Climate change: life and death

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the treaty in which nations agreed to try and control climate change.To speak very roughly, the international process under the UNFCCC has three stages. First of all, the negotiators and their advisers try to work out what would be dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Then they try to work out how much greenhouse gas can be emitted without reaching this dangerous level they have fixed on. Finally, they try to reach an agreement about how to divide up those permissible emissions among the nations. It is widely recognised that the last stage raises ethical issues and that there is a role for moral and political philosophers in answering questions like these. They are mostly questions of fairness or justice. Most philosophers of climate change are political philosophers, and political philosophy is these days very much focused on justice. So many philosophers of climate change are content to concentrate on this third stage of the political process. A consequence is that the other two stages have been left mostly to scientists and economists. But there is evidently an important role for moral philosophers in answering the question of what is dangerous. It will be the subject of this chapter. The notion of dangerousness is plainly an evaluative one. To work out what interference with the climate system is dangerous, we need to know, not only what effects would result from different degrees of interference, but also how good or bad those effects would be. Ethics, and specifically value theory, is the discipline that assesses goodness and badness. So we need ethics. It seems not to be clearly understood by all the protagonists that there is an academic discipline that deals with values.