Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices - Hardcover

Rieder, Travis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593471970 ISBN 13: 9780593471975

Verlag: Dutton, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

How to live a morally decent life in the midst of today's constant, complex choices

In a world of often confusing and terrifying global problems, how should we make choices in our everyday lives? Does anything on the individual level really make a difference? In Catastrophe Ethics, Travis Rieder tackles the moral philosophy puzzles that bedevil us. He explores vital ethical concepts from history and today and offers new ways to think about the “right” thing to do when the challenges we face are larger and more complex than ever before.
 
Alongside a lively tour of traditional moral reasoning from thinkers like Plato, Mill, and Kant, Rieder posits new questions and exercises about the unique conundrums we now face, issues that can seem to transcend old-fashioned philosophical ideals. Should you drink water from a plastic bottle or not? Drive an electric car? When you learn about the horrors of factory farming, should you stop eating meat or other animal products? Do small commitments matter, or are we being manipulated into acting certain ways by corporations and media? These kinds of puzzles, Rieder explains, are everywhere now. And the tools most of us unthinkingly rely on to “do the right thing” are no longer enough. Principles like “do no harm” and “respect others” don’t provide guidance in cases where our individual actions don’t, by themselves, have any effect on others at all. We need new principles, with new justifications, in order to navigate this new world.

In the face of consequential and complex crises, Rieder shares exactly how we can live a morally decent life. It’s time to build our own catastrophe ethics.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Travis Rieder, PhD, is a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, where he directs the Master of Bioethics degree program. He holds secondary appointments in the departments of Philosophy and Health Policy and Management, as well as the Center for Public Health Advocacy. His first book, a memoir of opioid dependence and withdrawal, was named an NPR Best Book of 2019, and his TED Talk on the same topic has been viewed more than 2.5 million times. He has been interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air and his opinion writing has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, and Psychology Today.

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Chapter 1

The Climate Case

It is worse, much worse, than you think.

-David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth

I'd love to retire in Cyprus. It's as close to paradise as anywhere I've ever been, with long stretches of largely unspoiled beaches, warm Mediterranean water, mild winters, friendly people, and amazing food. My partner, Sadiye, is Turkish Cypriot (from the northern half of the island), and so we have a home there, full of people who love us. I love the Turkish language and the culture, and every time we go home, we wonder how long it will be until we can just stay there.

Unfortunately, I don't think we'll retire in Cyprus. Not year-round, anyway. It'll just be too hot.

Since it's an island sitting at the intersection of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Africa, you might expect it to be a warm climate. And that's how it used to be. But it's going from reasonably warm to unbearable in the summer months.

Among the hundreds of Cypriots I've met since my first visit in 2003, I've never encountered climate denialism there. There's not much room for doubt when the older generations have seen the environment go from hospitable, though warm, to downright hostile for two to three months of the year. Indeed, my in-laws regularly tell me about how much change they've seen in their lifetimes. Even when Sadiye was growing up, families largely didn't invest in expensive air-conditioning units (which use very expensive energy). She and her brother grew up sweating at night during the summer because it was at least possible to get away with forgoing A/C units in the children's rooms.

Not anymore. Every Cypriot home I go to now has A/C units in every bedroom, and most have the (prohibitively expensive) large units in their living space to get them through the worst of the summer months.

By the time Sadiye and I intend to retire-somewhere around the midcentury mark-I don't think we'll want to be in Cyprus for a good chunk of the summer. Of course, many Cypriot people will still live on the island, but it will be getting more uncomfortable to do so (and they will likely have increased the already prevalent tendency to simply go on holiday in August to escape the heat). My family and friends already have modified work schedules during the heat of the summer, which encourage people to stay indoors and find air conditioning during the hottest part of the afternoon. Construction and other manual labor slows down or stops. Those without air conditioning or who can't afford to run it constantly struggle to stay not only comfortable but healthy.

In fall 2021, it was announced that August of that year had been the hottest month ever recorded in Cyprus. High temperatures averaged 39.8 degrees Celsius (103.6 degrees Fahrenheit), with a single-day high temperature of 44.3 degrees Celsius (111.74 degrees Fahrenheit). To see how quickly things are changing, consider that the average high temperature in August from 1981 to 2010 was 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit). And warming trends are only speeding up. Every Cypriot I have spoken to about climate change is deeply concerned about the future, as anyone my age or older has viscerally felt the dramatic change over their lifetimes.

When I was growing up and first learned of climate change, the wisdom of the day was that it occurred on a time scale too slow to notice. That was part of the challenge, in fact, that we needed to address a threat that one couldn't actually see over the course of a lifetime. But we've now come to realize that's simply not true, and we're already seeing the changes. People like me who spend our lives thinking about this issue will tell you: we make very practical decisions based on the future that climate change is ushering in.

Cypriot summer during my sunset years isn't the only time and place I'm avoiding. During the summer of 2020, it seemed like the entire West Coast of the United States was ablaze. Residents of California couldn't go outside due to air-quality warnings, and pictures of the San Francisco Bay Bridge were all over the internet, standing against a threatening, apocalyptic-looking orange sky. Fire season is spreading dramatically in California, both in duration and intensity. There is much that Sadiye and I love about the Bay Area: the weather; a strong biotech presence for her (she's an industry scientist); a thick network of universities for me. But my climate angst won't let us entertain the idea of moving there.

Unsurprisingly, another restriction on our future plans is that we avoid moving too close to the ocean. Living on the East Coast, moving somewhere along the eastern shoreline of the United States seems almost attainable. But the increasing number and intensity of tropical storms, along with sea-level rise, has me acutely aware of the ever-increasing costs (both financial and anxiety-related) of those beautiful water views. Iconic beach destinations like the Outer Banks in North Carolina are slowly being lost to the Atlantic Ocean, with beachfront homes now regularly falling into the rising waters and the only highway into the area constantly requiring protective adaptation (and a section of it being converted into a bridge, for a price tag of $155 million).

Miami-Dade County is perhaps in an even more dire circumstance, sitting on porous limestone on the low-lying southern tip of Florida. There, the phenomenon of "sunny-day flooding," which is flooding just from high tide, has become a standard nuisance, forcing the city to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to prolong its life. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the same story is playing out in coastal communities around the world. But adaptation efforts like seawalls, beach nourishment, building houses on stilts, and converting roads to bridges are Band-Aids. Low-lying coastal areas will eventually be overtaken by rising waters while being ever more routinely battered by ferocious storms.

If you're wondering whether it's a bummer to live with someone who spends their days thinking about climate change, Sadiye is probably too nice to say yes but too honest to say no.

Of course, much of this caution is based on predictions. Yes, Cyprus is already hotter, and yes, Miami has a "King Tide" season. But my worry that it will continue to worsen to a degree that should make most of us want to stay away is based on projections. So couldn't I be wrong? After all, we're hearing all the time about climate summits, new policies and pledges made by various countries, and green technologies that are supposed to revolutionize our future.

Perhaps, then, I'm just being pessimistic. Humanity is going to figure this out, right? After all, the Netherlands figured out how to protect itself against the sea. When we realized that our collective actions were causing a hole to appear in the ozone, we moved quickly to adopt policies and change behaviors in a way that solved the problem. Surely we'll eventually pull off something similar when it comes to climate change. Right?

I want to tell you yes. I want to say that there's still hope that we will avoid the sort of future I fear. But while there's a technical sense in which we could, it's not realistic. Serious harms are already here, many more are coming, and we avoid talking about them at our peril.


For hundreds of thousands of years, the atmosphere was relatively stable in an important respect: the proportion of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) remained within a certain range. That’s important because these gases are very efficient at trapping heat, so when the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere goes up, less heat is able to escape from Earth out into space and so the global average temperature increases. The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593471970
• ISBN 13: 9780593471975
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; Deutschland