Climate Change: Navigating Ethical Dilemmas and Moral Duty

Climatic changes are happening around the globe. The science of climate change

affirms that most of these changes have been brought about by the actions of human

beings. While trying to understand the concept of anthropogenic climate change it is

noticed that significant ethical issues surround it and the question of responsibility

becomes vital. Certain ethical issues including responsibility associated with climate

change are discussed in this Book.

This research examines and reviews some general or traditional concepts of individual

and collective responsibility along with some specific literature concerning climate

change responsibility. The work of two philosophers, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and

Baylor Johnson is quite influential in this regard. The central idea of the arguments

offered by both the philosophers is that unless everybody acts, individual efforts to

diminish carbon emissions will have little or no effect on climate change. For instance

Sinnott-Armstrong assesses and rejects several ethical principles to arrive at the

conclusion that one has no moral obligations to limit one's personal emissions in

climate change. This idea is analyzed and shown to be inconsistent in this research.

Alternatively it is agreed that the moral theories which Sinnott-Armstrong considers

do not put a restraint on the individual to curb her greenhouse gas emissions. Thereby

a need to propose a different way of ascertaining moral obligation in climate change is

recognized. A knowledge based ethical relativist theory is suggested for the same.

This theory expects the agent to act in the light of the knowledge that exists and

illustrates that commitments at the individual level cannot be different from the

commitments at collective level if one has knowledge about it that exist in today's

world in case of climate change. It is concluded that this knowledge based ethical

theory is one possible way to assign responsibility in climate change but

concomitantly it is also admitted that this theory may face certain limitations.