Abstract
Climate change has obvious practical implications. It will kill millions of people, wipe out thousands of species, and so on. My question in this paper is much narrower. How might climate change impact on moral theory – and especially on the debate between utilitarians and their non-utilitarian rivals? I argue that climate change creates serious theoretical difficulties for non-utilitarian moral theories – especially those that based morality or justice on any contract or bargain for reciprocal advantage. Climate change thus tips the dialectical balance in favour of utilitarianism. However, I also argue that, because it upsets assumptions that lie behind the most plausible forms of modern utilitarianism, climate change may also push utilitarianism in a more austere and demanding direction.
While a French translation of this paper has appeared in The tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville (vol. XXXII, no. 1–2011), it appears here for the first time in English. I dedicate it to Colin Cheyne – colleague, friend, and cosmopolitan Dunedinite.
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Notes
- 1.
I have also presented work-in-progress on this research project to audiences at the University of St Andrews, the Universite de Rennes, the Open University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Auckland, the University of Otago, the British Society for Ethical Theory, and the Centre for Human Values at the University of Princeton. I am grateful to all these audiences for helpful comments.
- 2.
To justify the expenditure of a dollar today, the catastrophe has to cost $39,323,267,827 at that future date.
- 3.
This is the famous Lockean proviso, borrowed from Locke’s original discussion. For further discussion, and references, see Mulgan (2011a, part one).
- 4.
For further discussion and references, see Mulgan (2011a, part three).
- 5.
One prominent example is Frank Jackson (1999), who identifies moral facts with the ‘mature folk morality’ of some future community of rational inquirers.
- 6.
Mulgan, ‘Theory and intuition in a broken world’; Mulgan, Ethics for a broken world.
- 7.
- 8.
For further references to current debate, see Mulgan (2011b).
- 9.
In his Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999), Rawls also optimistically ignores the impact of climate-related scarcity on international relations.
- 10.
- 11.
Another common strategy for moderate consequentialists is to directly incorporate agent-centred prerogatives that allow agents to give disproportionate weight to their own interests. This strategy is exemplified by Samuel Scheffler’s hybrid view (Scheffler 1982; Mulgan 2001, chapter 6, Mulgan 2006, chapter 4).
- 12.
This section presents a brief sketch of material that I explore at much greater length in Mulgan (2006, especially chapters 3 and 5–9). See also Mulgan (2005).
- 13.
For further references, see Mulgan (2011b).
- 14.
This has certainly been my experience in teaching such examples over many years.
- 15.
In my combined consequentialism, I also use the lexical threshold to set the boundaries of the agent-centred prerogative (Mulgan 2006, chapter 11).
- 16.
For further references, see Mulgan (2011b).
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Mulgan, T. (2012). The Future of Utilitarianism. In: Maclaurin, J. (eds) Rationis Defensor. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 28. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3983-3_6
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