Global environmental and climate ethics

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Environmental ethics is a key branch of contemporary global ethics and one that is increasingly important. Environmental ethics has expanded dramatically in recent years and, like global ethics, as discussed in Chapter 1, it is a response to emerging problems and crises. For some, the environmental crisis is the overarching global-ethics issue that needs to be addressed because human survival itself is threatened. In attempting to respond to the environmental crisis we can see very clearly the logic of global ethics at work. It makes little sense to construct a less-than-global ethical community when considering how to address global threats such as climate change. No nation or region can address climate change alone. Only a shared response, where everyone takes the actions necessary, will be sufficient to deal with this problem. Climate change is no respecter of national borders and the behaviour of one nation or region affects others. Hence responses to climate change are always “global in scope”; even those who endorse regional protections (such as the strengthening of national borders to protect national resources) cannot but think of the global causes and effects. The second two criteria of global ethics are also clearly met: responses to climate change are necessarily multidisciplinary – scientific knowledge is crucial to legal, moral and political responses; and theory and practice are linked as ethicists struggle to propose just and effective practical solutions (something evident in the work of Caney and Moellendorf, discussed towards the end of this chapter).