9
Climate Change
In the previous chapter, we briefly considered the argument that the only
obligation we have to strangers is not to harm them. For most of human
existence, that view would have been easy to live by. Our ancestors lived
in groups of no more than a few hundred people, and those on the
other side of a river or mountain range might as well have been living
in a separate world. We developed ethical principles to help us to deal
with problems within our community, not to help those outside it. The
harms that it was considered wrong to cause were generally clear and well
defined. We developed inhibitions against, and emotional responses to,
such actions, and these instinctive or emotional reactions still form the
basis for much of our moral thinking.
Today, we are connected to people all over the world in ways our
ancestors could not have imagined. The discovery that human activities
are changing the climate of our planet has brought with it knowledge of
new ways in which we can harm one another. When you drive your car,
you burn fossil fuel that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. You
are changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere and, hence,
the climate. What does this do to others?
In some parts of the world, what you are doing is already apparent.
According to the World Health Organization, the warming of the planet
caused an additional 140,000 deaths in 2004, as compared with the number
of deaths there would have been had average global temperatures
remained as they were during the period 1961 to 1990. This means that
climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occurred
in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The immediate causes of
the additional death are mostly climate-sensitive diseases such as malaria,
216
Climate Change 217
dengue, and diarrhoea, which is more common when there is a lack of
safe water. Malnutrition resulting from crops that fail because of high
temperatures or low rainfall is also responsible for many extra deaths.
Changes are also already apparent in the fertile, densely settled delta
regions in Egypt, Bangladesh, India and Vietnam, which are at risk from
rising sea levels. The Sunderbans, islands in the Ganges delta that are
home to four million Indians, are disappearing – two islands have vanished
entirely; in total, an area of land measuring thirty-one square miles
has disappeared over the last thirty years. Hundreds of families have
had to move to camps for displaced people. Some small Pacific nations
like the Maldives, Kiribati and Tuvalu, which consist of low-lying coral
atolls, are in similar danger; within a few decades, these nations may be
submerged beneath the waves.
These are only the first signs of much greater change to come. In
2007, the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, the scientific body established by the United Nations
Environment Program and the World Meteorological Association, found
that a temperature rise, by 2080, in the range of 2.0◦
C to 2.4◦
C would
put stress on water resources used by 1.2 billion people. Rising sea levels
would expose, each year, an additional 16 million people to coastal flooding.
If temperatures rise as much as 3.3◦
C over the same period, the stress
on water resources would affect 2.5 to 3.2 billion people, and each year
would expose an additional 29 million to coastal flooding.
What we are doing to strangers in other communities right now is,
therefore, far more serious and far more widespread than the harm we
would do if we were in the habit of occasionally sending out a group of
warriors to rape and pillage a village or two. Yet causing imperceptible
harm at a distance by the release of waste gases is a completely new form
of harm, and so we lack any kind of instinctive inhibitions or emotional
response against causing it. We have trouble seeing it as harm at all.
The polar bear perched on a melting chunk of ice has become an
icon of the campaign against global warming, making the point that
it is not only humans who will suffer from climate change. Millions of
animals will die in droughts and floods. Some will be able to move as
their environments change, but for others there will be nowhere to go.
In some regions, for instance, alpine species will be able to move higher
up mountains as temperatures increase, but in others – Australia is one
example – alpine plants and animals are already clinging to the most
elevated regions of the country, and there is nowhere higher to go.
Global warming will cause extinctions on a vast scale.
218 Practical Ethics
In the previous chapter, I argued against the view that the only obligation
we have to strangers is to avoid harming them; but even if we were
to take that view, the facts of climate change would demonstrate clearly
that we are harming hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of the world’s
poor. It would seem, therefore, that on any plausible view, we have an
obligation to stop harming them and to compensate them for the harm
we have already caused them – harm that will continue to unfold for the
next century at least, even if we cut all greenhouse gas emissions to zero
today. We need international arrangements to deal with climate change,
and we need a global ethic on which to base these arrangements. This
chapter will discuss what this global ethic might look like and what the
responsibilities of both nations and individuals are in respect of climate
change.
‘enough and as good’
Imagine that we live in a village in which everyone puts their waste down
a giant drain. No one quite knows what happens to the waste after it goes
down the drain, but because it disappears and doesn’t seem to bother
anyone, no one worries about it. No matter how much we pour down
the drain, others can do the same. For as long as anyone can remember,
the capacity of the drain to dispose of our waste has seemed limitless. We
believe that we can take what we want and still leave, in the words of the
seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, ‘enough and as
good left in common for others’. This, on Locke’s view, is a key factor in
our being able to acquire property from natural resources. Now imagine
that we start producing more waste, and suddenly we find that the drain’s
capacity is not limitless after all; on the contrary, it is being used to the
full. At this point, when we continue to throw our wastes down the drain
we are no longer leaving ‘enough and as good for others’, and hence our
right to unchecked waste disposal becomes questionable.
Think of our atmosphere as that giant drain and our wastes as carbon
dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. We have just discovered
that the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb our gases without harmful consequences
is limited. The evidence shows that we are already using it
beyond its capacity. Before the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide in
our atmosphere amounted to only 270 parts per million (ppm). Then
humans began to burn coal in large quantities, and later oil and gas.
In 2010, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 390 ppm. This
is a higher level than at any time in recorded history, and it is still
Climate Change 219
increasing at 2 ppm each year. There is general agreement that if we
cause average temperatures to increase by 2◦
C, dangerous, large-scale
consequences, much more severe than anything we have seen so far,
are probable. Until about 2008, most scientists agreed on 450 ppm
as the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere that should not be
exceeded if we are to prevent a greater increase than 2◦
C. On current
trends, we will reach 450 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
by 2040.
Allowing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to reach 450
ppm is already taking a grave risk. In the first decade of the twenty-first
century, global warming repeatedly exceeded the predictions made by
earlier reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and
we developed a better understanding of the dangers of feedback loops
in planetary warming. The melting of arctic ice is one visible example
of something happening more rapidly than scientists had predicted. It
also illustrates the dangers of a feedback loop. Four hundred years ago,
explorers sought the legendary ‘Northeast Passage’ that would enable
them to sail across the north of Europe and Russia to China. They found
the arctic ice impenetrable and gave up their quest. In 2009, commercial
vessels successfully navigated the Northeast Passage. The large area
of the Arctic Ocean that is now ice-free in summer is a symptom of global
warming. In addition, it is itself a cause of further warming. Ice and snow
reflect the sun’s rays back upwards. An ice-free ocean surface absorbs
more warmth from the sun. Our greenhouse gas emissions have, by causing
enough warming to melt arctic ice, created a feedback loop that
will generate more warming, even if we were to stop emitting all greenhouse
gases tomorrow. Other feedback loops pose even greater danger.
In Siberia, vast quantities of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse
gas, are locked up in what used to be called ‘permafrost’ – regions in
which the ground was permanently frozen. Areas that used to be frozen
are now thawing, and as they thaw they release the methane, contributing
to further warming and to the thawing of further regions, releasing
more methane.
Evidence of this kind led James Hansen, of the U.S. National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, and his colleagues to conclude, in an
article published in Science in 2008, that if we wish ‘to preserve a planet
similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth
is adapted,’ we need to reduce carbon dioxide to ‘at most 350 ppm’.
That is, of course, a level that we passed some years ago. So if we think of
the atmosphere as a giant drain, then the drain is already overused. We
220 Practical Ethics
need to cut back on our usage. How can we decide who should cut back
the most?
what is an equitable distribution?
Historical Responsibility
In addressing the question of justice in distribution in his book Anarchy,
State and Utopia, the philosopher Robert Nozick made a useful distinction
between ‘historical’ principles and ‘time-slice’ principles. An historical
principle is one that says: to understand whether a given distribution of
goods is just or unjust, we must ask how the distribution came about; we
must know its history. Are the parties entitled, by an originally justifiable
acquisition and a chain of legitimate transfers, to what they now have? If
so, the present distribution is just. If not, rectification or compensation
will be needed to produce a just distribution. In contrast, a time-slice
principle just looks at the existing distribution, at this moment of time,
and asks on that basis if it is just.
One historical principle, often applied in the case of pollution, is ‘You
broke it, you fix it’ – also known as ‘The polluter pays’. If a chemical
factory pollutes a river, then the owner of the factory is responsible for
cleaning up the river. If we apply this principle to climate change, then
it would assign responsibility for fixing the problem to each country in
proportion to the amount that the country has contributed to causing
the problem. Historical emissions of carbon dioxide are relevant, because
most of the carbon dioxide emitted a century ago is still in the atmosphere
today.
In discussions at the United Nations on climate change in 1997, the
Brazilian government proposed that emission reduction targets should
be set according to the impact of a nation’s historic emissions on temperature
rise. A scientific group was set up to evaluate the proposal and
indicate whether the data existed to allow conclusions to be reached on
what contributions different nations or regions had made to the increase
in global temperatures. This group eventually reported, in 2008, that the
data was adequate for this, especially for fossil fuel emissions, although
contributions due to changes in forestry and agriculture were more difficult
to quantify. The group took as its period for measuring contributions
from 1890 to 2000, noting that different dates would give slightly
different results. It concluded that the United States is responsible for
20 percent of the temperature rise and the European nations that are
Climate Change 221
members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) are responsible for 14 percent. Somewhat surprisingly –
and perhaps disconcertingly for the Brazilians – Latin America also comes
out as contributing 14 percent of the temperature rise, although the
study notes that this figure falls as low as 8 percent if different data for
forestry and land use changes are used. On the other hand, all of East
Asia, including China, has contributed only 10 percent, and South Asia,
including India, only 7 percent. On the ‘You broke it, you fix it’ view,
therefore, it is the United States and the long-industrialized European
nations, perhaps together with Latin America, that ought to bear the
largest share of the burden of solving the problem.
China has offered support for the Brazilian proposal, but with the
explicit proviso that historic contributions to climate change should be
considered on a per capita basis. Carbon Equity, a report prepared by five
Chinese academic and policy-oriented think tanks for the 2009 conference
on climate change in Copenhagen, argues that the fact that China
has a much larger population than the United States has to be taken into
account in apportioning responsibility for the greenhouse problem. The
assumption here, which seems reasonable, is that each person is entitled
to an equal share of the atmosphere, and we should be looking at the
extent to which people in some nations have, in past centuries, used more
than their share. The report calculates that over the period from 1850
to 2004, the average American has been responsible for putting twentyone
times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the average
Chinese and fifty-three times as much as the average Indian. On average,
Britons and Canadians are responsible for sixteen times as much carbon
being in the atmosphere as Chinese and forty times as much as Indians.
The principle of historical responsibility thus indicates that almost all of
the sacrifices required to stop global warming should be made by the
older industrialized nations.
One sometimes hears the objection that the industrial revolution has
benefited the entire world, not only the industrialized nations, and hence
that the emissions required for industrialization should not be regarded
as only the responsibility of the industrialized nations. It’s true that the
industrial revolution made possible the development of science and technology,
and this has benefited and is continuing to benefit billions of
people all over the world. But it also enabled the industrialized nations
to colonize much of the world and, even after the era of colonization,
to dominate the global trading system. This has greatly benefited those
living in the industrialized nations, whereas its impact on the colonized
222 Practical Ethics
nations was, at best, much more mixed. So even if industrialization has
been, on balance, a benefit rather than a harm for the world as a whole,
it is a benefit that has accrued disproportionately to those in the industrialized
nations themselves, and the emissions can fairly be seen as their
responsibility.
Another objection to holding the industrialized nations responsible
for all their emissions since the industrial revolution is that for most of
this period they did not know that these emissions would be harmful.
That’s true, though as early as 1896, the distinguished scientist Svante
Arrhenius predicted that burning fossil fuels would lead to a build-up
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that would heat the planet. (He
thought, however, that this would be a good thing, making the earth’s
climate ‘more equable’ and stimulating food production. Perhaps that
benign view of global warming had something to do with his location
in Sweden.) Human-induced global warming was not seriously studied
until the 1970s, however, and climate change only became an issue of
international concern in the 1980s. At U.S. congressional hearings in
1987 – at the time the hottest year on record, but now already not even
one of the ten hottest years – James Hansen warned of the dangers
of global warming. Other scientists supported him. The following year,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up, and two
years later that body reported that the threat of climate change was
real, and a global treaty was needed to deal with it. The United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed to at the “Earth
Summit” held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This convention, accepted by
181 governments, including all the major industrialized nations, calls
for greenhouse gases to be stabilized ‘at a low enough level to prevent
dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’. The
nations of the world have not done what they said they would do. Instead,
their greenhouse gas emissions continued to grow. (The Kyoto Protocol,
agreed to by most industrialized nations in 1997, was an attempt to get
action from the industrialized nations that would fulfil the pledges made
at the Rio Earth Summit five years earlier. The United States, then the
world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and one with a particularly
high per capita level of emissions, did not ratify it.)
Though not legally binding, the Rio de Janeiro commitment demonstrates
that in 1992 the developed nations were aware of the need for
action. The study of the Brazilian proposal to consider historical contributions,
referred to previously, also examined what the outcome would
be if the starting date for historical responsibility were not 1890 but
Climate Change 223
1990 – a date by which there could be no claim of ignorance about the
fact that greenhouse gas emissions posed a risk of bringing about dangerous
climate change. Although this much more recent starting date did of
course reduce the contributions of the older industrialized nations, the
difference was smaller than might be expected. The contribution of
the United States declined from 20 percent to 16 percent, and that of the
European OECD nations fell from 14 percent to 11 percent. China’s contribution
increased to around 13 percent, but India’s remained near 5
percent; Africa’s contributions remain extremely small whatever dateline
is used. The per capita contributions of the industrialized nations remain
lopsidedly greater, because of course the population of the United States
is only about one quarter that of China. Thus, even if we accept the
argument that the ‘You broke it, you fix it’ rule applies only from the
time when the biggest emitters knew that their emissions were risking
dangerous anthropogenic climate change, it would still be the case that
the United States and the industrialized nations of Europe ought to be
doing much more than any other nations to solve the problem.
Equal Shares
At a 2009 United Nations Summit meeting on climate change, the president
of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, pointed out that climate change will
probably have a more severe impact on Africa than on any other part
of the world – and yet Africa has fewer resources to draw on to meet
this challenge. Many models of the changes that global warming is likely
to bring show that precipitation will decrease nearer the equator and
increase nearer the poles. The rainfall on which hundreds of millions
rely to grow their food will become less reliable. Moreover, the poor
nations depend on agriculture far more than the rich. In the United
States, agriculture represents only 4 percent of the economy; in Malawi
it is 40 percent, and 90 percent of Malawians are subsistence farmers, virtually
all of them dependent on rainfall. Similar patterns of dependence
on farming and rainfall are common across Africa.
It is also obviously true that the poorer nations lack the resources to
adapt. In southern Australia, when several states were faced with a longterm
trend of declining rainfall, governments built costly desalination
plants to ensure that major cities will not run out of water. In the Netherlands,
the government has raised dykes to keep out rising sea levels and
is designing amphibious houses that can rise and float, while remaining
securely moored, if rivers flood. Other countries cannot afford such
224 Practical Ethics
expensive ways of providing water and controlling flooding from rising
sea levels.
President Kagame went on to point out that climate change is only
‘very marginally, if at all, a problem of Africa’s making’. We have seen
that he was right about this too. Nevertheless, he offered to wipe the slate
clean and forget about the responsibility of the industrialized nations for
causing the problem. Because we are all facing a struggle for survival,
he said, he did not want ‘a new round of blame game’ which would
not only be in poor taste but also counterproductive. Instead, he proposed
that every human being is entitled to an equal share of the atmosphere.
At the same United Nations meeting, Sri Lanka made a similar
proposal.
‘Equal shares’ has the great merit of simplicity. It is a time-slice principle
– it takes no account of the past and gives everyone an equal share
of the atmosphere from now on. Like other developing nations, Rwanda
and Sri Lanka are using far less than their equal per capita share, and so
even if they give up their right to make a claim against the industrialized
nations on the basis of historical responsibility, they will still do well on
an equal shares basis.
What would equal shares mean in practice? Suppose that we aim to
stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at a level that will prevent us exceeding
450 ppm carbon dioxide. It is controversial how much carbon we could
emit per person while remaining below that level, but one plausible
figure is two tons of carbon dioxide per person per year. (Emissions are
sometimes expressed in terms of carbon rather than carbon dioxide.
One ton of carbon is equivalent to 3.7 tons of carbon dioxide, so two
tons of carbon dioxide is not much more than half a ton of carbon. We
should also remember that the figure for ‘carbon dioxide’ really means
‘carbon dioxide equivalent’ for it includes other greenhouse gases such
as methane, converted at a rate that takes into account their potency to
heat up the planet.) Now compare actual per capita emissions for some
key nations with this estimate of two tons of carbon dioxide per person
that could be emitted each year. In 2010, the United States, Canada and
Australia all produced about twenty tons of carbon dioxide per person
per year, while Germany produced eleven tons, China about four, India
not much more than one ton, and Sri Lanka only about two-thirds of a
ton. This means that Sri Lanka could triple its emissions and India could
almost double its emissions while still remaining within their per capita
shares. China would need to halve its current emissions, Germany would
have to reduce them by more than 80 percent, and most dramatically of
Climate Change 225
all, the United States, Canada and Australia would have to reduce their
emissions to only one-tenth of present levels.
It is, of course, not possible for industrialized nations like Germany and
the United States to make such dramatic reductions in the short term, or
at least not without devastating economic consequences that would be
likely, in a democracy, to lead to a change of government and a reversal
of the policy. Before we conclude that this makes the principle of equal
per capita shares an unrealistic idea, however, there are two mitigating
factors to consider. The first is that making greenhouse gas emission
quotas tradeable would ease the transition to a low-emissions economy.
Emissions trading works on the simple economic principle that if you can
buy something more cheaply than you can produce it yourself, you are
better off buying it than producing it. In this case, what you buy will be a
transferable quota to produce greenhouse gases, allocated on the basis of
an equal per capita share. International carbon trading means that cuts in
carbon emissions will be made at the lowest possible cost, thus doing the
least possible damage to the global economy. Moreover, a carbon trading
scheme gives countries with few greenhouse gas emissions – generally,
poor countries – an incentive to keep their emissions low, so that they
have more emissions quota to sell to rich countries that are over their
quota. Thus, an international emissions trading scheme could contribute
towards solving the problem of poverty discussed in the previous chapter.
It would involve the transfer of resources from rich nations to poor ones –
not as altruism, but as payment for a valuable commodity.
There are, however, some serious objections to an international carbon
trading scheme. One is whether such a scheme would be verifiable
– that is, whether the emissions of each nation could be properly
checked against the nation’s quota – and what would happen if it were
not. Without a reliable means of verifying emissions cuts, nothing will be
achieved. Secondly, payments from rich nations to poor nations will only
reduce poverty if the governments to which they are paid use them for
that purpose. In the case of governments that refused to do so – which,
as we saw in the previous chapter, often happens when dictatorial or
corrupt governments earn royalties from the sale of oil and minerals – it
would be better for the payments to be held in trust until a government
emerges that can demonstrate that it will use the funds for the benefit of
its people as a whole.
The third objection to an international emissions trading scheme is
one that James Hansen has made to any ‘cap and trade’ system – that
is, any system that sets an overall cap on emissions, divides them up
226 Practical Ethics
into emission permits for nations or corporations or individuals, and
then allows these permits to be traded. Hansen points out that such
schemes have a perverse effect on altruistic actions. If I decide to cut
my greenhouse gas emissions by buying a fuel-efficient hybrid car, this
does not reduce the emissions total for my country. The cap determines
the total, and if some people reduce their emissions, this will make the
price of emission permits fall. Thus, fossil fuels will be cheaper than they
would have been if some people had not altruistically decided to reduce
their emissions, and others who are not altruistic will no doubt decide to
buy a bigger car, or use more energy, because of the price fall. Hansen
therefore prefers a tax on the carbon content of fossil fuels, with the
proceeds divided equally between all of a country’s legal residents – he
calls it a ‘fee and dividend’ scheme. This would reward those who reduce
their carbon footprint, and doing so would reduce the overall emissions
total. In response, the economist Paul Krugman acknowledges that a cap
and trade system does reduce the opportunities for climate altruism, but
he denies that altruism is going to enable us to cut emissions to the extent
we need. He also points out that allowing permits to be traded uses the
mechanism of the market to ensure that emissions are reduced at the
lowest possible cost – why reduce emissions at a high cost if someone else
can reduce them for much less and still profit by selling their permits
to you? Thus, in Krugman’s view and in the view of most economists, a
carbon fee or tax is less efficient than a cap and trade system.
This discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of a carbon trading
scheme is, however, a digression from our discussion of whether it
is possible for developed nations to reduce their emissions to the extent
needed to avoid catastrophe. A carbon trading scheme was one factor that
may make this task a little more possible than it at first seems. A second
factor is that the cuts do not need to be made all at once. The German
Advisory Council on Global Change, a scientific body that advises the
German government, has suggested that the total amount of permissible
emissions of carbon dioxide should not be calculated for a single year,
but rather should be set for the entire period between now and 2050
and designed to make it likely that global temperatures do not rise more
than 2◦
C. For this purpose, the council suggested a maximum of 750
billion tons of carbon dioxide to be emitted between 2010 and 2050
(although even with this amount, the council warned that there would
be no more than a two-thirds probability that the temperature rise could
be kept below 2◦
C). This total, the council proposed, should be divided
between countries on the basis of equal per capita shares. Countries could
Climate Change 227
then produce their own ‘road maps’ showing how they would reduce
their carbon dioxide emissions so as not to exceed their carbon budgets
before 2050.
Although the German proposal gives industrialized countries time to
make changes, for those countries with the highest current per capita
emissions outputs, the time is very short. About sixty countries, mostly
industrialized nations, will, at current rates, use up their budget in less
than twenty years. Germany, for example, if it continued to emit at the
same rate as it did in 2008, would use up its emissions budget in just ten
years, requiring it to have zero emissions for the next thirty years. (It is
therefore commendable that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has
accepted the equal shares principle, saying: ‘ . . . our long-term measure
can only be that per capita CO2 emissions in the world must be equalized.’)
The United States, Australia and Canada are currently on track to
use up their budgets in just six years. Another group of thirty countries,
which includes China, Mexico and Thailand, will, at current rates, use up
their budgets in twenty to forty years. The remaining ninety-five countries
do not need to reduce their emissions, as at current rates their budgets
will last at least forty years. Brazil is in this group. So too is India, which
would take eighty-eight years to exhaust its budget at current levels. Some
of the poorest nations emit so little carbon that at current rates it would
take them several centuries to use up their budget. At the extreme end of
this spectrum, the small African nation of Burkina Faso would take 2,892
years to use up its budget – which means that under an international cap
and trade scheme, it would be able to sell a large amount of its quota to
those nations that will have the most difficulty in meeting their targets.
Apart from the question of whether the rich nations could realistically
comply with the equal per capita share approach, another objection
to this approach is that if a country’s population grows, then that
country gets a larger allocation; while everyone else’s allocation diminishes
because the total permissible emissions level must remain constant.
Thus, a country with a rapidly growing population is imposing a burden
on other countries, forcing them to reduce their emissions still further.
It would be better to have a system that gives countries an incentive to
slow population growth. We could do this by setting national allocations
that are tied to today’s population rather than letting them rise with
an increase in population. Because different countries have different
proportions of young people about to reach reproductive age, however,
this provision would produce greater hardship in countries with younger
populations than in those with older populations. That problem could be
228 Practical Ethics
avoided if national allocations were based on an estimate of a country’s
population at some future date. The Population Division of the United
Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs publishes predictions
of the population that each nation will reach in 2050. Using this
figure as the basis for the per capita allocation would encourage countries
to aim to remain below their projected population, for any country
that could achieve this would have a larger per person allocation than
that to which its actual population would entitle it. Conversely, a country
would have a reduced emission quota per actual resident if its population
growth exceeded the UN population forecast.
Luxury versus Subsistence
In A Theory of Justice, perhaps the most influential work on justice published
in the twentieth century, John Rawls argued that if devoting more
resources to those who are worse off will improve their situation, then
that is what justice requires us to do. In the1992 United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change, the importance of favouring those
who are worse off was recognized by a provision stating that the countries
signing the convention ‘have a right to, and should, promote sustainable
development’. This accepts the importance of development for poor
countries, but the right to development is constrained by the need for
development to be sustainable. The countries of the world therefore
have, in the wording of the convention, ‘common but differentiated
responsibilities’.
In 1993, the philosopher Henry Shue argued that a just allocation of
quotas to emit greenhouse gases would distinguish between ‘subsistence
emissions’ and ‘luxury emissions’ so that methane from rice paddies in
poor countries would not rank equally with emissions from large vehicles
used for recreational driving in the rich nations. At a United Nations General
Assembly debate on climate change in 2007, a diplomat representing
China used the same language, saying that ‘emissions of subsistence’ and
‘development emissions’ of poor countries should be accommodated by
any future agreements, whereas the ‘luxury emissions’ of rich countries
should be restricted. Whether one chooses an egalitarian, Rawlsian, or
utilitarian principle of justice, that is difficult to deny.
Drawing a distinction between subsistence and luxury emissions shows
convincingly that Burkina Faso is under no obligation to restrict emissions
that are helpful for its development – but then, as we have seen, that
is also apparent from an application of the principle of equal per capita
Climate Change 229
shares. The distinction between subsistence emissions and luxury emissions
is of only limited use to China, however, because there are already
more Chinese living an affluent lifestyle, and therefore responsible for a
high level of emissions, than there are, say, Germans. Admittedly, almost
all Germans are responsible for a high level of emissions, whereas only
a small proportion of Chinese are, but if China is calling on rich countries
to restrict their ‘luxury emissions’, it can scarcely ignore the luxury
emissions coming from its own elite.
a form of aggression?
All of the three principles we have discussed have something to be said
for them, and the choice between them is difficult. We could try to
combine them, modifying the basic idea of equal per capita shares by
giving some weight to historical contributions and some to a country’s
need to develop and provide the means for all its citizens to reach a
minimum standard of living. Without going into the complexities of
such possible combinations, it is clear that on any of these principles,
or on any combination of them, the rich nations cannot justify their
continued high output of greenhouse gases. It is impossible to think of a
plausible ethical principle by which they could justify it. We can therefore
conclude that they are doing something wrong.
What exactly is the nature of the wrongdoing? At an African Union
summit in 2007, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda told the nations of
Europe and North America: ‘You are causing aggression to us by causing
global warming . . . Alaska will probably become good for agriculture,
Siberia will probably become good for agriculture, but where does that
leave Africa?’ We have already seen that the facts to which Museveni
refers are basically accurate. Nevertheless, his use of the term ‘aggression’
shocks us. Can he be right?
When we think of ‘aggression’, we imagine troops moving across a
border, or planes bombing enemy positions. In emitting high levels of
greenhouse gases, the rich nations are not deliberately attacking another
country, but their actions may be even more devastating than conventional
forms of aggressive war. Because of what the rich nations are doing,
lands that now grow crops will become barren, glaciers that for millennia
have fed rivers will dwindle, the sea will take over fertile fields, tropical
diseases will spread, and people will starve or become refugees. For
at least the past twenty years, the rich countries have known that their
actions risk causing these effects; and from some time in the first decade
230 Practical Ethics
of the twenty-first century, they have known that their actions very probably
will have these effects. The fact that these harms are an unwanted
but unavoidable side effect of pursuing otherwise innocuous goals, like
giving people the kind of lifestyle they desire, is no justification for causing
such harms. According to the doctrine of double effect, knowingly
causing harm can be justified if the harm is not intended, the goal is sufficiently
important to outweigh the harm caused, and there is no other
way of achieving the goal without causing at least as great a harm. In the
case of global warming, however, the reverse is the case: the harm caused
far outweighs the good obtained. President George W. Bush admitted
as much early in his presidency when, asked if he would do something
about global warming, he said: ‘We will not do anything that harms our
economy, because first things first are the people who live in America.’
Shortly afterwards Ari Fleischer, his spokesperson, was asked at a press
briefing whether the president would call on drivers to sharply reduce
their fuel consumption, Fleischer replied: ‘That’s a big no. The President
believes that it’s an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of
policymakers to protect the American way of life.’ Such remarks suggest
that the United States was bringing life-threatening harm to hundreds of
millions of people because its leader put a higher priority on preserving
its citizens’ economic interests, and their rights to burn as much fuel
as they wish, than on the survival of people outside the United States.
Though George W. Bush is no longer in power, unless the United States
drastically changes course on emissions, that will remain true. One could
say the same about other developed nations, even if their leaders are
more guarded in their comments.
What we are doing to the people most at risk from global warming,
therefore, is similar in its impact to waging aggressive war on them.
It differs in its motivation, but that will be little consolation to them.
Moreover, because we know what we are doing and yet do not stop doing
it, we cannot shirk responsibility for it. We are culpable for the harm we
are doing to them.
what ought individuals to do?
The next question to ask is: what obligation does this place on us as
individual citizens of the culpable nations? When we looked at our individual
responsibilities as affluent individuals in a world with a billion
people living in extreme poverty, the answer was clear. We may well try
to change the behaviour of our government, urging it to increase its aid
Climate Change 231
to the world’s poor and to make that aid as effective as possible, but we
also can and should act on our own, even if – or especially if – the government
does not live up to its obligations. As long as we can, by giving
to aid agencies, stop something very bad from happening without sacrificing
anything of comparable moral significance ourselves, then giving to
those agencies is what we ought to do. That does seem to be the situation:
a given donation can have a significant, discernible impact – not on the
problem of poverty as a whole, but on a child and the child’s family. Can
we say the same about climate change?
At first glance it seems that we can. Suppose that, like the average
American, I am personally responsible for emitting the equivalent of
twenty tons of carbon dioxide every year. I use air-conditioning to keep
my house cool in summer, with the electricity coming largely from coalfired
power stations, and I use oil to heat it in winter. My diet is heavy in
beef and dairy products, I drive a car, and I fly to Florida for my winter
vacation. Then I become concerned about climate change, so I switch
to eating mostly plant-based foods, improve my home insulation, install
solar hot water, heating and electricity generation, ride my bike or the
train instead of driving, and take vacations closer to home. Amazingly, I
manage to cut my greenhouse gas emissions to two tons a year. Will the
change in my lifestyle have a significant, discernible impact on anyone?
It surely won’t have an impact that anyone can detect. Even if we assume
that the result of my actions is that eighteen fewer tons of carbon dioxide
go into the atmosphere each year, that is too small a quantity to have
any discernible effect on anyone. That’s not to say that it won’t have any
effect at all, but rather that we cannot know what effect – if any – it has.
We often find ourselves faced with actions that seem to be wrong, even
though it isn’t obvious that they will have bad consequences. A favourite
example of philosophers is taking a short cut across a beautiful lawn.
Assume that all of us would save a few seconds by taking the short cut,
but none of us want to see the lawn damaged. Still, what difference will
it make if I take the short cut, just this once? The grass will not show
any perceptible damage from one person walking on it. To this the usual
reply is: ‘What if everyone did that?’ If everyone did it, of course, an
unsightly muddy path would form, and none of us want to see that. The
suggestion is that, because it would be bad if everyone were to do it, it
must be wrong for me to do it.
‘What if everyone did that?’ isn’t always a good objection to an action.
‘What if everyone became a philosopher? We would all starve!’ is not a
good reason against becoming a philosopher, as long as we know that
232 Practical Ethics
there is no chance that everyone will become a philosopher. Even where
sufficient others might want to do what I am doing to bring about the bad
consequence – as in the lawn-crossing example – it isn’t clear that ‘What
if everyone did that?’ really shows that an action is wrong. Is it wrong
for me to cross the lawn because I might set a bad example to others,
and thus increase the chances that everyone will do it? What if it is late
at night and no one else is around? Is it wrong because my imprint on
the grass will make a causal contribution, even if only a small one, to the
grass wearing out? Suppose that I have studied the amount of traffic this
lawn can bear, and I find that it can withstand ten people walking across
it per day without showing any signs of wear at all. I also know that no
more than six people do walk across it each day. So as long as I only do it
when fewer than ten people are crossing it each day, and I do it when no
one else is looking, and so do not influence others to cross it, my stroll
over the lawn will have no harmful consequences at all. Am I still wrong
to do it because it would be bad if everyone did it?
Here consequentialists and non-consequentialists differ. An actutilitarian
who judges every act in accordance with its consequences
would say that if you could really be sure that walking across the grass
would have no harmful consequences at all, it would not be wrong to
do it. A rule-utilitarian could say that because the best rule for everyone
to observe in these circumstances would be ‘Do not cross the lawn’, it
would be wrong for me to cross it, even if my crossing would have no
bad consequences. A Kantian, too, could reject lawn crossing because
Kant said that if I cannot will the maxim of my action to be a universal
law, then it must be wrong. The difficult question for the rule-utilitarians
and Kantians, however, is how to formulate the rule or maxim that must
be universalized. It is true that ‘Cross the lawn whenever it is convenient
to you to do so’ would, if widely observed, damage the lawn; and
because I value the unspoilt law, I could not will it to be a universal
law. What about ‘Cross the lawn whenever crossing it will not set a bad
example and will not damage the grass’? If we are allowed to make
our rules or maxims as specific as that, then, as David Lyons showed in
his book Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism, rule-utilitarianism becomes
indistinguishable from act-utilitarianism – that is, rule-utilitarians will
approve of just those actions of which an act-utilitarian would approve,
and they will disapprove of those of which an act-utilitarian would
disapprove. R. M. Hare made a similar claim in respect of Kant’s
appeal to the idea of universal law, arguing that this principle leads
utilitarianism.
Climate Change 233
In Ideal Code, Real World, Brad Hooker argues for a version of ruleutilitarianism
that provides a barrier against making rules too complicated.
He holds that we act wrongly if we act contrary to a rule that would
be part of the set of rules that, if internalized by the overwhelming majority
of people, would have the best consequences. If we make rules too
specific, people will find them too difficult to internalize, or act on, and
the costs of educating people to act on the rules will be too high. Because,
on Hooker’s view, the code must be publicly known and promoted, it is
hard to imagine that a rule like ‘Cross the lawn only when you can do it
in secret’ could be part of the best moral code, for then everyone would
know that ‘secret’ lawn crossings were permitted, and too many people
would cross the lawn.
Christopher Kutz examines these issues in his book Complicity: Ethics
and Law for a Collective Age, and suggests what he calls the Complicity
Principle:
I am accountable for what others do when I intentionally participate in the wrong
they do or the harm they cause.
This principle is not consequentialist, Kutz says, because it makes me
accountable independently of the actual difference I make. As an
example of complicity, he considers the emission of chlorofluorocarbons,
or CFCs, the gases that damage the ozone layer and enlarge the
ozone hole, causing an increase in the rate of skin cancer in many parts
of the world. Although in many respects the ozone hole problem was
similar to the problem of climate change – individual emissions from
many nations were damaging the atmosphere, to the detriment of all –
the ozone was being damaged by a much more specific and economically
less significant class of gases, used largely in refrigerators and some
air-conditioners. International agreement on stopping the use of the
gases was therefore far easier to obtain and was achieved by the 1987
Montreal Protocol, which granted developing countries a longer period
than the industrialized nations to phase out their use of CFCs. Kutz
focuses on an individual driver who uses a CFC-based coolant in his car’s
air-conditioning. Is he doing anything wrong? Kutz says that although
there is no clear victim of the driver’s use of CFCs, ‘individuals must
think of themselves as inclusively accountable for what they do together’.
If collectively we cause harm, then – even though we do not deliberately
set out to do something together, and the contribution of a single individual
may make no difference to the harm done – each one of us is
complicit in causing the harm and accountable for it.
234 Practical Ethics
It isn’t clear, however, that we need a special non-consequentialist
complicity principle of the kind that Kutz proposes. Neither the ozone
damage nor global warming is like the case of a lawn that could withstand
the tread of a few more people without any damage. By the time the
dangers of CFCs and of greenhouse gases were known, the threshold
for damage had already been crossed. Our emissions of CFCs were, and
our emissions of greenhouse gases still are, making the situation worse –
and of course the damage is much more serious than ruining a lawn.
This suggests that we do not need to depart from consequentialism to
show what is wrong with emitting harmful gases into the atmosphere. In
Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit points out that we tend to think that we
can only be harming others in a serious way if there is someone who has
a ground for a serious complaint. That may be a relic of the conditions
of our earlier existence when, as mentioned at the beginning of this
chapter, if we harmed someone, it was usually obvious that we had done
so, and nothing we did was likely to affect a very large number of people.
Now our actions can affect millions – perhaps billions. This means that
we can inflict harm that is so broadly dispersed that no one individual
can plausibly claim to have been seriously affected by it.
Jonathan Glover offers a vivid illustration of how ignoring imperceptible
harms can lead us astray. Glover imagines that in a poor village, 100
people are about to eat lunch. Each has a bowl containing 100 beans.
Suddenly, 100 hungry bandits swoop down on the village. Each bandit
takes the contents of the bowl of one villager, eats it, and gallops off.
Next week, the bandits plan to do it again, but one of them is afflicted
by qualms about causing poor peasants to go hungry. These doubts are
set to rest by another bandit who proposes that each of them should take
no more than one bean from any villager’s bowl. Because the loss of one
bean cannot make a perceptible difference to any villager – you don’t
really notice if you are eating 99 or 100 beans – no bandit will have made
anyone worse off. So the bandits swoop down on the village, but instead
of just grabbing a whole bowl from a villager, each bandit goes to all 100
villagers, taking just one solitary bean from each bowl. The villagers are
just as hungry as they were the previous week, but the bandits can all
sleep well on their full stomachs, knowing that none of them has harmed
anyone.
Glover’s example shows the absurdity of disregarding tiny harms. Even
if each of us makes no perceptible difference, we are each responsible for
a share of the total harms we collectively cause. If, acting together with a
billion other affluent people, we each emit twenty tons of carbon dioxide,
Climate Change 235
each of us makes only an imperceptible difference to the climate and so
inflicts only an imperceptible harm on anyone. Yet we are still, collectively,
inflicting a very great harm on a very large number of people, and we
must bear our share of responsibility for that. We can, following Kutz, see
the wrongness of what we are doing in terms of a non-consequentialist
principle of complicity, but we can also see it, at least in this kind of case,
as consistent with a strict application of consequentialism.
Up to this point, we have been assuming that my change of lifestyle,
and that of many others acting on a similarly voluntary basis, will over
time result in less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there would
have been if we had not reduced our emissions. That seems obvious, but
as we saw earlier, James Hansen has pointed out that if the government
adopts a cap and trade scheme for reducing carbon emissions, individual
reductions in carbon emissions may have no effect on reducing emissions.
Suppose my government commits itself to reduce greenhouse gases by,
say, 50 percent by 2050. In order to achieve this, it calculates how much
carbon can be emitted each year and auctions permits, which major
emitters need to buy in order to continue to run their power stations
or factories. If more people install solar panels, and fewer coal-fired
power stations are required, power companies will not need to buy so
many permits; or if they have already bought them, they will have surplus
permits to sell to whoever needs them. The price of permits will fall
and with it the cost of carbon-intensive products. Consumers who care
more about saving money than about doing what is right will buy more
of these products, and, if the emissions trading scheme is well-designed
and implemented, emissions will still equal the target the government
has set. The savings in emissions caused by my change of lifestyle will not
have resulted in fewer emissions overall.
Could there still be benefits in voluntary lifestyle changes that reduce
emissions, even under a cap and trade scheme? People who consume
less demonstrate that we can live more lightly on the planet. If the target
set by the government for cutting greenhouse gas is easily met, that
could persuade the government to make its next target more ambitious.
When people change their lifestyles, they are expressing their values and
encouraging others to reconsider their values as well. That could lead to
greater concern for the environment and for all who share the planet
with us. Changes in consumption could also reduce the profits of carbonintensive
industries and thus diminish their lobbying power with the
government. This might be particularly important with an industry that
has a lot of political muscle, such as the beef industry. Cattle and sheep
236 Practical Ethics
emit high levels of methane, and hence the livestock industry is a major
contributor to climate change – in fact, worldwide, livestock contributes
more to global warming than all forms of transport combined. Because
of this, in 2010 the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization proposed
a tax on livestock. Nevertheless, in many countries livestock producers
are lobbying to be exempted from carbon trading schemes, and in some
countries, at the time of writing, these lobbying efforts appear to be
having considerable success. If they do succeed, a voluntary boycott of
products from cattle and sheep would be the only way to reduce the large
quantity of emissions these industries cause.
For non-consequentialists, the complicity principle is relevant here.
If the government’s emissions trading scheme does not cut greenhouse
gas emissions to a point at which there is no further danger of serious
damage to the planet’s climate – and at the time of writing, no country
has implemented a scheme that will cut greenhouse gases sufficiently to
eliminate such risks – then to continue to emit greenhouse gases, even at
a level consistent with the government’s scheme, is still to participate in
a wrongful practice that will harm others. A non-consequentialist could
therefore hold that our intentional participation in this practice is wrong,
even if cutting one’s own emissions to zero would have no impact on
the total amount of greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere. This
is a kind of ‘I’m keeping my hands clean, anyway, even if it makes no
difference’ approach that is difficult to justify on direct consequentialist
grounds, but some successful movements for change have their origins
in the actions of those who resist evil without really giving themselves any
chance of making a difference. A resolutely non-consequentialist stance
can have good consequences. Perhaps our sense that it is objectionable
to be complicit in a harmful practice, even if our own actions make no
difference, has arisen because it will sometimes have best consequences
if people act as if they were non-consequentialists.
One thing on which everyone can agree is that in addition to being
responsible for the wrong we do, either individually or collectively,
through our emissions, we have an obligation to try to change the policy
of our government in whatever way will best slow the rate of climate
change. As we have seen, in failing to cut their greenhouse gas emissions,
the rich nations are culpably causing harm to others on a vast scale. There
is room for diverse opinions on the best method of cutting emissions.
It might involve adopting a carbon trading scheme, or a carbon tax,
so that everyone has a strong financial incentive for avoiding products
that required the emission of greenhouse gases. By putting a price on
Climate Change 237
carbon emissions – which ideally would mean, including in the price of
activities that emit carbon the full cost these activities impose on third
parties who are harmed by climate change – we create an incentive for
finding new ways to discover cost-effective, low-emission forms of energy
that will replace the use of fossil fuels simply because they are cheaper.
We can also urge governments to fund research and development in such
forms of energy. Note, however, that even if we did find a replacement
for fossil fuels, that would still leave untouched the problem of methane
emissions from cattle and sheep, so these emissions also need to be taxed
or brought within the scope of a carbon trading scheme.
Given the gravity of the risks that our planet and its entire population
face from climate change over the next century, the level of protest
against inaction has, to date, been quite small. There is an urgent need
for greater understanding about what is likely to happen if we do not
start cutting, deeply and rapidly, our greenhouse gas emissions. In this
situation, we should not be passive spectators.
314 Notes, References and Further Reading
On the actions of the Salwen family, see Kevin and Hannah Salwen, The
Power of Half: One Family’s Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back (New
York, 2010). On Zell Kravinsky, see Ian Parker, “The Gift”, The New Yorker,
August 2, 2004. Susan Wolf’s article “Moral Saints” appeared in Journal of
Philosophy, 79 (1982), pp. 419–39. For a discussion of whether a position
like that defended here sets too high a standard, see the “Symposium on
Impartiality and Ethical Theory”, Ethics 101:4 ( July 1991). For a forceful
defence of impartialist ethics against this objection, see S. Kagan, The
Limits of Morality (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989). See also Peter Singer,
The Life You Can Save, chap. 9–10.
chapter 9: climate change
The basic documents for assessing climate change are the Assessment
Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At the time
of writing, the most recent of these documents is the Fourth Assessment
Report, released in 2007. The reports are available at www.ipcc.ch. Tim
Flannery’s The Weather Makers (New York, 2001) is a fine broad introduction
to the topic, as is the same author’s briefer Now or Never (New
York, 2009). The literature on ethical aspects of climate change includes:
Stephen Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm (Oxford, 2011); James Garvey,
The Ethics of Climate Change, (New York, 2008); and Jeremy Moss (ed.),
Climate Change and Social Justice (Melbourne, 2009). A useful collection
is: Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue, eds.,
Climate Ethics (New York, 2010).
The figure on the number of deaths already caused by global warming
comes from World Health Organization, The Global Burden of Disease,
2004, Annex, p.8, http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global burden
disease/GlobalHealthRisks report annex.pdf.
On the disappearance of the Sunderbans: Somini Sengupta, “Sea’s
Rise in India Buries Islands and a Way of Life”, New York Times, 11
April 2007. The predictions regarding the likely future impact of climate
change are drawn from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), “Summary for Policymakers”, in IPCC, Climate Change
2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group
II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (Cambridge, 2007 and online at www.ipcc.ch), pp. 1–22. For the
Brazilian proposal, see:
http://unfccc.int/methods and science/other methodological issues/
items/1038.php For figures on historical responsibility for climate
Notes, References and Further Reading 315
change, see: Niklas H¨ohne et al., Summary report of the ad hoc group for
the modeling and assessment of contributions to climate change (MATCH),
November 2008, http://unfccc.int/files/methods and science/other
methodological issues/application/pdf/match summary report .pdf;
see also Michel den Elzen et al., “Analysing countries’ contribution to
climate change: scientific and policy-related choices”, Environmental
Science & Policy, 8 (2005), pp. 614–636. The Chinese document referred
to in the text is: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, Development Research Center of the State Council,
National Climate Center, Tsinghua University, Carbon Equity: Perspective
from Chinese Academic Community, December 10, 2009.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change can be
found at http://www.unfccc.int/resource/conv/conv.html.
The suggestion that we should not exceed 350 ppm of CO2 in the
atmosphere was made in James Hansen, et al., “Target Atmospheric
CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” Open Atmosphere Science Journal,
2 (2008), pp. 217–31. Hansen argues against a cap and trade scheme in
his “Cap and Fade,” The New York Times, December 7, 2009; Paul Krugman
responds in his “Building a Green Economy,” New York Times Sunday
Magazine, April 5, 2010.
For the approach taken by the German Advisory Council on Global
Change, see WBGU, Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach (Berlin,
2009). available at http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu sn2009 en.html. The
quote from Angela Merkel is from her speech at the symposium “Global
Sustainability” given in Potsdam, October 9, 2007, available in German
as ‘Rede von Bundeskanzlerin Dr. Angela Merkel beim Symposium
“Global Sustainability“ am 9. Oktober 2007 in Potsdam,” Bundesregierung,
Bulletin 104-1 10.10.2007, http://www.bundesregierung.de/
nn 1514/Content/DE/Bulletin/2007/10/104-1-bk-klima.html. For
Henry Shue’s distinction, see his “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury
Emissions”, Law and Policy, 15 (1993), pp. 39–59. For China’s defence of
something like this view in 2007, see Xinhua news agency, “China urges
accommodation to ‘emissions of subsistence’” China Daily, 2007–08–02.
President Museveni’s remarks are from his speech at the African Union
summit, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, February 2007, as reported in Andrew
Revkin, “Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms”, New York Times, 1
April 2007.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s proposal for a tax on
meat was included in its report, Livestock in the Balance: The State of Food
and Agriculture, 2009 (Rome, 2010), p. 74.
316 Notes, References and Further Reading
The quotation from President George W. Bush is reported in Edmund
Andrews, “Bush Angers Europe by Eroding Pact on Warming”, New York
Times April 1, 2001, and that from his spokesperson, Ari Fleisher, is from
the White House press briefing of May 7, 2001.
On issues about individual responsibility for actions to which we contribute,
the following are relevant: David Lyons, Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism
(Oxford, 1965); R. M. Hare, “Could Kant have been a Utilitarian?”
Utilitas, 5 (1993), pp. 1–16; Brad Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World
(Oxford, 2000); David Schwartz, Consuming Choices (Lanham, Md, 2010);
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, (Oxford, 1984), chap.3; Christopher
Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age, (Cambridge, 2000);
and Jonathan Glover, “It makes no difference whether or not I do it”,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XLIX (1975).
chapter 10: the environment
On the proposal to dam the Franklin River in Southwest Tasmania,
see James McQueen, The Franklin: Not Just a River (Ringwood, Victoria,
1983).
The first Bible quotation is from Genesis 1:24–28 and the second from
Genesis 9:1–3. For attempts to soften the message of these passages see,
for instance, Robin Attfield, The Ethics of Environmental Concern (Oxford,
1983) and Andrew Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals (London,
1987). The quotation from Paul comes from Corinthians 9:9–10, and that
from Augustine is from The Catholic and Manichean Ways of Life, translated
by D. A. Gallagher and I. J. Gallagher (Catholic University Press, Boston,
1966), p. 102. For the cursing of the fig tree, see Mark 11:12–22 and for
the drowning of the pigs, Mark 5:1–13. The passage from Aristotle is to
be found in Politics ( J. M. Dent and Sons, London, 1916), p. 16; for the
views of Aquinas see Summa Theologica, II, ii, question 64, article 1; I, ii,
question 72, article 4.
For details on the alternative Christian thinkers, see Keith Thomas,
Man and the Natural World (Allen Lane, London, 1983), pp. 246–7, and
Attfield, The Ethics of Environmental Concern (London, 1929), pp. 246–7.
The quotations from Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (New York,
1989) are from pp. 58 and 60. See also the same author’s Eaarth, (New
York, 2010).
Albert Schweitzer’s most complete statement of his ethical stance is
Civilization and Ethics (Part II of The Philosophy of Civilization), tr. C.T.
Notes, References and Further Reading 317
Campion, (2nd edition, London, 1929). The quotation is from pp. 246–
7. The quotations from Paul Taylor’s Respect for Nature, (Princeton, 1986)
are from pp. 45 and 128. For a critique of Taylor, see Gerald Paske, “The
Life Principle: a (metaethical) rejection”, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 6
(1989).
Holmes Rolston’s objection to what I wrote in the 2nd edition of this
book can be found in his “Respect for Life: Counting what Singer Finds
of no Account”, in Dale Jamieson (ed.), Singer and Critics (Oxford, 1999),
pp. 247–68; see also my response in the same volume.
A. Leopold’s proposal for a ‘land ethic’ can be found in his A Sand
County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York,
1970; first published 1949, 1953); the passages quoted are from pp.
238 and 262. The classic text for the distinction between shallow and
deep ecology is Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range
Ecology Movement”, Inquiry, 16 (1973), pp. 95–100. For other works on
deep ecology, see, for example: Arne Naess and George Sessions, “Basic
Principles of Deep Ecology”, Ecophilosophy, 6 (1984); W. Devall and G. Sessions,
Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City, 1985) (The
passage quoted in the “Deep ecology” section of Chapter 10 is from p.
67); Lawrence Johnson, A Morally Deep World (Cambridge, 1990); Freya
Mathews, The Ecological Self (London, 1991); Val Plumwood, “Ecofeminism:
an Overview and Discussion of Positions and Arguments: Critical
Review”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 64 (Supplement, 1986);
and Richard Sylvan, “Three Essays Upon Deeper Environmental Ethics”,
Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, 13 (1986) (Published by
the Australian National University, Canberra). James Lovelock, Gaia: A
New Look at Life on Earth was published in Oxford in 1979. Christopher
Stone’s Earth and Other Ethics (New York, 1987) is a tentative exploration
of ways in which nonsentient beings might be included in an ethical
framework.
The original Green Consumer Guide was by John Elkington and Julia
Hailes (London, 1988). Adaptations have since been published in several
other countries, as have many similar guides. On the environmental
extravagance of animal production, see the references given for Chapter
8. For an excellent introduction to environmental ethics, see Dale Jamieson,
Ethics and the Environment (Cambridge, 2008). Dale Jamieson (ed.),
A Companion to Environmental Philosophy (Oxford, 2001) is a comprehensive
collection of essays. See also the article “Environmental Ethics” by
Andrew Brennan in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.