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Letting Climate Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2021

CHARLOTTE FRANZISKA UNRUH Open the ORCID record for CHARLOTTE FRANZISKA UNRUH [Opens in a new window]
CHARLOTTE FRANZISKA UNRUH*
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Abstract

Recent work by Ingmar Persson and Jason Hanna has posed an interesting new challenge for deontologists: How can they account for so-called cases of letting oneself do harm? In this article, I argue that cases of letting oneself do harm are structurally similar to real-world cases such as climate change, and that deontologists need an account of the moral status of these cases to provide moral guidance in real-world cases. I then explore different ways in which deontologists can solve this challenge and argue that the most promising way to conceive of cases of letting oneself do harm is as nonstandard cases of allowing harm, supplemented with an additional argument for the moral relevance of one's own agency. The upshot is that cases of letting oneself do harm are both more theoretically challenging and practically important than has been acknowledged.

Keywords

doing/allowingharmdeontologyclimate changeagency
Type
Article
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Fall 2021 , pp. 368 - 386
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

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Footnotes

I am grateful to participants at the International Society for Utilitarian Studies Conference 2018, Aart van Gils, Brad Hooker, and Fiona Woollard for excellent comments and discussion. I also thank anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/L503939/1).

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