Consequentialism And Climate Change Essay

Consequences of Climate Change: Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics A somewhat commonly held concern is that consequentialism is an inadequate moral theory for tackling the issue of climate change. In this paper I will argue that consequentialism can successfully respond to climate change by, at times, evaluating the morality of character traits instead of actions. First, I will provide a couple major objections that consequentialism must overcome if it is to be successful in addressing the issue of climate change. Next, I will outline what a response to these objections would require. Then, I will show how evaluating character traits or virtues would allow consequentialism to respond to climate change without compromising its identity
as a moral theory. As with any moral theory, numerous objections have been made about the usefulness of consequentialism. Here I will present some objections that consequentialism needs to address in order to adequately handle the issue of climate change. The first objection that is often raised is the calculation objection, and it goes as such: Consequentialism states that an action is right if and only if performing that action would bring about the best consequences. However, due to our limited knowledge of the effects our actions will have, it can be very difficult to determine what action will in fact bring about the best consequences. The calculation objection focuses on this, arguing that to determine through consequentialism what a right action is would require spending inordinate amounts of time calculating the net outcome of all possible actions. This objection can be even nastier when dealing with climate change, as many times the full consequences of one’s actions as they relate to the environment can take years to be fully realized.
A second objection deals with the consequentialist’s ability to bring about change.
Climate change is an issue on a massive scale, and one implication of this is that any individual’s actions, even the actions of a single company or even a single nation, will have a negligible impact on the environment as a whole. An example of this issue is as follows: Say I own a company and am deciding on whether or not I should reduce emissions, given that reducing emissions would require increasing costs. I will take it for granted that an increase in costs is a negative consequence and a decrease in emissions is a positive consequence. So what remains to be seen is if the “bad” from increasing costs outweighs the “good” from reducing pollution. However, if it is true that my company on its own can only have a miniscule impact on the environment, then it would seem that the action that would bring about the best consequences might be to continue to pollute (as the environmental damage caused by my polluting would also be miniscule), which is at best a dubious answer. The flaw with this answer is somewhat readily apparent, as while it may be true that no single company can affect the climate to any noticeable degree, if everyone followed this logic and nobody made any attempt to reduce pollution the environmental results could be disastrous. As such I believe it fair to ask that any method used by consequentialism to respond to climate change be able to resolve issues like
this.
Now, having presented the obstacles consequentialism must overcome to be useful in addressing climate change, I will now describe what a successful response to the objections must entail. I will start with the calculation objection. The core problem raised by this objection is that in some cases it is hard for consequentialism to pick a course. Thus, an adequate response to this objection would need to include a decision making process that does not leave the consequentialist in a mire of calculations. The next obstacle consequentialism must overcome is the claim that if no individual can have a meaningful impact on the environment, then it might be morally required for individuals to pollute, so as to bring about good consequences for themselves. If this claim was true, it would make consequentialism’s usefulness doubtful. The main problem posed by this objection is a sort of consistency problem-an action should not become wrong only once a certain number of people perform it. Thus a response to this objection should provide consistency as to the morality of an action. I have listed some objections to consequentialism’s capability of responding to climate change, and detailed what a response to those objections would require. I will now present a way I believe consequentialism could adequately respond to climate change. To start, I will present a view espoused by Dale Jamieson in his article “When Utilitarians Should be Virtue Theorists”: “In some cases and in some worlds it is best for us to focus as precisely as possible on individual acts. In other cases and worlds it is best for us to be concerned with character traits.” (Jamieson 182) Essentially, Jamieson is saying that at times, it is best not to use consequentialism to evaluate the morality of an action, and instead evaluate the morality of a trait. I believe that the idea is of adapting consequentialism to consider character traits is a powerful one, and could allow consequentialism to successfully respond to climate change. This idea of evaluating character traits instead of actions is only a marginal deviation from standard consequentialism.
When it is problematic to evaluate the morality of a set of possible actions one can take, one could instead evaluate the morality of the character traits, or virtues, those actions would follow. The process for evaluating the morality of these virtues would be no different than for evaluating acts. The virtues to uphold would be the ones that, when upheld consistently, would bring about the best consequences. Now, one might object VC, claiming it is merely a rehashed version of virtue ethics. However, in virtue ethics, it is the virtues themselves that are the core of the moral philosophy, while with this idea, we would be accepting and rejecting virtues based on the consequences they would bring about, through a purely consequentialist thought process. This idea would also address most of the objections I have outlined above. It would address the calculation objection by allowing the consequentialist direct his attention away from the numerous consequences of numerous actions that could all be taken in a situation and instead focus on the general consequences brought about by upholding specific character traits or virtues. In this way, evaluating virtues instead of actions would reduce calculations. In addition, due to the general nature of virtues or character traits, their use could also overcome the second objection I raised. The morality of a
certain way of behaving would not change based on how many people behave that way, or on any thorny details present in the situation. As such, using consequentialism to evaluate virtues would provide necessary consistency in its moral evaluations of issues related to climate change. Before I conclude I will bring up one final point. One last issue I raised was that with issues relating to climate change and environmental ethics, consequences may take very long periods of time to become apparent. To account for this, when making moral evaluations, the consequentialist must be prepared to examine the long term effects of his/her actions or virtues. In this paper I have argued that consequentialism is capable of responding to climate change. To do so, I have presented some major objections or roadblocks to using consequentialism for evaluating climate change, and shown that, by at times evaluating virtues instead of actions consequentialism is capable of responding to these objections without slipping into the realm of virtue ethics.