Socolow, Robert

“Living Ethically in a Greenhouse”

I welcome the opportunity to entice ethicists to help others deal with climate change, including the formidable environmental risks and social issues related to energy production, distribution, and consumption. To lower the barriers to entry, I will do my best to tame the underlying science and technology and to clarify what is known and unknown. Here are seven challenges: 

1) Living well, as widely conceived today but not always in the past, means maximizing one’s experiences, accumulating property, exuding exuberance. Should environmental constraints affect the conceptualization of the good life?

2) Arguably, humanity will be well served if the human population, after peaking in a few decades, falls slowly, without pestilence or war, to, say, two billion people in 2200. Do environment constraints challenge the utilitarian goal of the greatest good for the greatest number?

3) The alleviation of abject poverty, the domain of the Millennium Development Goals, can be accomplished with negligible negative impact on the environment and natural resources. With what tools can we distinguish problems of poverty from problems of modernity?

4) Half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions today come from people living relatively well in so-called developing countries, with lifestyles resembling those in developed countries. Can we establish an ethic of “fairness” where the consumption pattern of every prosperous individual is addressed with the same urgency independent of the country where he or she lives – independent, in particular, of whether the country has few or many poor people?

5) It has long been assumed that our children will be richer than we are, but environmental concerns are driving a reexamination of this assumption. How should judgments about progress affect the ethics of intergenerational equity?

6) The more dire the consequences of environmental stress, the less we can allow ourselves to be squeamish about less than perfect “solutions,” from CO2 storage below ground to nuclear power to placing reflective particles in the upper atmosphere. Yet, to be sure, some cures are worse than the disease. By what criteria can we compare the disruption from avoiding environmental damage to the disruption from the environmental damage itself?

7) We need a new discipline, let me call it prospicience (the art and science of looking ahead), that asks what we as a species are here on earth to do. Prospicience will enable us to sort out our collective goals and responsibilities for distinct time frames: for example, the next 50 years vs. the next 500 years. How can ethicists help us develop a disciplined inquiry into our collective destiny?