interaction between those dynamic systems, the natural and cultural, because what happens in one system changes things in the other. The changes to the ecosystems are rapid and sometimes irreversible while dealing with them has been inadequate. Environmental movements, including deep ecology, have been at the forefront of the (...) efforts to engage the public, various groups, politicians, and world governments to address environmental problems on a coordinated large scale, but their efforts have not produced substantive results. Cultural, ideological, and other reasons provide some insights into the reasons why this has happened. They show that the ecological crisis is now at the point at which deep ecological principles offer a way out of the crisis more clearly, given that it offers a new, ecological worldview for humans to adopt. This worldview suggests there is inherent unity between the human and natural worlds based on the concept of interdependence. This paper attempts to show that such inherent unity exists and that humans need to use precaution because the risks are too great to ignore. (shrink)

In a recent editorial, Raymond Spier expresses skepticism over claims that climate change is driven by human actions and that humanity should act to avoid climate change. This paper responds to this skepticism as part of a broader review of the science and ethics of climate change. While much remains uncertain about the climate, research indicates that observed temperature increases are human-driven. Although opinions vary regarding what should be done, prominent arguments against action are based on dubious factual and ethical (...) positions. Thus, the skepticisms in the recent editorial are unwarranted. This does not diminish the general merits of skeptical intellectual inquiry. (shrink)

Tragedy feels disempowering and the confluence of tragedies since the beginning of 2020 can overwhelm one’s sense of agency. This paper describes how we use a civic engagement (CE) project to nurture radical hope for our students. Radical hope involves a desire for a positive outcome surpassing understanding, as well as an activity to strive to achieve that outcome despite its uncertainty. Our CE project asks students to identify ethical issues they care about and respond in a fitting way, questioning (...) the assumption that their efforts do not matter, and imagining creative ways to make a difference that are in their power. We scaffold our CE project in order to nurture hopeful possibilities for students by offering real-world, feasible pathways for addressing systemic problems. -/- . (shrink)

How should responsibility be theorized in the context of the global climate crisis? This question is often framed through the language of distributive justice. Because of the inequitable distributi...

European Journal of Political Theory, Ahead of Print. How should responsibility be theorized in the context of the global climate crisis? This question is often framed through the language of distributive justice. Because of the inequitable distribution of historical emissions, climate vulnerability, and adaptation capacity, such considerations are necessary, but do not exhaust the question of responsibility. This article argues that climate change is a structural injustice demanding a theory of political responsibility. Agents bear responsibility not in virtue of their (...) individual causal contribution or capacity, but because they participate in and benefit from the carbon-intensive structures, practices, and institutions that constitute the global political and economic system. Agents take responsibility by engaging in collective political action to transform these structures that generate both climate hazards and unjust relationships of power. By incorporating distributive principles within a capacious conception of political responsibility, this framework advances the theory and practice of climate justice in two ways. First, adopting a relational rather than individualistic criterion of responsibility better makes sense of how and why individuals bear responsibility for a global and intergenerational injustice like climate change. Second, framing climate justice in terms of political responsibility for unjust structural processes better orients and motivates the political action necessary for structural transformation. (shrink)

Does the receipt of benefits from some common resource create an obligation to contribute toward its maintenance? If so, what is the basis of this obligation? I consider whether individual contributions to climate change can be impugned as wrongful free riding upon the stability of the planet's climate system, when persons enjoy its benefits but refuse to bear their share of its maintenance costs. Two main arguments will be advanced: the first urges further modification of H.L.A. Hart’s “principle of fairness” (...) as the basis for demanding that would-be free riders pay their fair share in the context of climate change, while the second claims that remedial action on climate change is better captured through collective action analysis than through harm principles that seek to connect individual actions to bad environmental outcomes. (shrink)

In order to develop a model of equitable and sustainable distribution, this paper advocates integrating the ecological space paradigm and the capabilities approach. As the currency of distribution, this account proposes a hybrid of capabilities and ecological space. Although the goal of distributive justice should be to secure and promote people’s capabilities now and in the future, doing so requires acknowledging that these capabilities are dependent on the biophysical preconditions as well as inculcating the ethos of restraint. Both issues have (...) been highlighted from the perspective of the ecological space paradigm. Concerning the scope of distributive justice, the integration can combine the advantages of the ecological space paradigm regarding the allocation of the responsibilities involved in environmental sustainability with the strength of the capabilities approach regarding people’s entitlements. The pattern of distribution starts from a capability threshold. In order to achieve this threshold, ecological space should be provided sufficiently, and the remaining ecological space budget could then be distributed according to the equal per capita principle. (shrink)

Is liberalism adaptable enough to the ecological agenda to deal satisfactorily with the challenges of anthropogenic climate change while leaving its normative foundations intact? Compatibilists answer yes; incompatibilists say no. Comparing such answers, this article argues that it is not discrete liberal principles which impede adapatability, so much as the constructivist model (exemplified in Rawls) of what counts as a valid normative principle. Constructivism has both normative and ontological variants, each with a realist counterpart. I argue that normative constructivism in (...) the Rawlsian mode, whatever its strengths elsewhere, is markedly ill‐equipped to deal with the particular normative challenges posed by climate change – and that that these doubts holds regardless of which stance is adopted as its ontological corollary. (shrink)

Is liberalism adaptable enough to the ecological agenda to deal satisfactorily with the challenges of anthropogenic climate change while leaving its normative foundations intact? Compatibilists answer yes; incompatibilists say no. Comparing such answers, this article argues that it is not discrete liberal principles which impede adapatability, so much as the constructivist model (exemplified in Rawls) of what counts as a valid normative principle. Constructivism has both normative and ontological variants, each with a realist counterpart. I argue that normative constructivism in (...) the Rawlsian mode, whatever its strengths elsewhere, is markedly ill‐equipped to deal with the particular normative challenges posed by climate change – and that that these doubts holds regardless of which stance is adopted as its ontological corollary. (shrink)

Argues that, to make progress within environmental ethics, philosophers must explicitly engage in environmental metaphysics.

The Anthropocene and the Holocene are coeval. Preserving the Holocene/Anthropocene climate is the overarching concern of twenty-first-century environmental philosophy and ethics. The second wave of the environmental crisis—ozone thinning, biodiversity erosion, and climate change—crested in the mid-1980s and is global in scale. The land ethic is local in scale. Therefore, an earth ethic is needed. Leopold sketched several in 1923: a three-pronged virtue ethic, a care ethic for posterity, an ethic of respect for the living planet. An individualistic ethic for (...) distant future generations falls afoul of the non-identity paradox. Fiduciary care for global civilization can serve as a surrogate. (shrink)

How can the human speak in the shadow of the post-humanist critique? This essay arises out of a prolonged moment of doubt, a cognitive and affective confusion over the ontology and status of what goes under the name of “man.” Now, that confusion is of course nothing new. It has been inherent to the disciplinary inquiry within the humanities conducted under the aegis of philosophical positions broadly associated with post-structuralism over the last few decades. The early twenty-first century attempts on (...) the part of humanities scholars to turn to a more serious engagement with those hard sciences that deal with different human parts and particles – anatomy, neurology, genetics – have contributed even further to this uncertainty, as has the discovery that the typical signal points of the human such as language, tool use, culture, and emotions are to be found across the species barrier. Rather than aim at ascertaining the identity of the human/non-human animal, in all its biodigital configurations, what I am predominantly concerned with in this essay is discussing how this transformed understanding of the human can help us not only think better about ourselves and others who may or may not be like us, but also live better with others - machines, humans, and other animals. The emphasis in this investigation falls on the pragmatics of the “how” as much as on the nature of that “we.” My focus here is therefore primarily ethical rather than ontological. And yet the very inquiry into ways of living a good life must be accompanied by the assessment not only of who will do the living but also of who will be involved in the process of judging its goodness, and in structuring a theoretical discourse around our biological and political forms of existence. In a certain sense this essay is an attempt to return to the human “after the cyborg.” This attempt is underpinned by an intellectual and, dare I say it, personal imperative to find a way out of what I see as the posthumanist impasse of some strands of contemporary cultural theory, whereby the widespread acceptance of the notions of transhuman relationality, interspecies kinship, and machinic becoming by many humanities scholars seems to have diminished the need for a more rigorous interrogation of the singularity of trans-species and intra-species difference. It is thus armed with doubt and singularity as my analytical tools, coupled with the intransigent use of the “I” pronoun which simultaneously undermines and reasserts the humanist pretence of this piece of writing, that I set out to explore these issues. Obviously, there is also a possibility that this posthuman, all-too-human interrogation is just another exercise in narcissism, a desperate attempt to return to the self and hang on to a fantasy of human exceptionalism. In this context, Jacques Derrida’s query, “Is there animal narcissism?,” becomes something of an accusation, aimed perhaps at those of us who are still obsessed by Descartes’ question: “But as for me, who am I?.”. (shrink)

In this essay I present an overview of the problem of climate change, with attention to issues of interest to feminists, such as the differential responsibilities of nations and the disproportionate “vulnerabilities” of females, people of color, and the economically disadvantaged in relation to climate change. I agree with others that justice requires governments, corporations, and individuals to take full responsibility for histories of pollution, and for present and future greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless I worry that an overemphasis on household (...) and personal-sphere fossil fuel emissions distracts from attention to higher-level corporate and governmental responsibilities for addressing the problem of climate change. I argue that more attention should be placed on the higher-level responsibilities of corporations and governments, and I discuss how individuals might more effectively take responsibility for addressing global climate change, especially when corporations and governments refuse to do so. (shrink)

Environmental changes can bear upon the environmental virtues, having effects not only on the conditions of their application but also altering the concepts themselves. I argue that impending radical changes in global climate will likely precipitate significant changes in the dominate world culture of consumerism and then consider how these changes could alter the moral landscape, particularly culturally thick conceptions of the environmental virtues. According to Jonathan Lear, as the last principal chief of the Crow Nation, Plenty Coups exhibited the (...) virtue of “radical hope,” a novel form of courage appropriate to a culture in crisis. I explore what radical hope may look like today, arguing how it should broadly affect our environmental character and that a framework for future environmental virtues will involve a diminished place for valuing naturalness as autonomy from human interference. (shrink)

According to some scholars, while sets of greenhouse gases emissions generate harms deriving from climate change, which can be mitigated through collective actions, individual emissions and mitigation activities seem to be causally insufficient to cause harms. If so, single individuals are neither responsible for climate harms, nor they have mitigation duties. If this view were true, there would be collective responsibility for climate harms without individual responsibility and collective mitigation duties without individual duties: this is puzzling. This paper explores a (...) way to solve this puzzle. First, it will be argued that individual emissions, though not proper and full-fledged causes, causally contribute to raise the probability of climate harms. As a consequence, individuals are in fact responsible for their expected contributions to climate harms – this is contributive responsibility for likely outcomes. Second, it will be argued that people have responsibility also for the possible impacts of their individual emissions on climate harms. People can plausibly be regarded as individually responsible for the possible outcomes of their actions in close possible alternative worlds – this is robust responsibility. Non-causal individual responsibility for climate harms is plausible, and the puzzle may be solved. (shrink)

Humans are causing global climate change (GCC), and such climate change causes harms. Robin Attfield explained how individuals should be understood to be culpable for these harms. In this paper, I use a critical analysis of Attfield’s explanatory framework to explore further difficulties in accounting for corporate responsibility for these harms. I begin by arguing that there are some problems with his framework as it is applied to individuals that emit greenhouse gases (GHGs). I then show that it will be (...) very difficult to extend this framework to corporations. This is not a criticism of Attfield’s work (as he does not discuss corporate responsibility for those harms associated with GCC), but it will serve to show the difficulty in philosophically explaining corporations’ moral culpability when it comes to these harms. In fact, one positive conclusion of this paper is that it highlights a new area of concern that has been ignored in discussions of corporate responsibilities—that of mediated responsibilities—which is how Attfield understands our responsibilities regarding GCC. The discussion of this concern will draw attention to another positive conclusion of this paper: the harms associated with CO2 are very unlike the harms associated with other airborne-emitted substances, which will indicate that we will need new ways of understanding how individuals and corporations are philosophically responsible for these harms. The final positive conclusion of this paper will be a discussion of what the constraints should be on new approaches to explaining our culpability. (shrink)

How much responsibility ought a professional engineer to have with regard to supporting basic principles of sustainable development? While within the United States, professional engineering societies, as reflected in their codes of ethics, differ in their responses to this question, none of these professional societies has yet to put the engineer’s responsibility toward sustainability on a par with commitments to public safety, health, and welfare. In this paper, we aim to suggest that sustainability should be included in the paramountcy clause (...) because it is a necessary condition to ensure the safety, health, and welfare of the public. Part of our justification rests on the fact that to engineer sustainably means among many things to consider social justice, understood as the fair and equitable distribution of social goods, as a design constraint similar to technical, economic, and environmental constraints. This element of social justice is not explicit in the current paramountcy clause. Our argument rests on demonstrating that social justice in terms of both inter- and intra-generational equity is an important dimension of sustainability (and engineering). We also propose that embracing sustainability in the codes while recognizing the role that social justice plays may elevate the status of the engineer as public intellectual and agent of social good. This shift will then need to be incorporated in how we teach undergraduate engineering students about engineering ethics. (shrink)

Essays in Philosophy is proud to publish a special issue titled “New Currents in Environmental Virtue Ethics.” This issue invited submissions exploring innovations within environmental virtue ethics (EVE), a burgeoning subfield in environmental ethics that applies virtue ethics to environmental concerns. Some have referred to the recent interest in EVE in environmental ethics as the “Turn” to virtue. The call for papers encouraged authors to submit original research that expands the theoretical framework of EVE and applies EVE to new contexts (...) to address pressing environmental challenges. Topics for submission encompassed a broad spectrum, ranging from ethical adaptation to climate change and the virtue of resilience to discussions on moral psychology, animal virtue ethics, and the role of virtue in human flourishing amidst environmental challenges. (shrink)

The wicked problems that constitute sustainability require students to learn a different set of ethical skills than is ordinarily required by professional ethics. The focus for sustainability ethics must be redirected towards: (1) reasoning rather than rules, and (2) groups rather than individuals. This need for a different skill set presents several pedagogical challenges to traditional programs of ethics education that emphasize abstraction and reflection at the expense of experimentation and experience. This paper describes a novel pedagogy of sustainability ethics (...) that is based on noncooperative, game-theoretic problems that cause students to confront two salient questions: “What are my obligations to others?” and “What am I willing to risk in my own well-being to meet those obligations?” In comparison to traditional professional ethics education, the game-based pedagogy moves the learning experience from: passive to active, apathetic to emotionally invested, narratively closed to experimentally open, and from predictable to surprising. In the context of game play, where players must make decisions that can adversely impact classmates, students typically discover a significant gap between their moral aspirations and their moral actions. When the games are delivered sequentially as part of a full course in Sustainability Ethics, students may experience a moral identity crisis as they reflect upon the incongruity of their self-understanding and their behavior. Repeated play allows students to reconcile this discrepancy through group deliberation that coordinates individual decisions to achieve collective outcomes. It is our experience that students gradually progress through increased levels of group tacit knowledge as they encounter increasingly complex game situations. (shrink)

Climate change is the first anthropogenic alteration of a global Earth system. It is globally catastrophic in terms of food production, sea level rise, fresh water availability, temperature elevation, ocean acidification, species disturbance and destruction to name just a few crisis concerns. In addition, while those changes are occurring now, they are amplifying over decadal periods and will last for centuries and possibly millennia. While there are a number of pollutants involved, carbon dioxide which results from the combustion of any (...) fossil fuel is the primary pollutant. It has not been considered a pollutant until recently because of its natural dissociation into oxygen and carbon compounds like wood. However, because of its molecular durability and ability to acidify water, it has become the primary pollutant as a result of the exponential increase in fossil fuel use for the production of energy by Earth’s population that has doubled over the last six decades. That increase has exceeded Earth’s ability to handle humanity’s waste CO2. Obviously, the involved changes detrimentally affect all life on Earth. Because of the evolving nature of the changes, climate change is presently denied primarily in the United States because of the costs of eliminating our carbon addiction. Because no similar global natural or anthropogenic situation has previously occurred during the lifetime of Homo sapiens, our extant ethical theories are incapable of confronting the crisis. Consequently, new ethical paradigms are necessary. This dissertation attempts to provide thoughts about the use of Aristotelian ethical theory, the aidōs feeling, Aquinian psychology and a possible new virtue of proper primility in an effort to further nurture the growth of the new climate change ethics. (shrink)

Does the receipt of benefits from some common resource create an obligation to contribute toward its maintenance? If so, what is the basis of this obligation? I consider whether individual contributions to climate change can be impugned as wrongful free riding upon the stability of the planet's climate system, when persons enjoy its benefits but refuse to bear their share of its maintenance costs. Two main arguments will be advanced: the first urges further modification of H.L.A. Hart’s “principle of fairness” (...) as the basis for demanding that would-be free riders pay their fair share in the context of climate change, while the second claims that remedial action on climate change is better captured through collective action analysis than through harm principles that seek to connect individual actions to bad environmental outcomes. (shrink)

How should responsibility be theorized in the context of the global climate crisis? This question is often framed through the language of distributive justice. Because of the inequitable distribution of historical emissions, climate vulnerability, and adaptation capacity, such considerations are necessary, but do not exhaust the question of responsibility. This article argues that climate change is a structural injustice demanding a theory of political responsibility. Agents bear responsibility not in virtue of their individual causal contribution or capacity, but because they (...) participate in and benefit from the carbon-intensive structures, practices, and institutions that constitute the global political and economic system. Agents take responsibility by engaging in collective political action to transform these structures that generate both climate hazards and unjust relationships of power. By incorporating distributive principles within a capacious conception of political responsibility, this framework advances the theory and practice of climate justice in two ways. First, adopting a relational rather than individualistic criterion of responsibility better makes sense of how and why individuals bear responsibility for a global and intergenerational injustice like climate change. Second, framing climate justice in terms of political responsibility for unjust structural processes better orients and motivates the political action necessary for structural transformation. (shrink)

The idea that socially responsible investments can be viewed in terms of real options is relatively new. We expand on this notion by demonstrating how real option theory, within a Bayesian decision-making framework, can be used by managers to help when making green technology investment decisions. The Bayesian decision framework provides a more flexible approach to investment decision making because it adjusts for new information. Responding to a call for multidisciplinary and multifaceted research in environmental sustainability, this paper integrates ethics, (...) finance, and information technology by viewing investments in environmentally friendly technology as a profit-driven CSR real option. Our model provides managers with the analytic tool needed to make the business case for CSR initiatives providing an opportunity for firms to create economic, social, and ecological solutions that benefit all stakeholders. The practical applicability of our model is demonstrated in an illustrative case scenario based on real data. (shrink)

Implementing strategies to address climate change confronts us with an enormous collective action problem. Dale Jamieson argues that in order to avoid large-scale defection and, therefore, the collapse of any cooperative effort to curb climate change, utilitarians should become virtue theorists. As a tool to combat climate change, virtue change faces severe obstacles. First, the non-contingent green virtues envisioned by Jamieson are highly implausible. Second, even if such virtues could function, their inculcation would take too long to make the approach (...) viable. Third, given its inherent inflexibility, virtue change is ill equipped to deal with the great scientific uncertainty created by climate change. To combat climate change utilitarians are well advised to look elsewhere: green votes and state sanctions. (shrink)

Although climate change jeopardizes the fundamental human rights of current as well as future people, current actions and ambitions to tackle it are inadequate. There are two prominent explanations for this motivational gap in the climate ethics literature. The first maintains that our conventional moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify a complex problem such as climate change as an important moral problem. The second explanation refers to people’s reluctance to change their behaviour and the temptation to shirk (...) responsibility. We argue that both factors are at play in the motivational gap and that they are complemented by crucial moral psychological insights regarding moral disengagement, which enables emitters to dissociate self-condemnation from harmful conduct. In this way, emitters are able to maintain their profligate, consumptive lifestyle, even though this conflicts with their moral standards with respect to climate change. We provide some illustrations of how strategies of moral disengagement are deployed in climate change and discuss the relationship between the explanations for the motivational gap and moral disengagement. On the basis of this explanatory framework, we submit that there are three pathways to tackle the motivational gap and moral disengagement in climate change: making climate change more salient to emitters and affirming their self-efficacy; reconsidering the self-interested motives that necessitate moral disengagement; and tackling moral disengagement directly. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the professional engineering institutions ought to develop a Declaration of Climate Action. Climate change is a serious global problem, and the majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from industries that are enabled by engineers and represented by the engineering professional institutions. If the professional institutions take seriously the claim that a profession should be self-regulating, with codes of ethics that go beyond mere obedience to the law, and if they take their own ethical codes (...) seriously, recognising their responsibility to the public and to future generations, the professional institutions ought to develop a declaration for engineers, addressing climate change. Our argument here is largely inspired by the history of the Declaration of Helsinki. The Declaration of Helsinki was created by the medical profession for the profession, and it held physicians to a higher standard of ethical conduct than was found in the legal framework of individual countries. Although it was not originally a legal document, the influence of the Declaration can be seen in the fact that it is now enshrined in law in a number of different countries. Thus, we argue that the engineering profession could, and should, play a significant role in the abatement of climate change by making changes within the profession. If the engineering profession sets strict standards for professional engineers, with sanctions for those who refuse to comply, this could have a significant impact in relation to our efforts to develop a coordinated response to climate change. (shrink)