Conference – Climate Ethics at the Crossroads
Date: Monday 4 & Tuesday 5 November 2024
Time: 9 am – 5 pm
Venue: Marie Curie Amphitheatre, SUAD Campus
Open to public
Abstract
The ethics of climate change is at a crossroad. Mainly driven by American and British philosophers (Steve Gardiner, Henry Sue, Dale Jamieson, Simon Caney), the ethics of climate change emerged as a specific field in the early 1990s, focusing on issues such as the distribution of the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between states, responsibility towards future generations, human rights and the fair distribution of emission rights. At the root of this conference is the idea that there is a relative consensus that has emerged during the last decade about the application of distributive justice to climate change, but that fundamental disagreements are now concentrated at the interface between climate ethics and four key areas.
The first is normative ethics, metaethics and metaphysics, with, in particular, the continuation of a reflection on our entry into the Anthropocene, the accentuation of questions linked to population ethics and the motivation of agents, and the rise of a non-anthropocentric branch in climate ethics, in close relation with animal ethics and environmental ethics, breaking with the exclusively anthropocentric perspective that characterized for the most part the ethics of climate change until the 2010s.
The second is geoengineering, with lively debates on two controversial issues: solar geoengineering and carbon capture and sequestration, or negative emissions.
The third is economics, with two controversial issues: carbon taxation and the prioritization of the distribution of funds for mitigation, adaptation and compensation.
The fourth is political, with debates on the democratic governance of climate change policies, the governance of migration caused by climate change, the value of activism, the emergence of collectives, and individual political and ethical commitment.
These four areas, and not just the first, are all integral to contemporary thinking on the ethics of climate change, which today involves an ethics of geoengineering, an economic ethics and a political ethics applied to climate change.
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