Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World

摘要

Traditional moral theories often struggle to say what we ought to do about the harms of climate change and why. Theories of moral responsibility have particular difficulty. This is because no one agent causes climate change or can prevent it on her own, nor does climate change expressly result from intentional collective action. In Climate Change and the Moral Agent, Elizabeth Cripps responds to this theoretical problem. She argues for the existence of weak or'should-be'collectivities that are neither individual nor fully collective and which can be assigned moral duties. She provides four independent but overlapping justifications for weakly collective duties to mitigate, adapt, and compensate those affected by climate change. Her innovative contributions include a discussion of climate change and duties to the non-human world and her argument that failing to collectively address climate change is wrong because it leaves moral agents to make tragic choices. Cripps uses thought experiments to create intuitions which support her extension of common moral principles to aggregate groups, while effectively discussing objections at each step.