Climate Esoteric Morality and the Problem of Inconsequentialism
DOKPE
- Voiron, Ilias ORCID University of Fribourg
- Puumala, Mikko. M. ORCID University of Turku
- 2025
Published in:
- Utilitas. - Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 2025, p. 1-19
English
Climate change is to a large extent a collective action problem, but many believe that individual action is also required. But what if no individual contribution to climate change is necessary nor sufficient to cause climate change-induced harms? This issue is known as the problem of inconsequentialism. It is particularly problematic for act consequentialism because the theory does not seem to judge such inconsequential contributions negatively. In this paper, we apply Henry Sidgwick’s idea of esoteric morality to climate change and assess whether what we call a climate esoteric morality could help to deal with the problem of inconsequentialism from an act consequentialist perspective. Consequentialists ought then to promote what we call nonconsequentialist faux principles; exaggerate existing consequentialist principles that pro tanto forbid contributing to climate change whenever strictly consequentialist principles fail to do so; and refrain from criticising nonconsequentialist principles that forbid contributing to climate change.
- Faculty
- Faculté des sciences et de médecine
- Department
- Département de Géosciences
- Language
-
- English
- Classification
- Earth sciences
- License
- CC BY
- Open access status
- hybrid
- Identifiers
-
- DOI 10.1017/S0953820824000219
- ISSN 0953-8208
- ISSN 1741-6183
- Persistent URL
- https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/330832
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