The Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change (Keynote)

Scientists are doing a heroic job of documenting climate change and predicting its effects.  But to draw conclusions about what we ought to do in response requires more than science.  It requires rational discourse about the values that shape our vision of a just, sustainable world and the moral principles that shape our sense of personal and collective responsibility.

Any argument that reaches a conclusion about what we ought to do will have two premises.  The first is factual: this is the way the world is.  But a description of how the world is, no matter how complete, cannot tell us how the world ought to be.  That requires a second, normative, premise: this is what we value, what we think is right and good and worthy. From the combination of facts and values, but from neither alone, we can reach reasoned decisions about how we ought to go forward.

It is critical, therefore, to create a moral discourse about climate change that is as robust as the scientific. Toward that end, we contacted one hundred of the world’s moral leaders from a wide variety of fields and worldviews, asking them to write in response to this question: Do we have a moral responsibility to the future to leave a world as rich in possibilities as our own? Their answers give us much to think about.

First, the response powerfully affirms the moral imperative to act: To take what we need to support our profligate lives, leaving a ransacked and dangerously unstable world for the future, is not worthy of us as moral beings. We have a moral obligation to act individually and collectively to preserve the conditions for future thriving of human and other life.

Second, the response suggests that our culture is in the midst of an ethical paradigm shift, from a human-centered understanding of the world, to a worldview in which humans are understood as members of a community of interdependent parts.

Third, the response offers many reasons to honor our obligations to the future. They include utilitarian reasons (We must act for the sake of the children and the future of life on earth), justice-based reasons (We must act to avoid the greatest violation of human rights the world has ever seen), and virtue-based reasons (Even if we despair of success, we must act so that our lives embody our deepest values).