Governments Don't Actually Prioritise Economic Growth - But They Should

Environmentalists are always complaining that governments are obsessed with GDP and economic growth, and that this is a bad thing because economic growth is bad for the environment. They are partly right but mostly wrong. First, while governments talk about GDP a lot, that does not mean that they actually prioritise economic growth. Second - properly understood - economic growth is a great and wonderful thing that we should want more of.

Public Protest Is Not A Democratic Thing To Do

When people take to the street to protest this is often supposed to be a sign of democracy in action. People who believe that their concerns about the climate change, Covid lockdowns, racism and so on are not being adequately addressed by the political system make a public display of how many of them care a lot about it so that we are all forced to hear about their complaint and the government is put under pressure to address it.

Almost No Disasters Are Natural

A natural disaster is a disaster because it involves a lot of human suffering, not because the event itself is especially big or spectacular. The destruction of an uninhabited island by a volcano is not a natural disaster, because it doesn't really matter to humans. A landslide doesn't matter, however enormous, unless there is a town at the bottom of the hill.

So what does the word ‘natural' add? We use it to demarcate the edges of responsibility. We don't use it very well.

This Christmas, give the gift of a blameless life to someone you love

Do you want to be a good person but find yourself always falling short?

It may not be your fault. These days it is difficult to feel like a good person. In fact the harder you try, the more you may feel like a failure.

The calls on our moral attention are multiplying at an extraordinary rate. We are living through a perfect storm of social justice movements, activist NGOs, an unusually plausible pope, and a flood of academic moral philosophers trying to write for the public. Globalisation means that we have to take account of the furthest implications of our actions. The internet and social media spread the news of our ever increasing obligations and strike down those who sin without mercy.

Moral philosophy about global warming

What contribution can moral philosophers make to public reasoning about global warming?

I make two recommendations, concerning style and substance. First, moral philosophers should be oriented to investigating rather than moralising. Our contributions to public reasoning about global warming must do more than select and promulgate an existing moral account in the usual style of normative ethics. Our work should engage with the moral complexity of the issue rather than exhort the public to follow some simplified view. Second, moral philosophers should make particular efforts to engage collaboratively rather than adversarially with social scientists working in this area. The natural sciences alone are an insufficient basis for analysing the causes of global warming and its meaning for us. Economics in particular can be seen as a branch of applied moral philosophy, and is rich in concepts and techniques highly relevant to the moral understanding of global warming.

Debating climate change: The need for economic reasoning

The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so they put all our futures in jeopardy.

My diagnosis is a twofold ethical failure: of pragmatism and perspective (or, more eloquently, of ‘sense and sensibility’). Many environmentalists argue that climate change is fundamentally a values problem. And yet their interpretation of this has taken a narrow moralising form that systematically excludes consideration of such important ethical values as improving the lives of the 1 billion people presently living in unacceptable poverty or even protecting other aspects of the environment (such as wilderness areas). That narrowness also leads to self-defeating policy proposals founded almost entirely in the economy of nature rather than political economy. The result is a fixation on global CO2 levels alone as the problem and solution, at the cost of systematic and broad evaluation of the feasible policy space.

These foundational errors have induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in many otherwise sensible people, to the extent that to be an environmentalist these days is to fear the oncoming storm and know that all hope is lost. To put it mildly, people in this state of mind are not well placed to contribute helpfully to the political debate about what we should do about the fact of climate change. In their reconciliation with despair environmentalists are not only mistaken, but display a disturbing symmetry with those opponents of action who are mistakenly complacent about the status quo. My recommended treatment, to reinvigorate their confidence as well as their ethics, is a dose of economic reasoning.

Ethics and Global Climate Change

The global climate change debate has a lopsided empirical basis - in the economy of nature but not political economy - and this has contributed to a peculiar moralising trajectory. I have three main concerns with this: i) climate change has displaced other important concerns, for example of the 1 billion people living in unacceptable poverty; ii) a fixation on global CO2 levels alone distracts from what we can practically do, and even from caring about other aspects of the environment that we want to protect; iii) the debate has induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in which otherwise sensible people have lost all sense of proportion and hope.

Four Ideas of Sustainability

Sustainability concerns the relationship between humans and their natural environment over time. But there are various ethical understandings of that relationship with quite different implications. Two popular accounts actually repudiate human interdependence with nature by either making human interests completely subservient to a sacred nature, or by making nature completely subservient to human interests. Gro Brundtland's famous definition points in the right direction by focussing on the goal of meeting humanitarian needs in the present and the future, but her picture of human interests is too narrow and technocratic. What we need is a definition that is humanistic without necessarily being human-centred.