Green Votes not Green Virtues: Effective Utilitarian Responses to Climate Change

Abstract

Implementing strategies to address climate change confronts us with an enormous collective action problem. Dale Jamieson argues that in order to avoid large-scale defection and, therefore, the collapse of any cooperative effort to curb climate change, utilitarians should become virtue theorists. As a tool to combat climate change, virtue change faces severe obstacles. First, the non-contingent green virtues envisioned by Jamieson are highly implausible. Second, even if such virtues could function, their inculcation would take too long to make the approach viable. Third, given its inherent inflexibility, virtue change is ill equipped to deal with the great scientific uncertainty created by climate change. To combat climate change utilitarians are well advised to look elsewhere: green votes and state sanctions.