"Ethics and Climate Change": An Earth Day presentation by Andrew Light
Andrew Light is a professor of Philosophy and Environmental Policy and Director for the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University. Light is also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. A globally recognized environmental ethicist - specializing in the ethical dimensions of environmental policy, restoration ecology, and, more recently, climate change - he has authored, co-authored and edited 17 books on environmental ethics, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics, including Environmental Values (2008) and Reel Arguments: Film, Philosophy and Social Criticism (Westview 2003). He is currently finishing a book on the ethics of restoration ecology in a changing climate. Prof. Light's visit is cosponsored by the Philosophy Discipline at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
With the effective end of the debate in the U.S. over the basic science of climate change, and the dramatic shift in our political response to this issue, we are now witnessing an impressively aggressive push to establish a national price structure on carbon and move toward negotiation of a successor agreement to the Kyoto protocol. It is commonplace to call climate change one of, if not the most, important moral problems of our day. But will there actually be a role for ethicists in meeting the pressing demands of a global response to climate change? Just as a "clinical" form of bioethics emerged when ethicists had the opportunity to work directly with medical patients we need a new form of climate ethics -- more nimble, inherently interdisciplinary, and empirically based -- if ethicists want to be part of the resolution of this critical problem.
Question and Answer