Environmental virtues for climate change
Climate scenario development since
the Kyoto Protocol is considered as the problem for the maximization of
human welfare as a whole under socio-economic and environmental
constraints. At first, this caused problems between developed and
developing countries as there are large inequalities between their
welfare and developing countries are susceptible to institutional
failures to supply basic needs such as food and water under the changing
climate conditions (Jakob and Steckel, 2016). Secondly, the temporal
scale of climate change imposed the usage of discounting the welfare of
future generations compared to the current generation. But future
generation could either be better off having the capacity to generate
higher welfare or worse requiring the transfer of welfare from previous
generations. Also how this could work from second or third to the
unknown n’th generation remains to be unclear.
Utilitarianism is also based on preferences where there could be
substitutes or complements for endowments which could generate a
pareto-optimal utility maximization. Climate future narratives focus not
on individuals but holistically on the human species with their
cumulative population and their production resulting in greenhouse gases
as an environmental bad commodity. Singer (Singer, 2006) comments on the
adversaries of inaction based on utilitarianism that discounting the
unknown future and waiting for the unexpected climate extreme events
would result in degradation of total welfare. Protection of the climate
as a life supporting and regulating system requires individuals to
define nature as the bearer and locus of value influencing their
environmental behaviour.
Humanity faced much moral crises before climate change which has been
resolved mainly through mitigation efforts to reduce their adverse
consequences (Symons, 2019). The advancement of science also started the
space age and the digital age which neither Thoreau nor Leopold had an
experience during their lifetime (Hill, 1983). However, the three
paradigms of ecology – the biotic community, super-organism and
ecosystem – already were integrated in to human history by that time
and continue to support the foundations of environmental philosophy
today.