Several philosophers claim that the greenhouse gas emissions from actions like a Sunday drive are so miniscule that they will make no difference whatsoever with regard to anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC) and its expected harms. This paper argues that this claim of individual causal inefficacy is false. First, if AGCC is not reducible at least in part to ordinary actions, then the cause would have to be a metaphysically odd emergent entity. Second, a plausible (dis-)utility calculation reveals that such (...) actions have a not-insignificant amount of expected harm. One upshot is that the near-exclusive focus in the literature on AGCC as a collective action problem is too restricted. The paper also provides several moral psychological explanations of why it is so difficult to comprehend individual responsibility with regard to global phenomena, including a reappraisal of Thomas Nagel’s view of the absurd. (shrink)

The sorites paradox is the name given to a class of paradoxical arguments, also known as little by little arguments, which arise as a result of the indeterminacy surrounding limits of application of the predicates involved. For example, the concept of a heap appears to lack sharp boundaries and, as a consequence of the subsequent indeterminacy surrounding the extension of the predicate ‘is a heap’, no one grain of wheat can be identified as making the difference between being a heap (...) and not being a heap. Given then that one grain of wheat does not make a heap, it would seem to follow that two do not, thus three do not, and so on. In the end it would appear that no amount of wheat can make a heap. We are faced with paradox since from apparently true premises by seemingly uncontroversial reasoning we arrive at an apparently false conclusion. (shrink)

Climate change is a unique ethical problem. The individual actions of virtually everyone in the world contribute to climate change, which risk causing great harm, especially in the future. We are all complicit in causing this harm. In most cases, complicity implies accountability: one deserves blame or punishment, he becomes a legitimate subject of reactive attitudes, or he owes compensation. I argue that individuals are not accountable in these ways for their complicity in causing climate change. Rather, our moral accountability (...) flows directly to our political and collective responsibility. A morally decent person living in a developed, carbon-based society has no moral obligation to change the way she lives, but we all have strong moral duties to pressure our governments to enact effective policies to limit carbon emissions. (shrink)

“Perhaps the most common objection to consequentialism is this: it is impossible to know the future…This means that you will never be absolutely certain as to what all the consequences of your act will be…there may be long term bad effects from your act, side effects that were unforeseen and indeed unforeseeable…So how can we tell which act will lead to the best results overall – counting all the results? This seems to mean that consequentialism will be unusable as a (...) moral guide to action. All the evidence available at the time of acting may have pointed to the conclusion that a given act was the right act to perform – and yet it may still turn out that what you did had horrible results, and so in fact was morally wrong. Indeed, if will never be possible to say for sure that any given act was right or wrong, since any event can continue to have further unseen effects down through history. Yet if it is impossible to tell whether any act is morally right or wrong, how can consequentialism possibly be a correct moral theory?”. (shrink)

When an individual’s action is only one among a large number of similar actions and does not seem to make any difference to the bad collective outcome, can it nonetheless be condemned by act utilitarianism? This question has currently regained interest with papers, e.g., by Shelly Kagan, Julia Nefsky, and Felix Pinkert. Christopher Morgan-Knapp and Charles Goodman answer the question in the affirmative for miniscule emissions in the context of climate change. They use expected utility analysis as Kagan did in (...) consumer ethics. The assumptions about the impact of emissions vary according to some underlying empirical scenarios, all of which are possible. Individual actions might be relevant in the sense of contributing to a mere linear accumulation of emissions; or they might be relevant by leading to an accumulation in the form of crossing thresholds, be it one or several, Finally, such actions might not be relevant at all. To give an answer that solves the problem and that is based solely on expected utility analysis is impossible. Therefore, the view of Morgan-Knapp and Goodman must be rejected. (shrink)

Utilitarians are attracted to the idea that an act is morally right iff it leads to the best outcome. But critics have pointed out that in many cases we cannot determine which of our alternatives in fact would lead to the best outcome. So we can’t use the classic principle to determine what we should do. It’s not “practical”; it’s not “action-guiding”. Some take this to be a serious objection to utilitarianism, since they think a moral theory ought to be (...) practical and action-guiding. In response, some utilitarians propose to modify utilitarianism by replacing talk of actual utility with talk of expected utility. Others propose to leave the original utilitarian principle in place, but to combine it with a decision procedure involving expected utility. What all these philosophers have in common is this: they move toward expected utility in order to defend utilitarianism against the impracticality objection. My aim in this paper is to cast doubt on this way of replying to the objection. My central claim is that if utilitarians are worried about the impracticality objection, they should not turn to expected utility utilitarianism. That theory does not provide the basis for a cogent reply to the objection. (shrink)