The ethics of climate change: with a little help from moral cognitive neuroscience

The moral essence of climate change relates to causing/suffering harm. In particular, carbon emissions that threaten the stability of climate systems, and the consequent harm inflicted by altered climatic dynamics on present and future generations are the moral facets of climate change. Moral cognitive neuroscience indicates that up close and personal harm triggers deontological moral reasoning, whereas harm originating from impersonal moral violations, like those of climate change, prompts consequentialist moral reasoning. Consequently, climate ethics should abandon common, unreliable, moral deontological intuitions and be based on welfare-improving consequentialist approaches. Because consequentialism is in line with the indications of moral cognitive neuroscience on moral processes and judgments, it is, in fact, closer to the inner nature of the morality of human beings in regard to climate change. Therefore, an approach inspired by it can ultimately prove more morally acceptable and politically feasible in this context, notwithstanding its apparent counter-intuitiveness. Al Gore, who was awarded the 2007 Nobel Price Prize jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their efforts against climate change, refers to it in these terms: ‘[t]his is not a political issue. This is a moral issue, one that affects the survival of human civilization’. In the same vein, James Hansen, NASA’s prominent climatologist, writes: ‘[t]he predominant moral issue of the 21 century, almost surely, will be climate change, comparable to Nazism faced by 1 Gore, A., 2007. Moving Beyond Kyoto. The New York Times, 1 July, p. 413 (New York edition). Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/opinion/01gore.html [Accessed 10 May 2011].