Ethics of Climate Change – 32764 – PHIL 123
Professor: James Olsen
No matter how you look at it, climate change is a mess. What on earth (or in the atmosphere!) should we do? How should we go about doing it? And who is we? Governments? Institutions? Individuals like you and me? No matter how you answer these questions or any of the other myriad questions related to climate change, the answers are ultimately moral ones. Justifying that claim is one of the central goals of this class. Since your lifestyle and behavior (if not your Facebook feed) already–intentionally or not– makes moral claims and takes up moral positions with regard to climate change, another course goal is to examine those moral claims and positions (i.e. your claims and positions as well as those staked out by the rest of humanity) in order to try and determine which are justified and which aren’t.
We will consider arguments by philosophers on why climate change is such an intractable problem and the relationship between ethics and public policy. Climate change will be our constant focus, but in addition we’ll talk about ethics more generally, the history of international climate negotiations, moral responsibility, what cost benefit analysis can and can’t tell us, and the relationship between human and non-human nature.
