Moralische Pflichten des Klimaschutzes

Abstract

Cost-benefit analyses of mitigation options for climatic change suffer from an overwhelming amount of uncertainty and dissension about climatic change, its consequences, and their evaluation. Therefore, this article assumes a skeptical stance concerning our knowledge of climate change, but it nevertheless develops a rationale for moral duties of intervention against global warming. It starts from weak informational premises and identifies the outer bounds of the mean atmospheric temperature variation since the ice-age as intervention points for a tolerable-windows approach of climate policy. Finally, a gametheoretical modification of the idea of moral self-legislation leads to the derivation of a further half-way intervention point in the interior of the assumed temperature range.