Philosophy Talk: "Individual Responsibility in the Face of Climate Change"
Friday March 10th, 11am, Beckman Hall 211
Speaker: Dan Shahar (Tulane University)
Dr. Shahar is a research scholar in philosophy at Tulane University. He is the recipient of the International Society for Environmental Ethics’ Early Career Prize in Environmental Philosophy, and is the author of several books and articles including Why It's OK to Eat Meat, and Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works.
Abstract:
Ethicists and activists often identify specific moral problems (e.g., global poverty, systemic racism) and argue each of us has a moral duty to respond to them. Together, these calls imply a generalist approach to progress where people act on many problems in the hope small individual efforts will culminate in large-scale changes. Yet, this approach contrasts with how we think about progress more generally. In most domains, we don’t expect people to adopt many roles simultaneously in the hope of collectively producing results. Instead, we recognize that specialization and division of labor increase individuals’ effectiveness and thus humanity’s overall potential. In this talk, Dan Shahar suggests would-be moral leaders would be wise to learn from these successes, accepting the validity of focusing on only a few issues while declining to act on most others. He argues the case for specialization and division of labor extends even to individuals’ actions on global climate change. Although environmental ethicists and activists often claim each of us must respond to climate change (e.g., by reducing our carbon footprints), Shahar claims climate action is just option for discharging one’s duty to respond to the world’s problems. In presenting his case, Shahar examines several reasons why climate change might seem to be a special problem that demands special types of responses from us, showing how the moral case for specialization can be sustained even in this especially challenging domain.
Speaker: Dan Shahar (Tulane University)
Dr. Shahar is a research scholar in philosophy at Tulane University. He is the recipient of the International Society for Environmental Ethics’ Early Career Prize in Environmental Philosophy, and is the author of several books and articles including Why It's OK to Eat Meat, and Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works.
Abstract:
Ethicists and activists often identify specific moral problems (e.g., global poverty, systemic racism) and argue each of us has a moral duty to respond to them. Together, these calls imply a generalist approach to progress where people act on many problems in the hope small individual efforts will culminate in large-scale changes. Yet, this approach contrasts with how we think about progress more generally. In most domains, we don’t expect people to adopt many roles simultaneously in the hope of collectively producing results. Instead, we recognize that specialization and division of labor increase individuals’ effectiveness and thus humanity’s overall potential. In this talk, Dan Shahar suggests would-be moral leaders would be wise to learn from these successes, accepting the validity of focusing on only a few issues while declining to act on most others. He argues the case for specialization and division of labor extends even to individuals’ actions on global climate change. Although environmental ethicists and activists often claim each of us must respond to climate change (e.g., by reducing our carbon footprints), Shahar claims climate action is just option for discharging one’s duty to respond to the world’s problems. In presenting his case, Shahar examines several reasons why climate change might seem to be a special problem that demands special types of responses from us, showing how the moral case for specialization can be sustained even in this especially challenging domain.
