May 13, 2013, by Neil Sinclair
Harm and Climate Change, Part 1
The recent report about atmospheric C02 levels reaching the symbolic level of 400 parts per million calls attention to some of the issues dealt with in the Philosophy Department’s Environmental Ethics module.
Suppose you are engaged in an activity that causes significant harm to others. It forces them out of their homes, raises the cost of necessities, increases their risk of ill-health and deprives them of many of the opportunities for enjoyment that you possess. According to Mill’s harm principle, the state will be justified in preventing you acting in this way. But putting aside the issue of state action, we can surely agree that you ought to stop, right?
Perhaps. But many of us live lifestyles that, collectively, have these effects, and yet getting people to give up (or moderate) those lifestyles is proving stubbornly difficult. Our lifestyles collectively have these effects because they involve a level of resource use which propels global climate change. If our actions are any reflection of our moral beliefs, then it is not generally true that people believe we ought to curtail our current climate-changing lifestyles. Why the reluctance to embrace the logical conclusion?
One possible cause is the fact that in this case responsibility is diffuse. It is not any one individual’s greenhouse gas emissions that we can point to as the cause of a particular typhoon in the Pacific, say. Given this, it is easy for any individual to say: “My actions alone cannot possibly make a difference.” Yet we know that if several million people think this way, the chances of extreme weather events will rise.
Another factor is that the devastating impacts of climate change are often remote in space and time. Peter Singer has persuasively argued that the former cannot be morally (as opposed to psychologically) significant. The mere fact that the harm we do manifests on the other side of the world cannot lessen the reason we have to prevent it. The other factor – temporal remoteness – raises more interesting issues. Sometimes temporal distance brings uncertainty: the further we look into the future, the less reliable our predictions are. To the extent that we cannot be certain that our actions will cause harm, we have a lesser obligation to refrain from acting. In the case of climate change, there is a related issue. Although we can be fairly certain that there will be significant harmful impacts of climate change, it is much harder to identify exactly what those effects will be and who will be harmed. For example, we can fairly reliably predict a rise in the frequency of extreme weather events but it is much harder to predict who will lose their homes to the next typhoon.
Both of these factors put stress on the current shape of our moral thinking. That thinking is largely focused on the issue of individual responsibility. This is fine when the particular actions of an individual have predictable and identifiable effects: we can hold the individual responsible for the harm that can be linked to her action, and apply social and state pressures to encourage her to desist. But where neither the input (i.e. individual action) nor the output (i.e. harm caused) are readily identifiable, it can be difficult to know what to do, even though the harm is just as obvious. This problem led Dale Jamieson to suggest that the problem of climate change is not merely one of economics, but also one of moral philosophy. As he puts it: “Unless we develop new values and conceptions of responsibility, we will have enormous difficulty in motivating people in responding to this problem.”
The role of moral philosophy here is both theoretical and practical: theoretical insofar as it identifies one of the modes of thought that feeds the problem; practical insofar as it offers alternatives. Jamieson’s suggestion is to abandon the scheme that thinks in terms of individual responsibility for easily identifiable consequences and replace it with one that thinks in terms of the virtues of humility, courage, moderation, simplicity and conservatism.
As a suggested cure, it is perhaps easy to quibble with this. But if the diagnosis of the disease is accurate, some such paradigm shift in our conceptual scheme may be necessary before we finally face up to our collective responsibilities.
References
Peter Singer, 1972, “Famine, Affluence and Morality” in Philosophy and Public Affairs 1(3), pp.229-243
Dale Jamieson, 1992, “Ethics, Public Policy and Global Warming” in Science, Technology and Human Values 17(2), pp.139-153.
Image: Clarkcb@en.wikipedia
– Neil Sinclair (neil.sinclair@nottingham.ac.uk)
Rational action doesn’t just involve the desirability of the intended goal (including the goal of avoiding something undesirable). It also involves the confidence we can have that this or that course of action will successfully achieve the goal. That’s why a lottery ticket that has a one-in-a-million chance of winning the jackpot of £1,000,000 is only worth about £1: winning it would be very desirable goal, but we have little reason to think buying a ticket will achieve that goal.
These is considerable uncertainty about how effectively this or that course of action will avoid catastrophic climate change — instead of causing equally catastrophic economic collapse or global famine. There is also uncertainty about whether a changed climate would be change for the worse or change for the better. In other words, we don’t know if the goal in question is even desirable. Most of those who predict catastrophe are trained in climate science — they are not experts in futurology, or economics, or evolutionary biology, which are more relevant skills for judging the well-being of future generations. There’s a prima facie case for thinking that generally higher levels of CO2 and higher temperatures combined with higher humidity would sustain more life on a global scale. Of course changed conditions create difficulties for some species, but it they also create opportunities for other species.
The remoteness in space and time of the effects of our actions is irrelevant in itself, but as a rule the more remote these effects are, the less confidence we can have in our deliberations about them. At an extreme, we have practically no idea what the effects of our actions will be, or even if they are desirable or undesirable. That is relevant for rational action — and for informed moral judgement.
I agree that we need to temper our moral judgements and actions in the face of uncertainties. In this case, the reports of the IPCC are helpful. According to these, it is certain that climate change in the form global warming is occurring (cf. p.30 of the Synthesis report linked above). It is also very likely that most of the observed warming since the mid 20th century is due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (p.39). We can have high confidence that, when it comes to human populations, the positive health benefits (e.g. fewer deaths from cold exposure) of this climate change are outweighed by the negative health effects (e.g. increases in malnutrition) (p.49). There is a broad consensus and reasonable evidence that changes in human lifestyle and behaviour can contribute to mitigating these overall negative effects of this climate change (p.59). Finally, there is broad agreement and reasonable evidence that mitigation measures to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations on the atmosphere will cost between minus 1% and plus 5.5% of global GDP. So although certainty is generally hard to come by, we can plan on the basis of what is likely and such predictions are possible in the case of climate change.
But, this point aside, Jamieson’s point would apply even if we had absolutely certainty about the effects of climate change and the ways to mitigate these. For even in that case, both the causes and effects would be “fuzzy” insofar as we could not identify individuals or individual actions as the causes of the change, nor could we specify in advance individual victims. That makes our current notions of individual responsibility inadequate (even if we had certainty).
Also, it is clear that for some species, global warming will be beneficial. In fact, viewed from a sufficiently broad, planetary perspective, climate change is just another stage in the journey of life on earth: life will go on in some form, although it might be a bit different. This emphasises the point, made by William Grey, that concern for the harmful effects of climate change is not usually concern for the planet in itself – but concern for the human part of it. This kind of environmentalism is therefore deeply anthropocentric.
” Suppose you are engaged in an activity that causes significant harm to others. It forces them out of their homes, raises the cost of necessities, increases their risk of ill-health and deprives them of many of the opportunities for enjoyment that you possess. ”
For example, sharply increasing gas and electricity bills, which will have a severe impact on poor people, to pay subsidies to wealthy landowners cashing in on wind turbine FITs?
The issue is nowhere near as clear-cut as your rather naive article makes out.
Although the point of this article was not to make specific recommendations about how to deal with climate change, I agree that we should favour mitigation policies that do not excessively burden the already disadvantaged or excessively profit the already advantaged.
[…] This blog post was originally published in the University of Nottingham blog Think About It […]