Climate Ethics

Siddarth Dubey
Climate change has been described as a “perfect moral storm” because it brings together three major challenges to ethical action in a mutually reinforcing way. The first challenge stems from the fact that climate change is a truly global phenomenon. Once emitted, greenhouse gas emissions can have climate effects anywhere on the planet, regardless of their source. This is often said to result in a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ or ‘tragedy of the commons’ structure played out between nation states. Although collectively all countries would prefer to limit global emissions so as to reduce the risk of severe or catastrophic impacts, when acting individually, each still prefers to continue emitting unimpeded. At the same time, there are ‘skewed vulnerabilities’, at least in the short to medium term, many of the most vulnerable countries and people are those who have emitted the least historically, and whose emissions levels continue to be relatively low. This appears to be seriously unfair and casts a notable shadow over both practical and theoretical efforts to secure global cooperation.The second challenge is that current emissions have profoundly ‘intergenerational effects’. Emissions of the most prominent greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, typically persist in the atmosphere for a long time, contributing to negative climate impacts for centuries, or even millennia. This too seems unfair, especially if future negative impacts are severe and cumulative. In addition, the temporal diffusion of climate change gives rise to an ethical collective action problem that is even more challenging than the traditional tragedy of the commons both in its shape and because normal kinds of cooperation do not seem to be possible across generations. The third challenge to ethical action is that our theoretical tools are underdeveloped in many of the relevant areas, such as international justice, intergenerational ethics, scientific uncertainty, and the appropriate relationship between humans and the rest of nature. For example, climate change raises questions about the (moral) value of nonhuman nature, such as whether we have obligations to protect nonhuman animals, unique places, or nature as a whole, and what form such obligations take if we do. In addition, the presence of scientific uncertainty and the potential for catastrophic outcomes put internal pressure on the standard economic approach to environmental problems and play a role in arguments for a precautionary approach in environmental law and policy that some see as an alternative.The global and intergenerational dimensions of the perfect moral storm provide serious temptations for those in the current generation who contribute heavily to climate change to pass most of the burden of their activities on to people in other parts of the world and the future in unfair ways. In particular, the complexity of the ethical and scientific terrain may make us susceptible to arguments for inaction which is actually weak and self-deceptive. Unfortunately, there is some evidence for this in the ongoing political inertia in developing a robust global regime. This suggests the need for work in moral and political philosophy that exposes inadequate rationales and articulates compelling reasons as to how and why we should address climate change. Such work can help preserve and extend the limited progress currently being made and reinforce arguments against those who have failed to deliver on their promises to reduce emissions and contribute to adaptation funds.
Thus far the discussion has focused on how climate change should be addressed from a collective perspective, but what, if any, responsibilities do individuals have with respect to climate change? At one extreme, some argue that the responsibilities of individuals are primarily political, and that they have little or no obligation to change their consumption or lifestyle choices at the other, some maintain that individuals ought to take responsibility for their personal choices and develop a set of “green virtues” that are not contingent on how others response.Part of the problem that this debate wrestles with is that one person’s emissions seem very small in comparison with the global total, and as such unlikely to harm anyone considered in isolation.The theoretical debate about ‘individual responsibility’ is in its infancy, but is likely to heat up as more philosophers devote attention to this issue.

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