The moral element of climate change
February 24, 2017 by Alex Shashkevich
Lawmakers around the world struggle to create policies that balance their nations' needs and interests with their impacts on global warming.
Trying to figure out what to prioritize is a tough call for many.
Blake Francis, a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Stanford and a Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, hopes to help guide those decisions by identifying the harms of climate change and assessing their moral significance.
Through his research, he aims to create a framework that governments could use to evaluate the moral implications of their energy, transportation and other climate change policies in order to consider when it is morally justified for them to emit greenhouse gases.
"We often have debates in climate change about how to trade off benefits and burdens without adequately considering what constitutes benefits and burdens – and whether all burdens are of the same kind," said Debra Satz, a professor of philosophy and senior associate dean for the humanities and arts. "Blake's approach introduces an important dimension – not all burdens to people count as harms."
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-moral-element-climate.html#jCp