Abstract
Dale Jamieson has claimed that conventional human-directed ethical concepts are an inadequate means for accurately understanding our duty to respond to climate change. Furthermore, he suggests that a responsibility to respect nature can instead provide the appropriate framework with which to understand such a duty. Stephen Gardiner has responded by claiming that climate change is a clear case of ethical responsibility, but the failure of institutions to respond to it creates a (not unprecedented) political problem. In assessing the debate between Gardiner and Jamieson, I develop an analysis which shows a three-part structure to the problem of climate change, in which the problem Gardiner identifies is only one of three sub-problems of climate change. This analysis highlights difficulties with Jamieson’s argument that the duty of respect for nature is necessary for a full understanding of climate ethics, and suggests how a human-directed approach based on the three-part analysis can avoid Jamieson’s charge of inadequacy.
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Notes
I am assuming that climate change is occurring, and that it is due to human activity. These assumptions are supported by the position of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Solomon et al. 2007; IPCC 2013) and the opinion of the vast majority of climate experts (Doran and Kendall-Zimmerman 2009). Those who doubt that significant anthropogenic climate change is occurring could see the following discussion as hypothetical.
Figure calculated from data provided in a recent study by Ezra Markowitz (2012)
Some of Jamieson’s arguments this article covers can also be found in Jamieson (2011).
One might wonder if purely empirical means could be used to check the correlation between people’s views on nature-orientation and their views on the demandingness or urgency of a duty to respond to climate change. This would indeed be interesting, but there remains the possibility that although many human-oriented folk believe a certain understanding of climate change generates a demanding and urgent duty to respond to it, they may be mistaken about this. Jameison’s approach aims to both explain the phenomena of variation in the views of urgency, and show which view about the responsibility to act on climate change has the more solid normative foundation.
Van de Poel et al make a further distinction between “responsibility-as-obligation” and “responsibility-as-virtue.” Jamieson’s discussion seems to relate best to responsibility-as-obligation: that kind of responsibility where one “has to see to it that a certain desirable state of affairs obtains” (Van de Poel et al. 2012). The state of affairs in question is that climate change is responded to. Van de Poel et al suggest that there is a morally problematic gap for backward looking “responsibility-as-blameworthiness” for climate change. Their conclusion about the kind of forward-looking responsibility Jamieson refers to is much more circumspect than the inadequacy thesis. Van de Poel et al conclude that there may be a gap in forward-looking responsibility-as-obligation if there is a gap in allocating the responsibility for climate change that is morally problematic due to the specific fairness requirements of responsibility-as-obligation. However, they emphasise that these fairness requirements are themselves dependent on whether we take a merit-based, rights-based or consequentialist approach to responsibility-as-obligation. Drawing these distinctions among different approaches to responsibility is fruitful in general, but to assess Jamieson’s argument on its own terms, I use a more fundamental concept of responsibility than the fine distinctions that Van de Poel et al. draw.
Importantly focusing on the duty to respect nature rather than claiming an inherent value in nature allows Jamieson to skirt the long-standing debate between biocentrics, ecocentrics and anthropocentrics in environmental ethics. While the duty of respect for nature remains “under-theorised” (Jamieson 2010: 443), some of Jamieson’s proffered reasons why a general duty to respect nature should be accepted are clearly anthropocentric, such as the reason of prudence. Thus, in this piece I will refer to an ethical framework which includes respect for nature as a “nature-oriented” approach, rather than a “nature-centred” one or any similar synonym. Rather than advocating for nature becoming the centre of an ethical system, Jamieson suggests we look to nature as one of the appropriate targets of ethical consideration. Much could be said in favour of such an approach, but this is not the place to do it.
Worst-case scenarios have reinforcing feedbacks (such as the release of methane from melting permafrost or the seafloor, the drying and burning of rainforests, or reduction in the shininess of the earth due to melting ice) pushing the world into “runaway” climate change where these natural warming factors add to the effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (Hansen et al. 2007) and cause global temperatures to rise by even more than the IPCC’s upper bound of 6.4 °C by 210 (Parry et al. 2007: 70). Because of the possibility of such feedbacks, catastrophic climate change causing warming of 10 °C or even up to 20 °C cannot be ruled out (Weitzman 2009). A temperature rise above 10 °C would probably result in the melting of Antarctica (Weitzman 2009) which would raise sea levels by 70 m (Poore et al. 2000). A temperature rise above 12 °C would render the regions that are home to most of the world’s people uninhabitable due to mammalian inability to tolerate wet-bulb temperatures (temperatures adjusted for the cooling effect of evaporation) above 35 degrees (Sherwood and Huber 2010). For a discussion of the ethical complications presented by the risk of catastrophic climate change, see (John Broome 2010, 2012).
Gardiner is well aware of this omission and explains it by stating that the time lag should make no difference: someone who places a time bomb under an elementary school is clearly culpable whether the detonation is set for 100 seconds or 100 years. But if the time lag were morally irrelevant, its inclusion in the case of George and his Buddies should make no difference, whereas it might be thought to dilute responsibility when added to that case. Furthermore this difference in its ability to remove perceived responsibility between the case of the time bomb under the school and the case of George and his Buddies could be explained by an interaction effect between lack of intention and time lag, as we discuss later.
Many of the causal pathways involved in climate change are made up of only a few steps. States might decide whether or not to apply restrictions to greenhouse gas emissions and large corporations whether to concentrate investments in clean or dirty energy. Individuals might choose to take or refrain from actions with a large carbon footprint such as building a house or taking a job that requires commuting daily. By acts of these kinds, such parties can be causally linked to climate change relatively directly through the associated increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
The following account of the three sub-problems is my own, but it has similarities to ideas outlined, but not elaborated on, by Gardiner himself in other work (Gardiner 2004). The weighing and ideal allocation questions are often independently posed in discussions of climate ethics (Caney 2009a, b; Page 2011). The non-ideal question is posed less often, although David Miller (2008) and Gardiner (2006) articulates it clearly in the case of climate change. Sinnott-Armstrong (2010) also refers to it.
See Moellendorf (2009) for an example of the plausible norms for burden sharing changing when different overall targets for emissions reductions are set.
Interestingly, Jamieson himself deals with what I call the non-ideal problem in detail in relation to the question of how utilitarians should respond to the wider “environmental crisis” (Jamieson 2007). For Jamieson though, the solution for utilitarians lies in their cultivation and promotion of green virtues, one of which, “humility”, is explicitly nature-oriented.
Although see Barrett (2003) for an argument that the Montreal Protocol is a poor model for burden-sharing in the case of climate change, due to the lack of enforceability of a similar agreement on greenhouse gases.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ramon Das, the audience at the Australasian Association of Philosophy New Zealand Conference 2012 for their comments on an early version of this paper, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
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Kingston, E. Climate Change as a Three-Part Ethical Problem: A Response to Jamieson and Gardiner. Sci Eng Ethics 20, 1129–1148 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-013-9483-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-013-9483-y