MONDAY 14 OCTOBER 2024 at 7:00 PM
Chambers Pavilion
Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture
15 Blackall Street Barton
Ethics and climate change
Ethical theories aim to guide us towards the right course of action. They do so based on explicit or implicit conceptions of the nature humans and how they relate to their worlds.
An ethics for an Earth transformed by climate change must account for the fact that technological humans have become so powerful that we have shifted the Earth irreversibly from its geological trajectory. What we have done and will do changes the habitability of the Earth. Equally, the Earth can no longer be understood as the passive victim of our exploitation and carelessness but is an increasingly unpredictable and uncontrollable entity “fighting back”.
These facts transform the landscape for ethical judgement. Mainstream ethical theories (consequentialist, deontological and virtue ethics) are ethics for relations between humans and are a poor guide to how to think ethically about the big dilemmas of an Earth transformed by us. Is it enough to take one of them and extend moral considerability to other animals, ecosystems or the Earth itself?
Professor Clive Hamilton AM
Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. He has held visiting academic positions at the University of Oxford, Sciences Po, and Yale University. He was the founder and for 14 years the executive director of the Australia Institute.
Clive’s books on climate change include Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change (Earthscan), Earthmasters: The dawn of the age of climate engineering (Yale UP), and Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the Anthropocene (Polity).
His most recent book, written with George Wilkenfeld, is Living Hot: Surviving and thriving on a heating planet (Hardie Grant). His opinions have been published in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American and the Guardian, among others.
