Climate Change Signals the End of the Social Sciences
In response to the heatwave that set a new Australia-wide record on 7 January, when the national average maximum reached 40.33°C, , the Bureau of Meteorology issued a statement that, on reflection, sounds the death knell for all of the social sciences taught in our universities. “Everything that happens in the climate system now”, the […]
Cory Bernardi is right, in Peter Singer’s world
Senator Cory Bernardi has been reviled for associating homosexuality with something repugnant, bestiality. Yet Australia has just awarded its highest civilian honour to a philosopher who provides a moral defence of sex with animals. Professor Peter Singer, the renowned Australian philosopher at Princeton University, believes that the taboo on bestiality is an anomaly, a prohibition […]
Bioengineering as a response to global warming
You know the situation is getting desperate when three bio-ethicists propose genetically modifying humans to reduce our environmental impact. In a bizarre paper titled ‘Human engineering and climate change’, Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache argue we should seriously consider technologies to engineer human bodies to reduce carbon emissions. One leading idea is genetic […]
Ethical Anxieties About Geoengineering
Three main justifications are used to defend geoengineering research and possible deployment—it will allow us to buy time, it will allow us to respond to a climate emergency, and it may be the best option economically. Against these a number of ethical risks intrude: we may use the possibility of climate engineering to blind ourselves […]
The Ethical Foundations of Climate Engineering
In the standard consequentialist view of climate ethics, the question of whether it is ethically justified intentionally to shift the planet to a warmer or cooler climate depends on an assessment of the costs and benefits of the new state compared to the old one. In this view the natural world is framed as a […]