Climate Change, Justice, and Beneficence

HO 705 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

In this seminar we explore justice and beneficence near and far. We engage in moral reasoning to learn what obligations we bear, in the throes of anthropogenic climate change, to benefit and to prevent harm to peoples and generations distant from us in space and time. Moral intuitions differ on recognition of distant persons as objects of moral concern. The urgency posed by occurrent climate change motivates work to construct a compelling understanding of what we collectively ought and virtuously would do. Candidate obligations are commonly expressed in terms of acts and forbearances to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to global warming. After surveying foundational topics debated by philosophers and economists—whether and at what rate future harms and benefits should be discounted, Parfit’s nonidentity problem, and carbon pricing—pragmatic reasoning will occupy center stage, as in quantifying how much mitigation may reasonably be expected from actions of individuals vis-a-vis actions of governments, and in anticipating the effects of alternative schemes for distributing the burdens of mitigation. Readings of recent works in moral philosophy and economics will draw students into grounding insightful positions on cogent arguments. The exploration will close with a question whose mere pertinence will cause alarm. What duty obtains to avoid hastening the extinction of homo sapiens?