Climate change is genuinely global, dominantly intergenerational, and takes place in a setting where our prescriptive theories are weak. This “perfect moral storm” poses a profound challenge to ...humanity. This book explains the storm, how it makes sense of our current malaise, and why better ethics can help. This book argues that despite decades of awareness, we are currently accelerating hard into the climate problem in a way that defies standard explanations. It claims that this suggests that our current focus on the scientific and economic questions is too narrow, and that the tendency to see the political problem as a traditional tragedy of the commons facing nation states is too optimistic. Instead, the key issue is that the current generation, and especially the most affluent, are in a position to pass on most of the costs of their behavior (and especially the most serious harms) to the global poor, future generations and nonhuman nature. This tyranny of the contemporary is a deeper problem than the traditional tragedy of the commons. Moreover, the book argues that this diagnosis helps to explain both the past failures of international climate policy (e.g., the “shadow solutions” of Kyoto and Copenhagen), and the current push towards geoengineering. Part of the solution, it argues, is better public ethics. We must work harder on articulating both the ethical problem, and moral constraints on solutions. In addition, there is a role for “defensive” moral and political philosophy, aimed at preserving the quality of public discourse.
The peculiar features of the climate change problem pose substantial obstacles to our ability to make the hard choices necessary to address it. Climate change involves the convergence of a set of ...global, intergenerational and theoretical problems. This convergence justifies calling
it a 'perfect moral storm'. One consequence of this storm is that, even if the other difficult ethical questions surrounding climate change could be answered, we might still find it difficult to act. For the storm makes us extremely vulnerable to moral corruption.
The Royal Society's landmark report on geoengineering is predicated on a particular account of the context and rationale for intentional manipulation of the climate system, and this ethical framework ...probably explains many of the Society's conclusions. Critical reflection on the report's values is useful for understanding disagreements within and about geoengineering policy, and also for identifying questions for early ethical analysis. Topics discussed include the moral hazard argument, governance, the ethical status of geoengineering under different rationales, the implications of understanding geoengineering as a consequence of wider moral failure, and ethical resistance to invasive interventions in environmental systems.
Gardiner offers some general reasons why philosophers should be more interested in climate change. He further suggests that climate change poses some difficult ethical and philosophical problems ...and moral philosophers should see this as a call to arms.
We are in the early stages of a new “intergenerational turn” in political philosophy. This turn is largely motivated by the threat of global climate change, which makes vivid a serious governance gap ...surrounding concern for future generations. Unfortunately, there is a lack of fit between most proposed remedies and the nature of the underlying problem. Most notably, many seem to believe that only piecemeal, issue-specific, and predominantly national institutions are needed to fill the intergenerational governance gap. By contrast, I argue that we should adopt a genuinely global approach that treats intergenerational questions as foundational, and advocates for new permanent institutions with ongoing responsibilities to act on intergenerational threats. In this essay, I summarize my diagnosis of the underlying problem—that we face a basic standing threat that I call the “tyranny of the contemporary”—and sketch my proposal for a global constitutional convention aiming at institutions with standing authority and a broad remit. I then develop some of these ideas further through responses to fellow advocates for reform who nevertheless consider my proposals to go too far. In particular, I reject a counterproposal made by Anja Karnein, who argues that reforms should address only threats whose negative impacts would cross a high threshold. I argue that this would leave future generations vulnerable to what I call “squandering generations”. Among other things, these intergenerational squanderers violate appropriate relationships between past, present, and future generations. Yet, in my view, a central task of defensible intergenerational institutions is to protect the future against such abuse.
Debating Climate Ethics Revisited Gardiner, Stephen M.
Ethics, policy & environment,
05/2021, Letnik:
24, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In Debating Climate Ethics, David Weisbach and I offer contrasting views of the importance of ethics and justice for climate policy. I argue that ethics is central. Weisbach advocates for climate ...policy based purely on narrow forms of self-interest. For this symposium, I summarize the major themes, and extend my basic argument. I claim that ethics gets the problem right, whereas dismissing ethics risks getting the problem dangerously wrong, and perpetuating profound injustices. One consequence is that we should reject the alleged "feasibility constraint" of short-term, economic self-interest.
In early policy work, climate engineering is often described as a global public good. This paper argues that the paradigm example of geoengineering—stratospheric sulfate injection (hereafter ...‘SSI’)—does not fit the canonical technical definition of a global public good, and that more relaxed versions are unhelpful. More importantly, it claims that, regardless of the technicalities, the public good framing is seriously misleading, in part because it arbitrarily marginalizes ethical concerns. Both points suggest that more clarity is needed about the aims of geoengineering policy—and especially governance—and that this requires special attention to ethics.
A Core Precautionary Principle Gardiner, Stephen M.
The journal of political philosophy,
03/2006, Letnik:
14, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The Precautionary Principle still has neither a commonly accepted definition nor a set of criteria to guide its implementation. 'There is,' Freestone ... cogently observes, 'a certain paradox in the ...widespread and rapid adoption of the Precautionary Principle:' While it is applauded as a 'good thing,' no one is quite sure about what it really means or how it might be implemented. Advocates foresee precaution developing into 'the fundamental principle of environmental protection policy at all scales.' ... Sceptics, however, claim its popularity derives from its vagueness; that it fails to bind anyone to anything or resolve any of the deep dilemmas that characterize modern environmental policy making.1 Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers
This paper argues that extortion is a clear threat in intergenerational relations, and that the threat is manifest in some existing proposals in climate policy and latent in some background ...tendencies in mainstream moral and political philosophy. The paper also claims that although some central aspects of the concern about extortion might be pursued in terms of the entitlements of future generations, this approach is likely to be incomplete. In particular, intergenerational extortion raises issues about the appropriate limits to the sway of central values such as welfare and distributive justice. We should be wary of ways in which such values invite us to buy off, or perhaps to join, an intergenerational climate Mafia.
This article offers a constructive critique of the Oxford Principles for the governance of geoengineering and proposes an alternative set of principles, the Tollgate Principles, based on that ...critique. Our main concern is that, despite their many merits, the Oxford Principles remain largely instrumental and dominated by procedural considerations; therefore, they fail to lay the groundwork sufficiently for the more substantive ethical debate that is needed. The article aims to address this gap by making explicit many of the important ethical questions lurking in the background, especially around values such as justice, respect and legitimacy.
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