Climate Ethics

Climate change has been characterized as the “greatest moral challenge of our time.” While the causes and impacts of climate change are now broadly understood, comparatively little attention has been directed toward the ethical challenges posed by climate change or to how the values, beliefs, and ethics of human societies drive the various actions that contribute to climate change. Nor has much attention been given to the goodness or badness of policies designed to remedy or adapt to climate change. Indeed, most of the ethical discussion to date has been relatively theoretical. Nonetheless, discussions about the rightness or wrongness of human (in)action around climate change and its impacts—in other words, about climate ethics and climate justice—have opened a veritable “Pandora's box” of issues. Resolving these ...