Why Solar Radiation Management is (Much) More Likely to be Morally Permissible

摘要

Scientists currently research solar radiation management (SRM) as a way of mitigating global warming and its disastrous consequences for the environment. Morrow (2014) identifies Risk profile as the scientists' main argument for SRM but argues, convincingly, that its simple consequentialist underpinnings render it implausible. He consequently proposes an improved version of the argument, which he calls Risk profile~* and which allows for constraints on the pursuit of good consequences. Actions can be morally impermissible, even if they maximize the good (understood in consequentialist terms), when they violate at least one such constraint. Morrow's constraints-Doing and Allowing and Double Effect (DDE)-are comparative principles. They state that, other things being equal, it is worse to bring about harms in some ways than in others. But the 'point of Risk profile~* ... is that other things would not be equal [because] SRM would improve humanity's risk profile' (p. 34). I take this to mean that it may be true that SRM would bring about harms in a comparatively worse way than other ways of responding to global warming, but that since SRM (greatly) improves humanity's risk profile, it is permissible. This raises the following question, which I take to be at the heart of Morrow's paper: 'what consequences do Doing and Allowing and [DDE] have for Risk profile~*?' (p. 34).