The kinds of specifically ethical questions we can meaningfully ask about the environment are rapidly becoming fewer as the climate emergency intensifies. The article argues that there is something fundamentally inadequate about the traditional conceptions of ethics regarding the climate crisis because they all tend to presuppose that we can somehow get it right. The problem is that we got it wrong and must start dealing with the consequences.

This paper sketches an emotion-aware model of environmental ethics education. The proposal draws on insights from feminists scholars, moral sentimentalism, as well as work in the pedagogy of discomfort traditions. It identifies and defends four core elements of climate change ethic, noting how they shed new light on the aims and challenges of environmental ethics education.

Psychoanalysis engages with the difficult subjects in life, but it has been slow to address climate change. Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics draws on the latest scientific evidence to set out the likely effects of climate change on politics, economics and society more generally, including impacts on psychoanalysts. Despite a tendency to avoid the warnings, times of crisis summon clinicians to emerge from comfortable consulting rooms. Daily engaged with human suffering, they now face the (...) inextricably bound together crises of global warming and massive social injustices. After considering historical and emotional causes of climate unconsciousness and of compulsive consumerism, this book argues that only a radical ethics of responsibility to be "my other s keeper" will truly wake us up to climate change and bring psychoanalysts to actively take on responsibilities, such as demanding change from governments, living more simply, flying less, and caring for the earth and its inhabitants everywhere. Linking climate justice to radical ethics by way of psychoanalysis, Donna Orange explores many relevant aspects of psychoanalytic expertise, referring to work on trauma, mourning, and the transformation of trouble into purpose. Orange makes practical suggestions for action in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic communities: reducing air travel, consolidating organizations and conferences, better use of internet communication and education. This book includes both philosophical considerations of egoism as problematic, together with work on shame and envy as motivating compulsive and conspicuous consumption. The interweaving of climate emergency and massive social injustice presents psychoanalysts and organized psychoanalysis with a radical ethical demand and an extraordinary opportunity for leadership. Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics will provide accessible and thought-provoking reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as philosophers, environmental studies scholars and students studying across these fields. ". (shrink)

Essays link Gaian science to such global environmental quandaries as climate change and biodiversity destruction, providing perspectives from science, ...

This review essay looks at Andrew Brei’s edited volume, Ecology, ethics and hope, Candis Callison’s How climate change comes to matter: The communal life of facts, Randall Curren and Ellen Metzger’s Living well now and in the future: Why sustainability matters, Willis Jenkins’ The future of ethics: Sustainability, social justice, and religious creativity, and Byron Williston’s The Anthropocene project: Virtue in the age of climate change. These recent works highlight various normative approaches for engaging with what is often (...) referred to as the Anthropocene. Drawing on virtue ethics, pragmatism, and concepts such as intergenerational justice, they seek to address some of the defining moral challenges of our time: how we should respond to this unprecedented era of anthropogenic climate and environmental change, and what ethical resources we can draw on to guide our response. On a larger level, they reveal how the climate crisis is testing the limits of our current moral systems and helping to drive greater ethical innovation and adaptation in the process. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Political Theology of Climate Change by Michael S. Northcott, and: Restored to Earth: Christianity, Environmental Ethics, and Ecological Restoration by Gretel Van WierenKevin J. O’BrienA Political Theology of Climate Change Michael S. Northcott grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2013. 335 pp. $30.00Restored to Earth: Christianity, Environmental Ethics, and Ecological Restoration Gretel Van Wieren washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2013. 208 pp. $29.95These two excellent (...) books, A Political Theology of Climate Change by Michael S. Northcott and Restored to Earth by Gretel Van Wieren, offer distinct directions for Christian environmental ethics: Northcott develops a rigorous analysis of climate change as a failure of enlightenment rationality and politics, while Van Wieren argues that those who care about the earth can connect with it through the practice of ecological restoration. Northcott theologically defines a complex global problem; Van Wieren theologically engages a community-based solution. Each book advances Christian environmental ethics in important ways; considered together, they have much to teach about the content and methods of the field.Northcott’s A Political Theology of Climate Change argues that climate change is a “cosmopolitical crisis” and that Christians should embrace a more ecological and theological politics in response. Theologians and ethicists have long argued that environmental degradation has cosmological roots: The belief that human beings are separate from nature makes global-scale degradation and pollution acceptable. Northcott adds a nuanced political analysis, noting that modern politics is based on a denial “that the weather is political, or that politics influences the climate” (46). Enlightenment thinkers who laid the groundwork for contemporary political structures insisted that storms and floods were not divine responses to human behavior, so modern nation-states are premised on an ideological separation from nature. Climate change reveals the failure of such thinking, so the facts of climate change pose an inherently political challenge.Thus, failures to act on climate change are political failures. Mainstream politics cannot consider that economic growth is unsustainable because it is premised on ignorance about nature. Nations cannot collaborate to solve the problem because they have no common moral agreement “about the ends and goals of human life” (245). Any response to climate change that simply extends [End Page 198] the enlightenment project—by ascribing “rights” to the natural world, or by trusting existing secular political structures—is doomed to failure. Instead, climate change calls for a different cosmology and a different politics.Northcott argues that both can be found in the Christian tradition. Natural law thinking respects the relationship between human beings and external moral standards “set into the structure of the cosmos,” demanding careful accounting for the atmospheric consequences of human action (246). Virtue ethics teaches the ideal of politics as a “community of friendship and love,” nurturing practices of participation in the good life, lived with less consumption and less destructive energy (200).Northcott hopes that small-scale communities inspired by Christian cosmology and Christian politics will transition away from destructive practices and thereby demonstrate a new way of life to the world. His book concludes by reasserting that because climate change is a political problem, it is fundamentally a theological problem, calling human communities to “re-create the historic and customary connections between nature and culture, land and life, love for neighbour and nature which are central to the Jewish and Christian messianism of empire-challenging love” (316).In contrast to Northcott’s focus on political and philosophical failures, Gretel Van Wieren’s Restored to Earth seeks a “more positive, solution-oriented” approach to Christian ethics (viii). The book is about reconnecting humans with the natural world through ecological restoration, “the science and art of repairing ecosystems that have been damaged by human activities” (2), and it argues that restoration models moral life by creating physical, intellectual, emotional, communal, and spiritual connections with the natural world.Van Wieren begins with an interdisciplinary definition of ecological restoration and argues that views on the practice depend upon varied definitions of nature. She then moves to a nuanced account of restoration ecology as a spiritual practice (chapter 3) of community formation (chapter 4). Evocatively recounting a controlled prairie burn in Illinois on Maundy Thursday, Van Wieren... (shrink)

The climate crisis is an enormous challenge for contemporary societies. Yet, public discussions on it often lead to anger, mocking, denial and other defensive behaviours, one prominent example of which is the reception met by the climate advocate Greta Thunberg. The paper approaches this curious phenomenon via shame. It argues that the very idea of anthropogenic climate change invites feelings of human failure and thereby may also entice shame. The notion of “climate shame” is introduced (...) and distinguished from “climate guilt”. Whereas climate guilt prioritises the flourishing of the environment and is focused on actions and morality, climate shame is concerned with human identity and selfhood. The paper then explores whether shame is a morally destructive or constructive emotion. Making use of both psychological and philosophical literature on shame, it argues that although shame faces many challenges that question its usefulness in moral pedagogy, these challenges can be met with “moral maturity”—moreover, following a utilitarian approach, the overall benefits of climate shame can justify its costs to individuals. My argument is that climate shame holds the potential of being a highly effective moral psychological method of persuasion, capable of inviting wholesale critical reflection on current, environmentally damaging practices and cultivation of more virtuous ways of co-existing with the rest of the natural world and other species. (shrink)

Tackling climate change is one of the most demanding challenges of humanity in the 21st century. Still, the efforts to mitigate the current environmental crisis do not seem enough to deal with the increased existential risks for the human 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. (shrink)

What kinds of issues does the global crisis of climate change present to aesthetics, and how will they challenge the field to respond? This paper argues that a new research agenda is needed for aesthetics with respect to global climate change (GCC) and outlines a set of foundational issues which are especially pressing: (1) attention to environments that have been neglected by philosophers, for example, the cryosphere and aerosphere; (2) negative aesthetics of environment, in order to grasp (...) aesthetic experiences, meanings, and dis/values in light of the catastrophic effects of GCC; (3) bringing intergenerational thinking into aesthetics through concepts of temporality and 'future aesthetics' (4) understanding the relationship between aesthetic and ethical values as they arise in regard to GCC. (shrink)

This volume brings scholarly attention to the Midwest and to how broader concerns of environmental ethics manifest. Consisting of eight essays, a wide range of topics is covered, such as agrarian ethics and Stoicism, the Dakota access pipeline and Indigenous women's activism, philosophy of law and species classification, environmental justice and the Flint water crisis, hog farming and anti-microbial drug resistance, science education standards and climate change education, virtue ethics and ecological restoration, and environmental pragmatism (...) and the Clear Water Act; and more. Each accessibly written chapter brings multidisciplinary complexity to bear on this complex region. The authors include philosophers working in environmental ethics and other subfields of philosophy, and together with scholars in fields such as environmental sociology, American Indian studies, and environmental studies, they provide a fresh and necessary perspective on the American Midwest. (shrink)

This article substantiates the common intuition that it is wrong to contribute to dangerous climate change for no significant reason. To advance this claim, I first propose a basic principle that one has the moral obligation to act in accordance with the weight of moral reasons. I further claim that there are significant moral reasons for individuals not to emit greenhouse gases, as many other climate ethicists have already argued. Then, I assert that there are often no significant (...) moral (or excusing) reasons to emit greenhouse gases. In any such trivial-cost – but not necessarily trivial-impact – cases, the individual then has an obligation to refrain. Finally, I apply the moral weighing principle to everyday situations of emitting and establish two surprisingly substantial implications: the relevance of virtues to the interpersonal assessment of environmentally harmful actions and the extensive individual ethical obligations that exist short of moral purity. (shrink)

Doing Environmental Ethics offers a way to face our ecological crisis that draws on environmental science, economic theory, international law, and religious teachings, as well as philosophical arguments. It engages readers in constructing ethical presumptions based on our duty, our character, our relationships, and our rights. Then it tests these moral presumptions by predicting the likely consequences of acting on them. Readers apply what they have learned to specific policy issues discussed in the final part of the (...) book: sustainable consumption, environmental policy, clean air and water, agriculture, managing public lands, urban ecology, and climate change. Questions after each chapter and a worksheet aid readers in deciding how to live more responsibly as consumers and as citizens. “What you do matters,” Robert Traer writes, “and the person you are also matters. In ethics we look for reasons to explain why this is so.”. (shrink)

Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations (UN), political leaders and health professionals to recognise that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackled together to preserve health and avoid catastrophe. This overall environmental crisis is now so severe as to be a global health emergency. The world is currently responding to the climate crisis and the nature crisis as if they were separate challenges. This is (...) a dangerous mistake. The 28th Conference of the Parties (COP) on climate change is about to be held in Dubai while the 16th COP on biodiversity is due to be held in Turkey in 2024. The research communities that provide the evidence for the two COPs are unfortunately largely separate, but they were brought together for a workshop in 2020 when they concluded that: ‘Only by considering climate and biodiversity as parts of the same... (shrink)

The environmental crisis challenges the adequacy of traditional moral theories, particularly in the case of act consequentialism – the view that an act is morally right if and only if it brings about the best available outcome. Although anthropogenic climate change threatens the well-being of billions of humans and trillions of non-human animals, it is difficult for an act consequentialist to condemn actions that contribute to it, as each individual action makes no difference to the probability of (...) whether climate change will occur. Or so one argument goes. This chapter examines the limits and possibilities of a consequentialist approach to climate ethics. It discusses various types of consequentialist theories applicable to the current environmental situation. It outlines outcome-based strategies to address the no-difference problem and to promote individual climate action. Finally, it considers environmental cases of evaluative uncertainty and how a consequentialist could deal with them. (shrink)

> Wealthy nations must step up support for Africa and vulnerable countries in addressing past, present and future impacts of climate change The 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a dark picture of the future of life on earth, characterised by ecosystem collapse, species extinction and climate hazards such as heatwaves and floods.1 These are all linked to physical and mental health problems, with direct and indirect consequences of increased morbidity and mortality. To (...) avoid these catastrophic health effects across all regions of the globe, there is broad agreement—as 231 health journals argued together in 2021—that the rise in global temperature must be limited to <1.5°C compared with pre-industrial levels. While the Paris Agreement of 2015 outlines a global action framework that incorporates providing climate finance to low-income and middle-income countries, this support has yet to materialise.2 COP27 is the fifth Conference of the Parties (COP) to be organised in Africa since its inception in 1995. Ahead of this meeting, we—as health journal editors from across the continent—call for urgent action to ensure it is the COP that finally delivers climate justice for Africa and vulnerable countries. This is essential for the health of those countries, and for the health of the whole world. The climate crisis has had an impact on the environmental and social determinants of health across Africa, leading to devastating health effects.3 Impacts on health can result directly from environmental shocks and indirectly through socially mediated effects.4 Climate change-related risks in Africa include flooding, drought, heatwaves, reduced food production and reduced labour productivity.5 Droughts in sub-Saharan Africa …. (shrink)

This book explores how the history of philosophy can orient us to the new reality brought on by the climate crisis. If we understand the climate crisis as a deeply existential one, it can help to examine the way past philosophers responded to similar crises in their times. This book explores five past crises, each involving a unique form of collective trauma. These events-war, occupation, exile, scientific revolution and political revolution-inspired the philosophers to remake the whole (...) world in thought, to construct a metaphysics. Williston distills a key intellectual innovation from each metaphysical system: - That political power must be constrained by knowledge of the climate system - That ethical and political reasoning must be informed by care or love of the ecological whole - That we must enhance the design of the technosphere - That we must conceive the Earth as an internally complex system - And that we must grant rights to anyone or anything-ultimately the Earth system itself-whose vital interests are threatened by the effects of climate change. Philosophy and the Climate Crisis will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental philosophy and ethics and the environmental humanities. (shrink)

This paper aims at surveying the current philosophical issues concerning the climate change crisis in Latin America. The work attempts to analyze some central policies, particularly those that fostered economic progress in the region at the expense of human and environmental depletion. Historically, Latin America remained at the periphery of philosophical inquiry following the long standing multiple manifestations of colonialism. As a result, the systematic philosophical reflections about climate change in the region have been scarce at (...) best. Here, I have addressed three main topics: political ecology, economic development, and indigenous issues. Latin American political ecology generally seeks to identify the ontological schemes necessary to mitigate, cope, and adapt to the climatic crisis. In addition, developmentalism played a significant role in exacerbating the state of Latin American political, economic, and ecological systems. Environmentalists all throughout the region strive to find alternatives to replace the failures of developmentalist policies. Consequently, indigenous concepts such as Sumak Kawsay or ?good living? offer alternate philosophical modes for Latin Americans, with their complex ethnic diversity, to derive their ontological and epistemological foundations on the problems posed by climate change. My work represents a sketch reporting the various inception points of different eco-philosophical views portraying legitimate instances of Latin Americans thinking critically about their own reality and surroundings. These may serve as alternate methods to forge models that could potentially contribute to universal philosophical concepts endowing humanity with broader epistemic tools to tackle the crisis at hand. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis ought to serve as a reminder about the costs of failure to consider another long-term risk, climate change. For this reason, it is imperative to consider the merits of policies that may help to limit climate damages. This essay rebuts three common objections to carbon taxes: (1) that they do not change behaviour, (2) that they generate unfair burdens and increase inequality, and (3) that fundamental, systemic change is needed instead of (...) carbon taxes. The responses are (1) that there is both theoretical and empirical reason to think that carbon taxes do change behaviour, with larger taxes changing it to a greater extent; (2) that undistributed carbon taxes are regressive but distributing the tax receipts can alleviate that regressivity (and, in many cases, make the overall effect progressive); and (3) that while small changes for increasing democratic decision-making may be helpful, (fundamental) change takes time and the climate crisis requires urgent action. [Open access] //// -/- La crise de lamaladie à coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) devrait servir de rappel sur les coûts de la non-prise en compte d’un autre risque à long terme, les changements climatiques. Pour cette raison, il est impératif de considérer lesmérites des politiques susceptibles de contribuer à limiter les changements climatiques. Cet essai réfute trois objections courantes aux taxes sur le carbone : (1) qu’elles ne changent pas les comportements (2) qu’elles génèrent des charges injustes et augmentent les inégalités, et (3) qu’un changement fondamental et systémique est nécessaire au lieu de taxes sur le carbone. Les réponses sont (1) qu’il existe des raisons à la fois théoriques et empiriques de penser que les taxes sur le carbone modifient effectivement les comportements, et que des taxes plus élevées les modifient dans une plus grande mesure; (2) que les taxes sur le carbone non distribuées sont régressives,mais que la distribution des recettes fiscales peut atténuer cette régressivité (et, dans de nombreux cas, rendre l’effet global progressif); et (3) que, bien que de petits changements pour l’amélioration de la prise de décision démocratique peuvent être utiles, un changement (fondamental) prend du temps et la crise climatique exige une action urgente. (shrink)

Plants are permanently impacted by their environments, and their abilities to tolerate multiple fluctuating environmental conditions vary as a function of several genetic and natural factors. Over the past decades, scientific innovations and applications of the knowledge derived from biotechnological investigations to agriculture caused a substantial increase of the yields of many crops. However, due to exacerbating effects of climate change and a growing human population, a crisis of malnutrition may arise in the upcoming decades in some (...) places in the world. So, effective, ethical and managerial regulations and fair policies should be set up and applied at the local and global levels so that Earth may fairly provide the food and living accommodation needed by its inhabitants. To save some energy consumption, electric devices should be manufactured to work with solar energy, whenever available, particularly in sunny countries where sun is available most of the time. Such characteristic will save energy and make solar energy-based smartphones and laptops less cumbersome in terms of chargers and plugging issues. (shrink)

Recent discussions of “eco-anxiety” have brought attention to feelings of hopelessness and despair associated with climate change and ecological disaster. When we accept the claims made by science about climate change and realize that our near future is full of unprecedented ecological crisis it is difficult to avoid feelings of anxiety about the future of human life on our planet. While these discussions have largely taken place in the context of psychology and psychoanalysis, there is a need (...) to engage in ethical deliberation about both “eco-anxiety” and “eco-trauma.” In this paper, I argue that an environmental virtue of wonder can help to articulate the intersection of environmental ethics and “eco-anxiety” by offering a mean between the excess of anxiety and the deficiency of boredom. I situate this discussion within trauma studies and make connections between the pre-trauma of climate change, wonder, and eco-cinema. More specifically, I argue for a weird environmental ethic that embraces fuzzy boundaries of entangled environments and show that the virtue of wonder allows for flourishing within this context. I use cinema, and specifically Eco-Weird cinema, to argue for a shift in narratives about our present and our future as it relates to climate change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Demanding Environmental Ethics for the FutureJames P. Sterba (bio)As we contemplate the present and future effects of global climate change, it is hard not to be disillusioned by what we see. Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more intense and erratic weather patterns, wide-scale extinction of endangered species—what can we as environmental philosophers do that might be helpful in this regard? My suggestion is that we (...) respond by drawing on the resources of traditional normative philosophy to ground a demanding environmental ethics that will justify the kind of sacrifices that are needed to cope with our unsettling future.This is a project that, with a lot of help from others, I have been working on for the last twenty years. I will present it, at least in outline, in my presidential address at the APA Central Division Meeting next spring, entitled "Completing the Kantian Project: From Rationality to Equality." By equality here I mean substantive intergenerational equality. This will require that we limit our current use of resources to simply meeting our basic needs. So the argument moves from a neutral nonmoral rational foundation to a very demanding set of practical moral requirements. So far sketched, the argument does not yet take into account the requirements that nonhuman living nature places upon us. But surprisingly, so demanding is this morality as sketched so far, that when additional considerations are introduced to take nonhuman living nature into account, not much more is required of us other thansome further constraints on population policy.Now I know some environmental philosophers are more skeptical than I am about the usefulness of traditional moral philosophy. Even I am unhappy with certain debates currently raging among contemporary moral philosophers, such as the realist/anti-realist debate. In fact, my argument is designed to make that very debate unnecessary. Still, if we leave most of traditional moral philosophy behind, what do we as philosophers bring with us to the new disciplines with which we now propose to collaborate? Do we bring an ability to do values clarification and a good sense of argument? I don't think these skills and others like them alone will be enough for the task at hand. We need a very demanding ethics, and if we don't look to philosophy to ground such an ethics, where do we look? [End Page 146]There is also an additional advantage here to grounding a demanding environmental ethics in traditional normative philosophy. Such an approach is more likely to force traditionalists and conservatives, philosophers and otherwise, to take notice of our arguments. If we are out in "left" field just talking to those both inside and outside of philosophy who happen to agree with our practical agenda, it is easier for us to be dismissed by others who are not committed to that same practical agenda. By contrast, if we address our opponents by appealing to very traditional values by which they claim to live their lives, then we do have at least a fighting chance of changing the way they do live their lives. At least, as moral philosophers, we would have then done our best to respond to the environmental crisis. Provided of course that we are also willing to reach out with our demanding ethics in hand and do that interdisciplinary collaboration that needs to be done to secure fully practical and effective solutions to the problems we face.James P. Sterba James P. Sterba is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He has published 24 books, including the award-winning Justice for Here and Now (Cambridge, 1998), Three Challenges to Ethics (Oxford, 2001). Terrorism and International Justice (Oxford, 2003), Affirmative Action and Racial Preference: A Debate, co-authored with Carl Cohen (Oxford, 2003) and The Triumph of Practice Over Theory in Ethics (Oxford, 2005) He is president of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division. E-mail: [email protected] © 2007 Indiana University Press... (shrink)

Very few moral philosophers have written on climate change.1 This is puzzling, for several reasons. First, many politicians and policy makers claim that climate change is not only the most serious environmental problem currently facing the world, but also one of the most important international problems per se.2 Second, many of those working in other disciplines describe climate change as fundamentally an ethical issue.3.

Environmental and sustainability initiatives seek to respond to the challenges of ecological crises and ongoing environmental degradation by supporting students to develop knowledge and dispositions to respond to the challenges of and live in a climate changed world. However, these initiatives are often marginalised in curriculum and hamstrung by inherent tensions such as which worldviews should be prioritised, the incommensurability of some global and local values, and the pursuit of environmental needs in the age of neoliberalism. (...) These challenges become more complex when considering contextual stakeholders. In this paper we focus on the ethical dilemmas associated with environmental and sustainability education in a coal town where mining company sponsorship heralds mixed community response. In doing so, we unpack the contextual and philosophical complexities which create the crucial conditions for a viable normative case study—genuine uncertainty about issues not yet at tipping point, differences of reasonable perspectives and recognisable local concerns. We argue that teacher educators, particularly those with interdisciplinary philosophical insight should look to their local contexts for pressing ethical issues and engage in the development and field testing of their own normative case studies. We make the case that the process behind developing a normative case study involves insight into the relationships between educational ethics, policy, context, and divergent community perspectives. We argue that pedagogy using normative case study to navigate these elements has the potential to develop world-reading teacher deliberation which surpasses proceduralist approaches in teacher education. (shrink)

This paper examines an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant as the pressures of a warming planet, changing climate and changing ecosystems ramp up. The broad context for the paper is the intragenerational, intergenerational, and interspecies equity implications of changing the climate and the value orientations of adapting to such change. In addition, the need to stabilize the planetary climate by urgent mitigation of change factors is a foundational ethical assumption. In order to avoid further animal and (...) plant extinctions, or at the very least, their increased vulnerability to becoming rare and endangered; the systematic assisted colonization of “at risk” species is being seriously considered by scientists and managers of biodiversity. The more practical aspects of assisted colonization have been covered in the conservation biology literature; however, the ethical implications of such actions have not been extensively examined. Our discussion of the value issues, using a novel case study approach, will rectify the limited ethical analysis of the issue of assisted colonization of species in the face of climate change pressures. Beyond sustainability ethics, both animal and environmental ethical approaches will be used and intrinsic versus instrumental value orientations in the literature shall form the basis of our discussion. After the application of all the ethical approaches to the case studies, we conclude that without mitigation and the prospect of a future stable climate, assisted colonization will be involved in an inherently unethical process and a “move and lose it” outcome. With mitigation, there is wide-ranging ethical support for assisted colonization. (shrink)

Abstract. Environmental ethicists ask several questions about global climate change; especially on the moral justification of the problem of non-compliance; i.e., why agents do not comply with their climatic responsibilities. It is evident that some developed countries have been perpetuating the climate change crisis by not following their climatic responsibilities (i.e., mitigation, adaptation, and compensation) or even more surprisingly a few of those states have been denying the climate change facts. This paper focuses on comparing (...) two forward-looking approaches to climate justice; namely, the Ability to Pay Principle (APP) and the Power/Responsibility Principle (PRP) and seeks an answer whether any of these principles enable a response to the problem of non-compliance. Scrutinizing a few analogical examples and analysing contemporary debates on this issue, this paper then shows the APP does not enable a response to the problem of non-compliance whereas one possible distribution of duties according to the PRP does so and concludes that the relevant agents’ willingness to comply with climatic responsibilities seems to be the key factor to avoid harm in the context of climate change crisis. (shrink)

The editors of the _Journal of Medical Ethics_ support the call of the UK Health Alliance on Climate for urgent action to ensure that the current Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ‘finally delivers climate justice for Africa and vulnerable countries’. 1 As they note ‘Africa has suffered disproportionately although it has done little to cause the crisis’. The burden of climate change has thus far fallen disproportionately on (...) Global South countries. The monsoon in Pakistan this year killed over 1100 people and the public health implications of the flooding might affect the health of over 5 million people. 2 The South Asian monsoon impacts the lives of a billion people and the flooding associated with wet seasons is likely to occur eight times more frequently in future years than at present. 3 For many pacific islands such as Kiribati,... (shrink)

Environmental pollution and climate change have been considered the main environmental challenges affecting the world’s ecosystem, including that of South Africa. They cause poverty, land degradation, and health hazards. One of the leading causes and contributing factors of environmental pollution and climate change is carbon emissions into the atmosphere. As a way to curb these emissions, Carbon tax policy has been introduced in various countries, including South Africa. In 2019, a Carbon tax was introduced to (...) assist South Africa in delivering on the commitments made in the Paris Agreement in 2015. If the policy is effectively applied, it will raise revenues while reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Before and after introducing the Carbon tax policy in South Africa, there has been debate and discussion on its impact on the environment, economy, and society. Based on the debate and discussion, it has been observed that more attention is paid to the economic implications and benefits of the tax on South Africa than the ethical implications. Thus, this paper aims to contribute to the ongoing debate and discussion by ethically evaluating the Carbon tax policy in South Africa. (shrink)

Climate change, pollution, and deforestation have a negative impact on global mental health. There is an environmental justice dimension to this challenge as wealthy people and high-income countries are major contributors to climate change and pollution, while poor people and low-income countries are heavily affected by the consequences. Using state-of-the art data mining, we analyzed and visualized the global research landscape on mental health, climate change, pollution and deforestation over a 15-year period. Metadata of papers were (...) exported from PubMed®, and both relevance and relatedness of terms in different time frames were computed using VOSviewer. Co-occurrence graphs were used to visualize results. The development of exemplary terms over time was plotted separately. The number of research papers on mental health and environmental challenges is growing in a linear fashion. Major topics are climate change, chemical pollution, including psychiatric medication in wastewater, and neurobiological effects. Research on specific psychiatric syndromes and diseases, particularly on their ethical and social aspects is less prominent. There is a growing body of research literature on links between mental health, climate change, pollution, and deforestation. This research provides a graphic overview to mental healthcare professionals and political stakeholders. Social and ethical aspects of the climate change-mental health link have been neglected, and more research is needed. (shrink)

The latest news from our planet is threatening: climate change, pollution, forest loss, species extinctions. All these words are frightening and there is no sign of improvement. Simple logic leads to the conclusion that humanity has to react, for its own survival. But at the scale of a human being, it is less obvious. Organizing one’s daily life in order to preserve the environment implies self-questioning, changing habits, sacrificing some comfort. In one word, it is an effort. Then, what (...) justifies such an effort? The personal choice to act in order to preserve our environment is often made by simple altruism. This choice is based on our love for other human beings: our love for the others grounds our effort. Our moral values, our ethical reflections and our religious beliefs are the deep core of these choices. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15.12 NRSV). This Charter shows the moral and religious values that can help us react regarding the current environmental crisis and it should empower us to transcend the ideas of effort and sacrifice in order to consider the respect of the shared house, in a prophetic fulfillment of the being. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years, the idea that climate change – and indeed global environmental change more generally – is fundamentally a moral challenge has become mainstream. But most have supposed that the challenge is one of acting morally, rather than to our morality itself. Dale Jamieson is a notable exception to this trend. From the earliest days of climate ethics, he has argued that successfully addressing the problem will involve a fundamental paradigm shift in ethics. In (...) general, Jamieson believes that our current values evolved relatively recently in “low-population-density and low-technology societies, with seemingly unlimited access to land and other resources,” and so are ill-suited to a globalized world. More specifically, he asserts that these values include as a central component an account of responsibility which “presupposes that harms and their causes are individual, that they can be readily identified, and that they are local in time and space.” But, he claims, global environmental problems such as climate change fit none of these criteria, so that a new value system is needed, one which addresses “fundamental questions” about “how we ought to live, what kinds of societies we want, and how we should relate to nature and other forms of life.” In particular, he declares that there is little hope of success without direct appeal to a hitherto underappreciated “duty of respect for nature.” In my view, Jamieson is right to question the adequacy of conventional ethical thinking for addressing global environmental problems. However, I also contend that the situation with respect to responsibility is less clear cut than he suggests. In this paper, I offer several objections to Jamieson’s main arguments, and propose an alternative, less revisionary, account of our predicament. Nevertheless, I also suggest that much of the spirit of Jamieson’s position remains intact, so that my proposal is more of a “friendly amendment” to his view than an outright rejection of it. According to this amendment, climate change involves a failure of our attempts to delegate responsibility to political institutions charged with acting on our behalf. Such failures are jarring, since they throw many of our normal practices into doubt, and threaten to restore to us demanding social burdens to which we have become largely unaccustomed. This situation need not cast doubt on our basic account of ethical responsibility. Indeed, that account helps to illuminate what is going on. Still, it does imply that we face a large (although somewhat familiar) moral and political challenge. (shrink)

Global climate change raises critical issues of intergenerational ethics. One of these issues involves what Stephen Gardiner calls intergenera­tional buck-passing (IGBP)—a pattern through which each generation does little to address climate change and instead passes the problem along to the next, progressively amplifying the climate crisis over time. My goal in this paper to explore two key questions: (1) What is at the root of intergenera­tional buck-passing? and (2) What changes might help to disrupt it? To (...) an­swer these questions, I argue that we need to understand and address the role of moral ambivalence in reinforcing the status quo and creating friction that impedes climate action. Confronting moral ambivalence may enable more thoughtful and just responses to climate change that support intergenerational solidarity and mutual flourishing. (shrink)

In the present context of intertwined and intensifying economic, environmental and climate challenges and crisis, we need to enlarge our thinking about food systems change. One way to do so is by considering intersections between our longstanding interdisciplinary interest in food and agriculture and new scholarship and practice centered on transitions to sustainability. The general idea of transition references change in a wide range of fields and contexts, and has gained prominence most recently as a way to (...) discuss and address sustainability challenges. To explore connections to food systems change, I highlight two broad approaches in the sustainability transitions research field. First is a multi-level perspective that examines sustainability innovation pathways and second is a social practices approach that illuminates the possibilities for shifts in normal everyday routines and practices. Taken together, these approaches offer different and useful ways to think about the dynamics, durability and significance of innovations in food and agriculture, and the part they play in transitions to sustainability. Numerous opportunities exist to forge more productive links between work on food systems change and the broad and growing sustainability transitions field. First, our research and practice insights about the importance of politics, governance, values and ethics in food and agriculture could help to strengthen the sustainability transitions field, which initially underplayed such questions. Second, the sustainability transitions field’s implicit systems sensibility and its futures orientation could help to widen the scope of inquiry and the contribution to policy and planning of research and practice on food systems change. (shrink)

Climate change is a global problem that is predominantly an intergenerational conflict, and which takes place in a setting where our ethical impulses are weak. This "perfect moral storm" poses a profound challenge to humanity. This book explains how the "perfect storm" metaphor makes sense of our current malaise, and why a better ethics can help see our way out.

Environmental ethicists often criticize liberalism. For many liberals embrace anthropocentric theories on which only humans have non‐instrumental value. Environmental ethicists argue that such liberals fail to account for many things that matter or provide an ethic sufficient for addressing climate change. These critics suggest that many parts of nature – e.g. non‐human individuals, other species, ecosystems and the biosphere ‐ often these critics also hold that concern for some parts of nature does not always trump concern for (...) others. This article suggests, however, that such inclusive environmental ethicists have a different problem. For when there are many things of value, figuring out what to do can be extremely difficult. Even though climate change is likely to cause problems for many parts of nature, it will probably be good for some other parts. Inclusive environmental ethicists need a theory taking all of the things they care about into account. Otherwise they cannot provide definitive reason even to address climate change. Without this theory, anthropocentric liberals might argue that we should not accept an inclusive environmental ethic. Although there may be something wrong with this line of thought, it at least raises a puzzle for those inclined to accept these ethics. (shrink)

Climate change diplomacy is routinely characterized by preoccupation with narrow and short-term perceived national interests rather than the pressing need to mitigate global warming and respond agg...

In this paper, we are situated in postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist epistemologies to study environmental racism in the Anthropocene—a new geological epoch where human activity has changed the functioning of the earth. Drawing from critiques of the Anthropocene, the concept of racial capitalism, as well as environmental justice and racism scholarship, we show how proposed solutions to the climate crisis overlook and may even exacerbate racial injustices faced by communities of color. We contend that a _climate (...) justice agenda that is grounded on racial justice_ is necessary for our scholarship to develop a racially just management and organization studies (MOS). To accomplish this agenda, we propose three shifts: from studying elite institutions to researching grassroots organizations concerned with climate and racial justice, from uncritical endorsement of global technologies to studying local adaptation by communities of color, and from offering decontextualized climate solutions to unraveling racial histories that can help us address racial and climate injustices. We discuss the implications of these shifts for management research and education and argue that MOS cannot afford to ignore climate justice and racial justice—they are both inextricably linked, and one cannot be achieved without the other. (shrink)

Environmental activism is crucial for raising public awareness and support toward addressing the climate crisis. However, using climate change mitigation as the cause for blockage, vandalism, and harassment activities might be counterproductive and risk causing negative repercussions and declining public support. The paper describes a dataset of metadata of 89 blockage, vandalism, and harassment events happening in recent years. The dataset comprises three main categories: 1) Events, 2) Activists, and 3) Consequences. For researchers interested in (...) class='Hi'>environmental activism, climate change, and sustainability, the dataset is helpful in studying the effectiveness and appropriateness of strategies to raise public awareness and support. For researchers in the field of security studies and green criminology, the dataset offers resources to study features and impacts of blockage, vandalism, and harassment events. The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was employed to validate the dataset. Consequently, the estimated result aligns with the Mindsponge Theory’s theoretical reasoning. (shrink)

For too long the questions of how we treat animals and how we treat our fellow human beings have been considered separately. But the contours of the current animal crisis make it clear – the harms we are inflicting on the nonhuman world have devastating impacts on humans: zoonotic diseases caused by habitat destruction and animal exploitation have brought human life to a standstill; mass production of animals for food is poisoning the ground and contributing to catastrophic climate (...) change. Animal Crisis responds to this fractured relationship between human beings and animals by exploring the complex social and political contexts in which animals are harmed, revealing the connections between our callous and cruel attitudes to the animal world and those same attitudes towards vulnerable human groups. Marking a stark contrast to traditional theories in animal ethics, Alice Crary and Lori Gruen argue that there can be no animal liberation without human emancipation. Borrowing from critical social theory and ecofeminism, they build a framework for understanding and combatting the structural forces that shape and enable the diminishment of some for the advantage of a few, isolating critical resources that are crucial for animal and human emancipatory struggles alike. (shrink)

Literature has an ethical obligation to respond to the climate change crisis, and scholars have a responsibility to understand how these responses work. Neither the humanities nor the sciences have a good record when it comes to encouraging people to limit their desires, their consumption, or their growth. While there may be genetic reasons for this failure, calls for humanity to limit itself need better responses. Literature can help us to respond better to climate change, but only (...) if we reconceptualize narrative and accord to it the importance it once held as a source not only of entertainment but of knowledge necessary for our very survival. (shrink)

Given the unprecedented scope and stakes of contemporary environmental crisis, ethicists have raised critical questions about whether traditional religious texts can speak in a meaningful way to climate change and other environmental risks in the anthropocene. Building on the ethical urgency of the environmental justice movement, this essay offers a feminist reading of Jewish narratives from the Babylonian Talmud that centers attention on issues of power, privilege, and social inequality in the midst of disaster. Talmudic (...) tales of the destruction of Jerusalem critique the moral oblivion of wealthy residents who failed to act in response to crisis. Articulating a Jewish feminist reconstituative ethics, the author uses these tales to trace the ethical costs of epistemologies of ignorance—the complex strategies and social processes through which privileged communities cultivate ignorance of environmental suffering, maintain social distance from environmental risk, and disown moral culpability for environmental injustice. (shrink)

Eco-Rational Education proposes an educational response to climate change, environmental degradation, and desctructive human relations to ecology through the delivery of critical land-responsive environmental education. -/- The book argues that education is a powerful vehicle for both social change and cultural reproduction. It proposes that the prioritisation and integration of environmental education across the curriculum is essential to the development of ecologically rational citizens capable of responding to the environmental crisis and an increasingly changing (...) world. Using philosophical analysis, particularly environmental philosophy, pragmatism, and ecofeminism, the book develops an understanding of contemporary issues in education, especially inquiry-based learning as pedagogy, diversifying knowledge, environmental and epistemic justice, climate change education, and citizenship education. -/- Eco-Rational Education will be of interest to researchers and post-graduate students of social and political philosophy, educational philosophy, as well as environmental philosophy, ethics, and teacher education. (shrink)

Part 1. Introduction -- Introduction: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm in Light of a Thirty-Five Year Debate -- Thirty-Five Year Climate Change Policy Debate -- Part 2. Priority Ethical Issues -- Ethical Problems with Cost Arguments -- Ethics and Scientific Uncertainty Arguments -- Atmospheric Targets -- Allocating National Emissions Targets -- Climate Change Damages and Adaptation Costs -- Obligations of Sub-national Governments, Organizations, Businesses, and Individuals -- Independent Responsibility to Act -- Part 3. The Crucial Role of Ethics (...) in Climate Change Policy Making -- Why Has Ethics Failed to Achieve Traction? -- Conclusion: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm. (shrink)

What does it matter if the climate changes? This kind of question does not admit of a scientific answer. Natural science can tell us what some of its biophysical effects are likely to be; social scientists can estimate what consequences such effects could have for human lives and livelihoods. But how should we respond? The question is, at root, about how we think we should live—and different people have myriad different ideas about this. The distinctive task of ethics is (...) to bring some clarity and order to these ideas. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, virtue ethicists have begun to devote increasing attention to applied ethics. In particular, the application of virtue ethical frameworks to the environmental ethics debate has flourished. This chapter reviews recent contributions to the literature in this field and highlights some strengths and weaknesses of thinking about climate change through a virtue ethical lens. Section “Two Benefits of Virtue Ethical Approaches to Climate Change” explores two benefits of applying virtue ethics to climate (...) change: (a) we can better capture the phenomenology of our moral experience, and (b) we avoid the problem of inconsequentialism. Section “A Catalogue of Environmental Virtues” analyzes various practical proposals that have been put forward in the form of specific environmental virtues. Section “An Objection to Virtue-Oriented Approaches to Climate Change” reconstructs a fundamental objection to the idea of using a virtue ethical normative approach to tackling the urgent and imminent dangers of climate change. (shrink)

Climate change diplomacy is routinely characterized by preoccupation with narrow and short-term perceived national interests rather than the pressing need to mitigate global warming and respond agg...

Climate change is an ethical issue, because it involves the distribution of a scarce resource – the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb our waste gases without producing consequences that no one wants. Various principles might be used to decide what distribution is just. This commentary argues that on any plausible principle, the industrialised nations should be doing much more than they are doing now, and much more than they are required to do by the Kyoto protocol, to reduce (...) their greenhouse gas emissions. The commentary also responds specifically to some issues raised by MacCracken, Toman and Gardiner, including feasibility, the discount rate, and grounds for pessimism. (shrink)

This study examines the roles of environmental strategy and accounting in corporate carbon performance, as measured by the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. A novel interaction model is developed based on legitimacy theory and natural-resource dependence theory to capture the interaction between environmental strategy and accounting. An international sample of 3322 firms from 73 countries is used in the analysis, based on a panel data design for 17 years (2005–2022). The empirical findings reveal an overall reactive role of these (...) environmental initiatives in relation to carbon performance. The marginal effect analysis shows that environmental accounting favourably moderates the effect of environmental strategic functions on carbon performance, indicating that the former facilitates the translation of the latter into practice. Similarly, environmental strategic initiatives improve the impact of environmental accounting information on carbon performance. The main contribution of this study stems from methodologically demonstrating how the synergy between environmental strategic initiatives and environmental information mechanisms can translate into improved carbon performance. This finding has multiple societal, practical and research implications. The interaction effect evidence can be viewed as consistent with recent trends of integrated approaches to thinking and reporting, where interrelated phenomena are integrated into operational and reporting contexts to improve efficiency. This can be of interest to policymakers, investors, corporate managers and providers of assurance services related to carbon performance. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper argues that the activities of environmental protectors often mitigate climate change, and therefore the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Human Rights Council (HRC) should extend explicit protection to land and environmental defenders on this basis. First, we overview who and where protectors are, what they are protecting, and annual data on protector murders. Next, we examine the case of Berta Cáceres, murdered in Honduras in 2016, to show collusion of state (...) and capital in defender silencing. Then we show how criminalization of defenders is a strategy to undermine their public support, followed by assessment of the powerlessness of international law to hold oppressors accountable. Next, we connect protectors to climate change by indicating mitigation consequences of their work. Finally, we explain a factor common to the UNFCCC and the HRC that precludes their recognition of protectors' activities as mitigation, particularly with respect to women defenders, and make recommendations concerning how international law might more effectively protect defenders. (shrink)