CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE CHALLENGE OF (气候变化和挑战的).pdf
文本预览下载声明
ethics and the life sciences
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE CHALLENGE OF
MORAL RESPONSIBILITY
STEVE VANDERHEIDEN
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA DULUTH
Abstract : The phenomenon of anthropogenic climate
change—in which weather patterns and attendant ecological
disruption result from increasing concentrations of greenhouse
gases released into the atmosphere through human activi-
ties—challenges several conventional assumptions regarding
moral responsibility. Multifarious individual acts and choices
contribute (often imperceptibly) to the causal chain that is
expected to produce profound and lasting harm unless signifi-
cant mitigation efforts begin soon. Attributing responsibility
for such harmful consequences is complicated by what Derek
Parfit terms “mistakes in moral mathematics,” or failures to cor-
rectly assess the various individual contributions to collectively
produced harm. Combined with the difficulties in attributing
responsibility to agents for spatially and temporally distant
harmful effects and that of holding agents culpable for effects
(resulting from socially-acceptable acts) about which they
may be ignorant, this paper attempts to sort out several ethical
problems surrounding the identification of responsible parties
contributing to climate change.
T
he phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change—in which weather pat-
terns and attendant ecological disruption result from increasing concentrations of
greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere through human activities—chal-
lenges several conventional assumptions regarding moral responsibility. Mult
显示全部