Bioethics and global warming

Climate change raises difficult moral issues because the need to allocate limited funds and resources requires some classes, peoples, and generations to be prioritized over others. Bioethics seeks to create rational frameworks to facilitate the resolution of these issues.

Background

Bioethics is a discipline that seeks to determine the most ethical course of action when faced with a decision involving medical care, medical or biological research, or life and living processes generally. As such, it is implicated in many decisions dealing with the human response to climate change, because those decisions require balancing the interests of people in different locations, of different classes, and of different generations.

Sensitivity to temperature, and to change in temperature, is a central fact of almost all physical objects and processes, living or not. Extremes of cold and of heat disrupt physiological processes and thereby undermine ecological stability. Heat waves in summer in large population centers, for example, frequently result in illness and death. Such health threats create practical problems of predicting and planning for them, as well as training for and executing appropriate responses. They also raise many of the issues familiar in discussions of medical ethics.

Prioritization and Prediction

A central question in preparing responses to possible threats related to global warming is that of prioritization. Finite resources must be allocated equitably or according to some other compelling moral principle. It may be necessary to sacrifice a group or individual to advance the well-being of others or to abrogate property rights to serve the general welfare. Moreover, because predicting the future is never a certainty, principles must be established to measure or evaluate the uncertainty of predictions and the acceptable level of risk. Often, a balance must be struck between the two: If an event seems unlikely and its consequences would be minor, preparing for it is less important than preparing for either a near certainty with minor consequences or an unlikely event with severe consequences.

A particularly thorny issue involves intergenerational equity, the comparative claims of present and future generations. The moral philosopher John Rawls spoke of the “just savings” a society is required to put aside for the future. Choices made today will often affect those who live decades or centuries from now. Insofar as these effects can be anticipated, the needs, preferences, and well-being of future generations must be taken into account. It is difficult, however, to weigh those interests against those of the present generations, not least because only one party is able to participate in making decisions. This means not only that the decision makers will be biased in favor of themselves but also that it is impossible to determine with certainty what the preferences of unborn future generations will be. Indeed, as utilitarian theorist Derek Parfit emphasizes, it is possible that the choices made by present generations will determine which individuals are and are not born to be members of future generations.

In order to make ethical decisions regarding the proper response to global warming, it is necessary to establish a framework for evaluating future harms and benefits. Some economists invoke a social “discount rate” to resolve this problem. This method entails calculating the current cost of preventing future harm and comparing it to the cost of that harm in the future.

Competing Twenty-First Century Interests

Even restricting attention to the early twenty-first century, serious questions have arisen regarding the most ethical distribution of resources among and within nations subjected to the burdens of climate calamity. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, treated developing and industrialized nations differently and established more stringent standards for the latter. To hold every nation to the same standard (say, so much greenhouse gas emission per capita) would advantage those nations already well developed industrially, which would thereby benefit from their past pollution, and disadvantage developing nations that need to produce significant pollution through industrialization if they are to progress economically.

On the other hand, it has been speculated that using different standards may disadvantage industrialized nations that are competing with developing nations in a global market. More stringent rules regulating labor and environmental impact, for example, can make production in developed nations more expensive than production of the same products in developing nations. However, the lax standards that make production cheaper in developing nations may impose indirect costs not only on companies but also on all members of society. As journalist Alexandra Harney remarks,

pollution from Asia is believed to be affecting weather up and down the west coast of North America. . . . The sacrifices China makes to stay competitive in manufacturing affect the rest of the world.

The way in which the greenhouse gas emissions of the nations of the world contributed to global warming and thus rising sea levels, and the ways in which rising sea levels have threatened coastal and island nations (including the Maldives, Singapore, Fiji, and Kiribati, among others) is an example of an early twenty-first century issue regarding bioethics and climate change.

Context

Bioethics is a branch of applied ethics, a relatively recent subdiscipline of the ancient discipline of ethics. Bioethics seeks to ascertain consistent principles to guide decisions regarding such literal life-and-death issues as euthanasia, medical ethics, and proper responses to global warming. Because climate change is such a large-scale phenomenon, both spatially and temporally, the unique challenges it poses to bioethics involve the need to reconcile the disparate interests of all nations and their inhabitants, as well as present and future generations. The scale of the problems posed by climate change requires both individuals and governments to think globally while acting locally. This has come to a head during the early twenty-first century as the impact that the greenhouse gas emissions of developed countries have had on those that are developing became more apparent.

A United Nations (UN) report published in 2021 examined the ways in which the negative effects of climate change served as burdens for developing nations throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and found that the effects of global warming are particularly devastating for developing nations as they have often lacked the resources or infrastructure to counteract the damage done. The report, which found that disasters related to global warming led to developing countries sustaining economic losses three times higher than developed nations, highlighted the ethical implications that climate change has presented between nations of unequal wealth, infrastructure, and industry.

The dilemma resulting from the impact that climate change has had on developing nations was one of the key areas of focus at the UN Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow, Scotland in 2021. While the conference resulted in agreements among UN member nations that acknowledged a climate emergency, called for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels, and recognized the need to support developing nations, UN Secretary-General António Guterres ultimately called the results of the conference a compromise that highlighted the competing interests among nations that is a step in the right direction but not enough to resolve the physical and ethical dilemmas that global warming has presented throughout the early twenty-first century.

Key Concepts

• ethics: the application of moral philosophy to real-world decision making
• intergenerational equity: relative equality of treatment between present and future generations, including the obligation of present generations to preserve limited resources for the future
• prioritization: using a rational principle to determine the order of precedence among individuals or groups when allocating limited resources

Bibliography

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