Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T08:49:09.327Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Temporal and Spatial Scales of Global Climate Change and the Limits of Individualistic and Rationalistic Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2011

J. Baird Callicott
J. Baird Callicott
Affiliation:
University of North Texas
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Here I argue that the hyper-individualistic and rationalistic ethical paradigms – originating in the late eighteenth century and dominating moral philosophy, in various permutations, ever since – cannot capture the moral concerns evoked by the prospect of global climate change. Those paradigms are undone by the temporal and spatial scales of climate change. To press my argument, I deploy two famous philosophical tropes – John Rawls's notion of the original position and Derek Parfit's paradox – and another that promises to become famous: Dale Jamieson's six little ditties about Jack and Jill. I then go on to argue that the spatial and especially the temporal scales of global climate change demand a shift in moral philosophy from a hyper-individualistic ontology to a thoroughly holistic ontology. It also demands a shift from a reason-based to a sentiment-based moral psychology. Holism in environmental ethics is usually coupled with non-anthropocentrism in theories constructed to provide moral considerability for transorganismic entities – such as species, biotic communities, and ecosystems. The spatial and temporal scales of climate, however, render non-anthropocentric environmental ethics otiose, as I more fully explain. Thus the environmental ethic here proposed to meet the moral challenge of global climate change is holistic but anthropocentric. I start with Jamieson's six little ditties about Jack and Jill.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 69 , October 2011 , pp. 101 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 These ‘ditties’ (as I call them) were first published in Jamieson, Dale, ‘The Moral and Political Challenges of Climate Change’, in Moser, S. and Dilling, L., eds., Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 475–484CrossRefGoogle Scholar. They have been variously presented in subsequent work by Jamieson as ‘examples’ or ‘cases’. I take responsibility for calling them ‘ditties’ (in homage to the song ‘Jack 'n Diane’ by John Mellencamp) and I have also taken the liberty of editing them for a bit more elegance and clarity of phrasing.

2 Jamieson, Dale, ‘The Post-Kyoto Climate: A Gloomy Forecast’, Georgetown International Environmental Law Review 20 (2009): 537–551Google Scholar, 545.

3 Notable among such philosophers are Gardiner, Stephen M., ‘Ethics and Global Climate Change’, Ethics 114 (2004): 555–600Google Scholar; Garvey, James, The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World (London: Continuum, 2008)Google Scholar; Jamieson, Dale, ‘Climate Change and Global Environmental Justice’, in Edwards, P. and Miller, C., ed., Changing the Atmosphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001): 287–308Google Scholar; Shue, Henry, ‘Climate’ in Jamieson, D., ed., A Companion to Environmental Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 449–459Google Scholar; and Singer, Peter, [Chapter] 2. ‘One Atmosphere’ in One World: The Ethics of Globalization, Second Edition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Nota Bene, 2004): 14–50Google Scholar.

4 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

5 Ibid. 358.

6 Singer, Peter, Unsanctifying Human Life: Essays on Ethics, Kuhse, Helen, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)Google Scholar.

7 Singer, Peter, ‘On Being Silenced in Germany’, New York Review of Books (August 15, 1991)Google Scholar.

8 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

9 ‘Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide’, US Department of Commerce/National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

10 ‘IPCC, 2007: Summary for Policymakers’, in Solomon, S.D., Qin, D., Manning, M., Chen, Z., Marquis, M., Avery, K.B., Tignor, M., and Miller, H.L., eds., Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

11 For a recent and sober assessment see McKibben, Bill, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Henry Holt, 2010)Google Scholar.

12 ‘IPCC, 2007’; McKibben, Eaarth.

13 Caldeira, K. and Wickett, M. E., ‘Anthropogenic Carbon and Ocean pH’, Nature 425 (2003): 365–365.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

14 Garvey, Ethics of Climate Change, nicely brings out the centrality of consistency in the classical moral paradigm.

15 Ronald Bailey, ‘The Pursuit of Happiness: Peter Singer Interviewed by Ronald Bailey’, Reason (December 2000) http://reason.com/archives/2000/12/01/the-pursuit-of-happiness-peter; Anonymous, ‘Peter Singer: A Slippery Mind’ http://notdeadyetnewscommentary.blogspot.com/2008/03/peter-singer-slippery-mind.html

16 Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 201Google Scholar.

17 Ibid. 202.