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, (...) promote both a flourishing of human medical practice and the environment. We conclude by defining an expanded the scope of CME as inclusive of not only patients, families, physicians, and other health professionals but other humans, non-humans, and their shared environment. We then apply this scope and theory to a widely used framework for applying CME, the Four Topics model, to construct a climate conscious approach to CME. (shrink)

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)