A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change

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		A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change
		A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change

Climate change is arguably the great problem confronting humanity, but we have done little to head off this looming catastrophe. In The Perfect Moral Storm, philosopher Stephen Gardiner illuminates our dangerous inaction by placing the environmental crisis in an entirely new light, considering it as an ethical failure. Gardiner clarifies the moral situation, identifying the temptations (or "storms") that make us vulnerable to a certain kind of corruption. First, the world's most affluent nations are tempted to pass on the cost of climate change to the poorer and weaker citizens of the world. Second, the present generation is tempted to pass the problem on to future generations. Third, our poor grasp of science, international justice, and the human relationship to nature helps to facilitate inaction. As a result, we are engaging in willful self-deception when the lives of future generations, the world's poor, and even the basic fabric of life on the planet is at stake. We should wake up to this profound ethical failure, Gardiner concludes, and demand more of our institutions, our leaders and ourselves.

"This is a radical book, both in the sense that it faces extremes and in the sense that it goes to the roots." ―Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"The book's strength lies in Gardiner's success at understanding and clarifying the types of moral issues that climate change raises, which is an important first step toward solutions." ―Science Magazine

"Gardiner has expertly explored some very instinctual and vitally important considerations which cannot realistically be ignored. ―Required reading." ―Green Prophet

"Gardiner makes a strong case for highlighting and insisting on the ethical dimensions of the climate problem, and his warnings about buck-passing and the dangerous appeal of moral corruptions hit home." ―Times Higher Education

"Stephen Gardiner takes to a new level our understanding of the moral dimensions of climate change. A Perfect Moral Storm argues convincingly that climate change is the greatest moral challenge our species has ever faced - and that the problem goes even deeper than we think." ―Peter Singer, Princeton University

网友对A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change的评论

Excellent dissection of the actual climate change mitigation problem. It is tough to read through the endless hair-splitting detail, but the work is worth it in terms of the precision that Gardiner achieves. Every climate negotiator should read this book, examine his/her conscience and then act. Every citizen should read something a bit less daunting and then act. I thoroughly enjoyed the Austen dissection and my eyes opened wider and wider as the parallels with the climate negotiations became clear. I would only recommend the whole book to someone very interested in the issues.

This books makes some important points but fails in so many ways to communicate with an audience that will make a difference. When will intellectuals/academics learn to speak in ways that appeal to someone who isn't in the academy? The laborious point-by-point arguments, many of which are repetitive, are painful to read. This was surprising to me because the book received an excellent review in the journal Nature.

This is a very thoughtful and systematic analysis of the moral aspects of climate change. Gardiner is a moral philospher and appropriately approaches climate change as an ethical challenge. This book is a serious and largely successful attempt to lay out the ethical dimensions of climate change, and in particular, why it is such a challenging problem. Gardiner argues well that a conjunction of 3 major and mutually reinforcing factors make addressing climate change particularly challenging, leading to what he calls a "perfect moral storm." One is that it is a truly global problem requiring an unprecendented degree of international cooperation in a world of nation-states with markedly different aims and an international system with only rudimentary institutions for the required endeavour. The second, and as he points out, somewhat related major problem is that this is an intergenerational problem. A lot of the book is devoted to working out the details of climate change as a particularly difficult intergenerational issue. Finally, and in perhaps the most novel section, Gardiner argues that climate change presents a "theoretical" challenge. The different types of theories we possess in political philosophy, moral philosophy, and policy analysis are poorly suited to addressing climate change. Individually, each of these three components is formidable, put together, the problem of developing an adequate response is beyond daunting.

A lot of the descritption and analysis of each component is very good. The global problem analysis, for example, contains a nice summary of the history and failures of major climate change negotiations over the past 2 decades. The intergenerational problem analysis is a very thorough discussion of this issue from several angles and probably the strongest piece of sustained reasoning in this book. The theoretical analysis section makes a number of very cogent points. Moral philosophers, for example, haven't devoted much effort to intergenerational issues and political philosophy has been more concerned with ideal theory. In one of the best sections of the book, there is a sustained critique of the major policy analysis tool, economic cost-benefit analysis, which comes under a very effective attack, much of it pioneered by talented economists like John Broome and Martin Weitzmann. If you're looking for a nice discussion of the difficult topic of discount rates, this is the place to go.

An important point made by Gardiner is that difficulties of these combined 3 problems leads fairly easily to a form of moral corruption in which it is easy to avoid dealing with the major issues. Gardiner has good discussion of how not dealing with all aspects of the problem can lead to self-deluding pseudo-solutions and general avoidance of confronting the really knotty issues. Gardiner has a good discussion of geo-engineering a potential example of such self-deluding corruption that could divert attention from the crucial problems.

There are also some defects to this book. A minor defect is Gardiner's discussion of the drawbacks of alternative ways of looking at climate change as a moral problem. Gardiner expends a significant number of pages on analysis of game theoretic models like the prisoner's dilemma and also on Hardin's famous tragedy of the commons. A lot of this discussion is quite shrewd and the focus is understandable given that Gardiner is a professional moral philosopher. These are issues, I think, of considerable interest to him and his professional colleagues. In a book which is apparently written for a wide audience, I'm not sure how much they add.

While I endorse Gardiner's efforts to center discussions of climate change as a moral problem and I think his moral analyses are perceptive, I'm not sure he has characterized the background accurately. He complains that most prior discussions of climate change have focused on scientific and economic issues. I don't think this is correct in several senses. First, the discussion of scientific issues, at least as discussed in front of the American public and before policy makers, has not really been a scientific discussion in any conventional sense but rather an immoral effort to discredit scientific findings and corresponding defenses of the science. More important, while his efforts to bring the global and intergenerational ethical problems to the forefront are laudable, I don't think its fair to say that these aspects have actually been neglected. The great majority of people who've thought about this problem objectively have reached these conclusions pretty quickly and they are, in fact, the implicit basis for the (so far largely ineffective) efforts to do something about climate change. Gardiner implicitly acknowledges this fact in his discussion of the UN Framework agreements.

Gardiner clearly wrote this book in the hope that by grounding climate change as a moral issue, he could have a positive impact on policy formation. His efforts do him credit but he also exhibits some naivete. In the beginning of the book, he writes, "If climate change is a perfect moral storm, it is concerns about what we are doing to the poor, future generations, and nature that justify most of what needs to be done. I am optimistic that most of us have such concerns, and take them seriously." Well - facta non verba. The lametable record of inaction and actual obstruction on climate change issues are reasonable evidence that we don't take these concerns seriously. A shrewd comment by the late Don Fehrenbacher about antebellum American attitudes to slavery applies here, "slavery was an interest and anti-slavery was a sentiment." As Gardiner himself writes, climate change constitutes a stringent "Global Test" of our political, social, and economic institutions. Its a test we're failing badly.

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