Keeping a cool head at a time of global warming

30th March 2009

Robin Attfield

Professor of Philosophy, Cardiff University – International working party on Environmental Ethics, UNESCO

Biography

Robin Attfield is Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University, where he has taught philosophy since 1968. He has also served as Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Ife, Nigeria (1972-3), and National Research Council (Republic of South Africa) Visiting Research Fellow (July/August 1999). He has written the following books: ‘The Ethics of Environmental Concern’ (1983 and 1991), ‘A Theory of Value and Obligation’ (1987), ‘Environmental Philosophy: Principles and Prospects’ (1994), ‘Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics’ (1995), ‘The Ethics of the Global Environment’ (1999), ‘Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century (2003), and ‘Creation, Evolution and Meaning’ (2006). He is the joint editor of ‘Values, Conflict and the Environment’ (1989 and 1996), and of ‘International Justice and the Third World’ (1992).

Abstract

In the first part of this paper, I present some of the key themes and principles of the White Paper on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change, produced by Donald Brown and others in his Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change, and published by the Rock Ethics Institute at Pennsylvania State University. The Cardiff University Centre for Applied Ethics, of which I am a member, was associated with this project, and I personally played a small part in preparing the text, although I should not be taken to subscribe to it in every detail. Some of the themes and principles discussed in the White Paper are important and repay reflection. In particular, they invite reflection on what makes climate change an ethical issue (and not just a scientific one), and also what form an ethical approach would take to scientific uncertainty. Should we, as the Precautionary Principle maintains, intervene to prevent those serious and/or irreversible impacts of current behaviour which we have reason to credit when to some degree they are less than certain? Or should we rather choose not to intervene at present, in the hope of greater certainty and/or better technology at a later date? And, given all this, what is the case for taking steps by way of adaptation to the kinds and amounts of climate change that has already happened or that is by now inevitable, and, there again, for taking steps towards the mitigation of climate change, or, in other words, curtailing and reducing the contribution of human activity to this process? These issues lead to a further consideration of the White Paper. They also serve to introduce issues of international equity and approaches to an international climate change agreement, which I address in the later part of this paper.