Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management

This important edited collection addresses ethical issues associated with solar radiation management (SRM), a category of climate engineering techniques that would increase the planet’s reflectivity in order to offset some of the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Such techniques include injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere or brightening marine clouds with seawater. Although SRM has the potential to cool the planet by reducing the amount of incoming solar radiation absorbed by the planet, it raises a wide array of difficult and interesting ethical issues. Engineering the Climate makes an important contribution to addressing many of these issues

Geoengineering and Non-Ideal Theory

The strongest arguments for the permissibility of geoengineering (also known as climate engineering) rely implicitly on non-ideal theory—roughly, the theory of justice as applied to situations of partial compliance with principles of ideal justice. In an ideally just world, such arguments acknowledge, humanity should not deploy geoengineering; but in our imperfect world, society may need to complement mitigation and adaptation with geoengineering to reduce injustices associated with anthropogenic climate change. We interpret research proponents’ arguments as an application of a particular branch of non-ideal theory known as “clinical theory.” Clinical theory aims to identify politically feasible institutions or policies that would address existing (or impending) injustice without violating certain kinds of moral permissibility constraints. We argue for three implications of clinical theory: First, conditional on falling costs and feasibility, clinical theory provides strong support for some geoengineering techniques that aim to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Second, if some kinds of carbon dioxide removal technologies are supported by clinical theory, then clinical theory further supports using those technologies to enable “overshoot” scenarios in which developing countries exceed the cumulative emissions caps that would apply in ideal circumstances. Third, because of tensions between political feasibility and moral permissibility, clinical theory provides only weak support for geoengineering techniques that aim to manage incoming solar radiation

Why Moral Error Theorists Should Become Revisionary Moral Expressivists

Moral error theorists hold that morality is deeply mistaken, thus raising the question of whether and how moral judgments and utterances should continue to be employed. Proposals include simply abolishing morality (Richard Garner), adopting some revisionary fictionalist stance toward morality (Richard Joyce), and conserving moral judgments and utterances unchanged (Jonas Olson). I defend a fourth proposal, namely revisionary moral expressivism, which recommends replacing cognitivist moral judgments and utterances with non-cognitivist ones. Given that non-cognitivist attitudes are not truth apt, revisionary expressivism does not involve moral error. Moreover, revisionary expressivism has the theoretical resources to retain many of the useful features of morality, such as moral motivation, moral disagreement, and moral reasoning. Revisionary expressivism fares better than the three major alternatives in both avoiding moral error and preserving these useful features of morality. I also show how this position differs from the “revolutionary expressivism” of Sebastian Köhler and Michael Ridge

Is Aerosol Geoengineering Ethically Preferable to Other Climate Change Strategies?

In this paper, I address the question of whether aerosol geoengineering (AG) ought to be deployed as a response to climate change. First, I distinguish AG from emissions mitigation, adaptation, and other geoengineering strategies. Second, I discuss advantages and disadvantages of AG, including its potential to result in substantial harm to some persons. Third, I critique three arguments against AG deployment, suggesting reasons why these arguments should be rejected. Fourth, I consider an argument that, in scenarios in which all available climate change strategies would result in net harm to persons, we ought to adopt that response to climate change which would result in the least net harm. --Author\u27s Descriptio

The Role of Reasoning in Pragmatic Morality

Charles Sanders Peirce offers a number of arguments against the rational application of theory to morality, suggesting instead that morality should be grounded in instinct. Peirce maintains that we currently lack the scientific knowledge that would justify a rational structuring of morality. This being the case, philosophically generated moralities cannot be otherwise than dogmatic and dangerous. In this paper, I contend that Peirce’s critique of what I call “dogmatic-philosophical morality” should be taken very seriously, but I also claim that the purely instinctive morality Peirce endorses is liable to a danger of its own, namely fanaticism. Indeed, Peirce himself recognizes this danger. As an alternative, I sketch a form of “pragmatic morality” that attempts to sidestep the dogmatism of philosophical morality and the fanaticism of instinctive morality. This form of morality avoids philosophical dogmatism by treating extant instincts as the postulates and materials with which it works. It avoids instinctive fanaticism by allowing a role to reason. By exhibiting fallibilism, revisability, pluralism, and meliorism, this type of reasoning can avoid the dogmatism of the philosophical kind of morality Peirce critiques

Plato’s Ion as an Ethical Performance

Plato’s Ion is primarily ethical rather than epistemological, investigating the implications of transgressing one’s own epistemic limits. The figures of Socrates and Ion are juxtaposed in the dialogue, Ion being a laughable, comic, ethically inferior character who cannot recognize his own epistemic limits, Socrates being an elevated, serious, ethically superior character who exhibits disciplined epistemic restraint. The point of the dialogue is to contrast Ion’s laughable state with the serious state of Socrates. In this sense, the dialogue’s central argument is performative rather than demonstrative