Ethics of Climate Change: Adopting an Empirical Approach to Moral Concern

摘要

This paper is about a certain kind of insensitivity (to people and, by extension to ecosystems) that ethical deliber-ation and theorizing produce when faced with the complexity that climate change scenarios present. In the first part of the paper, I examine the insensitivity to this complexity of tradi-tional moral frameworks when prescribing courses of action. In the second, I attempt to sketch an approach to ethical de-liberation that better handles and sensitizes us to the complex concerns that arise in such situations, referring to an inter-disciplinary research project, Institutional Adaptations to Climate Change, as a way to illustrate how this ethic would work. Given the nature of the paper, the position I take is more programmatic than substantive.