Climate Change, Sustainability, and Environmental Ethics

摘要

From the present vantage point, climate change arguably presents the most daunting ethical problem in the history of ethics so far. It is an urgent problem with a definite time line. It is literally a vital problem impacting the survival and well-being of large sections of the world's population. It is a problem that is radically ethical in the sense that we currently cannot remove the problem technologically -while in other cases we can ponder whether we should do what we can do, here our predictive and technological capabilities are so limited that our decisions must, to a large extent, be guided only by what we ought to do to distribute the burdens fairly in the foreseeable future.