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.