PHILOSOPHY 104 (STOLZE)

Notes on James Garvey, The Ethics of Climate Change

Chapter Two: Right and Wrong

• The importance of giving reasons for one’s beliefs and actions (pp. 38-40)

• Justifying moral beliefs (ex: why killing innocent people is wrong—pp. 41-2)

• Two moral theories: Utilitarianism and Kantianism• Environmental ethics (intrinsic vs. instrumental value—pp.

51-2)

Chapter Three: Responsibility

Cases of direct, immediate responsibility that are easy to identify (e.g., smashing a vase)

vs.Cases of indirect, cumulative responsibility that are harder to identify (e.g., carbon emissions)

Three Complexities of Climate Change

• Global problem• Intergenerational problem• Our theoretical ineptitude to solve these problems

Two Thought Experiments

• The Prisoner’s Dilemma (and time travel variation)• The Tragedy of the Commons

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

CLYDE

Confesses Doesn’t Confess

BONNIE Confesses 5 years each Clyde gets 10 years, Bonnie gets 0 years

Doesn’t Confess Bonnie gets 10 years, Clyde gets 0 years

1 month each

The Tragedy of the Commons

• It is a kind of multi-person dilemma (e.g., the commuter’s dilemma)

• It can be avoided through enforcement of collective rules or incentives

Historical Principles of Justice

• Private Property Argument (John Locke)• Benefits to the Poor Argument (Adam Smith)

The Polluter Pays Principle

• “You Broke It—You Fix It!”• “Since 1850, the developed world is responsible for a total of

76 per cent of carbon-dioxide emissions, while the developing world has contributed just 24 per cent (p. 70).

Legal vs. Moral Responsibility

Two Possible Excuses:

• The damage to the Earth’s climate is an accident or an unintentional outcome

• The damage was done by previous generations

The Equal Shares Argument

1. Everyone is entitled to an equal share of greenhouse gas emissions that flow into the global “carbon sink.”

2. Rich nations like the U.S. have already used more than their share.

3. Therefore, rich nations like the U.S. should immediately begin to cut back on their greenhouse gas emissions.

Sustainability

A Working Definition of Sustainability = “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (from the 1987 Brundtland Report to the United Nations)

Chapters Four-Six

• Reasons to Do Nothing about Climate change• Excuses for Inaction• A Reason for Action: Reject Unsustainable Maxims

Four Reasons to Do Nothing

• Uncertainty about whether climate change is really happening

• Prohibitive cost to solve the problem• Technological rescue• Waiting for others to act

Ten Excuses for Inaction on Climate Change

• “I don’t believe in climate change.”• “Technology will be able to halt climate change.”• “I blame the government or the Americans or the Chinese.”• “But you wrote that book on paper. You killed trees!”• “It’s not my problem.”• “There’s nothing I can do about it.”• “How I run my life is my own business.”• “There are more important and urgent problems to tackle.”• “At least I am doing something.”• “We are already making a lot of progress on climate change.”

Unsustainable Maxims“Pick an unsustainable maxim: ‘consume as much as you can’, or ‘don’tconserve finite resources’, or ‘use a disproportionate share of a finitegood’. It doesn’t take much to see that these maxims cannot be universalized. If everyone consumed as much as they could, there would be nothing much left to consume. Consumption on a certain scale undermines consumption itself. If resources weren’t conserved, there’d

be no resources to use. Finally, not everyone can use a disproportionate share of a finite good--only proportionate uses are possible for everyone. The very fact that the maxims are themselves part of an unsustainable order means that they could never be universal laws, never part of a consistent world, never in keeping with the moral law.” (James Garvey, The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World [NY: Continuum, 2008], p. 149)

Living DeliberatelyGarvey invokes the 19th century naturalist, philosopher, and activist Henry David Thoreau’s expression “living deliberately”:

“Living deliberately, to borrow Thoreau’s excellent turn of phrase, is not something most of us do. There’s not much wrong with this, of course, and it would be preposterous to suggest that we all attend to our lives as carefully as did Thoreau. It is, anyway, true that we do not think much about how we live, much less about the moral status of our lives as such. Instead, at least some of the time, we go with the flow of life, drift along until we bump into something which calls for a thought or two. Sometimes what we bump into is a moral question or dilemma or problem, a worry about the rightness or wrongness of a particular course of action. Sometimes we stumble into something nearer a crisis, a much larger question about the general way we ought to live, what sort of person we ought to be. These crises about the course or nature of a life3 really can be primarily moral in flavour, however else they might seem at the time. Reflection on climate change and what to do about it in your own life can feel like something in between a moral problem or question and a crisis--better, it can seem to have some of the properties of both” (pp. 147-148).

Collective Action

Two forms of collective action (p. 152):

(1) Civilly obedient = “employs lawful means in the hope that a society might take a different course”

(2) Civilly disobedient = “non-violent, non-revolutionary but still unlawful collective action with political ambition”