Climate Change and the Moral Agent Review

2015

Marmara Üniversitesi Avrupa Topluluğu Enstitüsü Avrupa Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2020

Through an examination of some of the moral and political difficulties impeding people acting individually and collectively in pursuit of reduced carbon emissions, this article addresses the ways in which the government can and should encourage citizens to modify their behaviour and become good environmental citizens. The article touches on issues of rational choice and collective (ir)rationality, considers the individual moral response to these and the extent to which the government can act to eliminate or reduce the threat of inertia caused by collective action problems. Although the article is primarily focussed on the responsibilities of individuals in general, it also considers their role and views as citizens of states and supranational organisations such as the European Union. It also briefly addresses the problem of climate change as a "viciously nested" collective action problem, repeated at all political levels, from individuals to states to the European Union to international organisations, treaties and accords.

Environmental Values, 2010

Both Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Baylor Johnson hold that under current circumstances, individuals lack obligations to reduce their personal contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Johnson argues that climate change has the structure of a tragedy of the commons, and that there is no unilateral obligation to reduce emissions in a commons. Against Johnson, I articulate two rationales for an individual obligation to reduce one's greenhouse gas emissions. I first discuss moral integrity, which recommends congruence between one's actions and positions at the personal and political levels. Second, I draw on a Confucian, relational conception of persons to offer a critique of the collective action/tragedy of the commons framework itself. Under the relational conception, commons problems can be reconceptualised so as to dissolve the stark contrast between the individually and the collectively rational. This perspective can inform our approach to climate change and help reconcile individual and political action to mitigate it.

John Nolt criticizes the assumption that ‘the consequences of a single individual’s greenhouse gas emissions are negiglibly small’, an assumption crucial to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s rejection of a range of ethical principles that might ground individual moral obligations with regard to climate change. I argue, however, that the implications of Nolt’s argument for individual moral responsibility are not obvious. Nolt, like Sinnott-Armstrong, errs in trying to isolate the effects of individuals’ actions from the collectivity in which they occur. Individuals have good moral reasons both to change their own behaviour and to try to promote the necessary kind of collective effort. But these cannot be deduced from, and are not proportionate to, the amount of harm each (average) individual supposedly causes.

Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, Thompson and Bendik-Keymer, eds. (MIT Press, 2012), pp. 1-24. , 2012

Perspectives Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy, 2012

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues, on the relationship between individual emissions and climate change, that "we cannot claim to know that it is morally wrong to drive a gas guzzler just for fun" or engage in other inessential emissionsproducing individual activities. His concern is not uncertainty about the phenomenon of climate change, nor about human contribution to it. Rather, on Sinnott-Armstrong's analysis the claim of individual moral responsibility for emissions must be grounded in a defensible moral principle, yet no principle withstands scrutiny. I argue that the moral significance of individual emissions is obscured by this critique. I offer a moral principle, the threshold-contribution principle, capable of withstanding Sinnott-Armstrong's criticisms while also plausibly explaining what's wrong with gas-guzzling joyrides and other gratuitous emissions-producing individual acts.

In a recent article appearing in this journal, Theresa Scavenius compellingly argues that the traditional "rational-individualistic" conception of responsibility is ill-suited to accounting for the sense in which moral agents share in responsibility for both contributing to the causes and, proactively, working towards solutions for climate change. Lacking an effective moral framework through which to make sense of individual moral responsibility for climate change, many who have good intentions and the means to contribute to solutions for climate change tend to dismiss or put off addressing the root causes. With this tendency arises the practical problem that climate change calls for urgent global collective action, both in terms of mitigation (addressing the root causes, especially by reducing GHG emissions) and adaptation, in order to prevent global temperature rise from exceeding 2C and thereby avoid worst case climate scenarios. In this paper, I develop a phenomenological theoy of ecological responsibility, which addresses the conceptual problem Scavenius highlights, with the aim of contributing to a clarification of the sense in which moral agents share responsibility for both the causes and solutions for climate change. To develop this theory, I draw from, combine, and transform insights from the late work of Husserl on open horizons, transcendental intersubjectivity, and genetic phenomenology with breakthroughs from Emmanual Levinas in articulating an original, asymmetrical theory of unlimited, diachronic responsibility. In drawing from Husserl, I show how what Levinas describes as the source of a demand for unlimited, diachronic responsibility (an encounter with the infinity of the other) can be phenomenologically reinterpreted in terms of a horizon of indeterminacy. I then show how horizons of indeterminacy arise in phenomenological descriptions of both human and nonhuman entities disclosing the demand for responsibility as a broad-ranging demand for unlimited, diachronic ecological responsibility. An important implication of this phenomenological theory of ecological responsibility is that it contributes to clarifying the sense in which individual moral agents share in responsibility for long range collective moral problems such as climate change. In a recent article appearing in this journal, Theresa Scavenius compellingly argues that the traditional "rational-individualistic" conception of responsibility is ill-suited to accounting for the sense in which moral agents share in responsibility for both contributing to the causes and, proactively, working on solutions for climate change (Scavenius 2017, p. 239). Lacking an effective moral framework through which to make sense of individual responsibility for climate change, many who have otherwise good intentions and the means to contribute to solutions for climate change are dismissing or putting off addressing it. The practical problem with this tendency is that climate change calls for urgent prioritization and global collective action, both in terms of mitigation (especially through the reduction of GHG emissions) and adaptation, in order to prevent global temperature from exceeding a rise of 2C and thereby avoid worst case climate scenarios (IPPC 2007). In this paper, through a phenomenological approach, I develop an asymmetrical theory of ecological responsibility which, I contend, contributes to clarifying the sense in which moral agents share in responsibility for the causes as well as for contributing to solutions for climate change. The concept of asymmetry in ethics may be understood in various ways. In one sense, it may be viewed as a way of characterizing the moral agent/moral patient relationship, such as in the relationship of a parent to their infant, or a child to an aging parent suffering from dementia. In such human to human relationships, the moral responsibility of the moral agent, who is in a position of power in the relationship, entails acting for the good of the moral patient. In another sense—traceable in Aldo Leopold's development of " The Land Ethic " (Leopold 1949)— asymmetry arises in an inverse manner through the smallness, interdependence , and reliance of the moral agent on

Ramon Llull Journal of Applied Ethics, 2020

Tackling climate change is one of the most demanding challenges of humanity in the 21 st century. Still, the efforts to mitigate the current environmental crisis do not seem enough to deal with the increased existential risks for the human being and other species. Persson and Savulescu have proposed that our evolutionarily forged moral psychology is one of the impediments to facing as enormous a problem as global warming. They suggested that if we want to address properly some of the most pressing problems that cause catastrophic harm to our existence, we should enhance our moral behavior by biomedical means. The objective of this paper is, precisely, to reflect on whether a Moral Bio-Enhancement (henceforth MBE) program would be a viable option to confront the climate emergency. To meet this goal, I will propose the Ultimate Mostropic (hereafter UM) thought experiment, a hypothetical situation where we have already discovered the UM, an available, safe (without any deleterious secondary effects), extremely cheap and effective pill to enhance our cognitive, affective and motivational abilities related to morality. After briefly presenting the main argument of Persson and Savulescu regarding MBE and climate change, I will point out some of the difficulties that make MBE a daunting but exciting philosophical and scientific debate. In order to overcome these complications, I will describe the UM thought experiment, which involves two scenarios of the MBE program: (a) the state-driven, compulsory and universal enterprise, and (b) the initiative of voluntary individuals. I will show that the shortcomings of MBE programs through the UM in both scenarios make Persson and Savulescu's proposal a not appealing pathway to mitigate climate change. In the final section, I will suggest that an inaccurate attribution of responsibilities underlies their proposal and that the collective inaction problem should be redirected primarily through a reinforcement of the political nature of the solutions.

International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2011

Given that mitigating climate change is a large-scale global issue, what are our obligations to lower our personal carbon emissions? I survey recent suggestions by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Dale Jamieson and offer models for thinking about their respective approaches. I then present a third model based on the notion of structural violence. While the three models are not mutually incompatible, each one suggests a different focus for mitigating climate change. In the end, I agree with Sinnott-Armstrong that we have limited moral obligation to directly lower personal emissions, but I offer different reasons for this conclusion, namely that the structural arrangement of our lives places a limit on how much individuals can restrict their own emissions. Thus, individuals should focus their efforts on changing the systems instead (e.g., the design of cities, laws and regulation, etc.), which will lead to lower emissions on a larger scale.