The Ethical Climate of Climate Change
It has been nine years since more than 1,500 international senior scientists, including 105 Nobel laureates, signed the Union of Concerned Scientists-sponsored World Scientists' Call for Action at the Kyoto Climate Summit. This document, as well as others, set the stage for a strong climate change treaty. Since then climate change has occurred and continues to affect weather, agriculture, sea level increases, worldwide health, forests and wildlife, and marine life.
Although there are differing viewpoints, almost all scientists concur that the world is becoming warmer, that the warmth is most likely due to the increase of greenhouse gases produced by human activity and that the levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere are now higher than they were at any time in the past 420,000 years. Reductions in crop yields are anticipated for many regions, water availability is expected to decrease, and the World Health Organization has already attributed an estimate 150,000 deaths each year from climate changes.
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Nancy Tuana |
But scientific facts such as these are, to Nancy Tuana, just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
“Environmental damage is already occurring, and it will continue to occur,” she says. “This makes it essential that we take seriously the ethical dimensions of climate change, including issues of responsibility and accountability, to solve the problems in an equitable way.”
With all the publicity about climate change, one aspect people haven't heard much about is the ethical aspect. Consider as just one example, the fact that climate change overwhelmingly affects the poor—a fact brought vividly home to Americans during the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. But this fact is not limited to the United States: in 2005 alone, we saw how drought, famine, and weather-related catastrophes killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of children and adults in Africa and Asia; in South America, warmer temperatures and heavy rains in South Asia led to the worst outbreak of dengue fever there in years, according to WHO officials, infecting 120,000 people. According to a November 2005 article in Nature, these regions face a dramatic increase from disease and malnutrition as a direct result of climate change drive by wealthier, more polluting countries.
“People who are affected the worst are polluting the least,” says Tuana. “If there's a human-induced component to a disaster, who is responsible? When people lose lives, property, or security, who will compensate? These are not easy questions.”
Tuana, the DuPont/1949 Professor of Philosophy and Ethics and Director of the Rock Ethics Institute, is committed to refocusing the attention of politicians and policymakers, as well as the general public, on the importance of the ethical dimensions of climate change. The Rock Ethics Institute serves as secretariat to an international consortium of organizations and institutions around the world that have begun to develop a series of publications and workshops on this important topic.
The Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change was launched at the 10th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that was held in Buenos Aires in 2004. The major outcome of this meeting was the Buenos Aires Declaration on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change in 2004. The Program will seek to facilitate examination of the ethical dimensions of climate change; create a better understanding about these dimensions among policy makers and the general public; and assure that people around the world, including those most affected, participate in any ethical inquiry about responses to climate change.
In addition, Tuana and a team of environmental scientists and policy-makers were recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to integrate ethics into graduate training in the environmental sciences. The academic modules are designed to expand the ability of scientists to understand and respond to the ethical issues inherent in the content of scientific research, as well as helping them to better understand the requirements for the ethical conduct of scientific research. The teaching techniques and assessment strategies that are developed in the first year of this study will be implemented in graduate courses at Carnegie Mellon, Penn State Harrisburg, and at Slippery Rock University during the second and third year of the grant.
Tuana earned her doctorate at the University of California at Santa Barbara and her training in the philosophy of science has made her particularly attentive to the role of ethics in the sciences.
“A question I view as central to scientific research, including research in medicine, engineering, and technology is ‘How do we conduct systematically responsible science?'” She explains that “this focus of attention is similar to the traditional question of ‘How do you know science is presenting the truth?', but when you put “responsible” into the question, other issues arise—and they're all ethical issues. Once you attend to the question of conducting ethically responsible science, that remains a constant in every situation.”
The Institute was established with a gift from Doug and Julie Rock in 2001, the same year Tuana was hired to be the founding director. Doug Rock, a 1968 psychology graduate, is president, chief executive officer, and chairman of Smith International, a worldwide supplier of products and services used in oil and gas exploration. He is also director and former chairman of the Petroleum Equipment Suppliers Association and director of Viad Corporation. The Rocks' vision for the Institute grew out of their concern about the myriad of ethical issues that transcend geographical borders. Increasingly, today's college students will be facing more and more of these global concerns.
This mission of cultivating moral and ethical literacy through teaching, research, and outreach reaches across the entire University. In carrying out these goals, Tuana decided not to focus on one particular issue but rather to have a series of initiatives that would change over time and build to strengths at the University.
“We look for areas of expertise and build on those,” she explains. “Penn State has a wide range of renowned climate scientists that work on different dimensions of climate change, so developing an ethics curriculum around this issue was a natural outcome.”
Other Institute initiatives include ethics and disability studies; learning and teaching ethics in engineering; moral literacy in K-12 school settings, and Breaking the Silence: slavery and freedom projects. Tuana says that her objective is not to tell people what's right or wrong, but help people develop the skills to be literate in an ethical debate. Students are taught to not only identify ethical issues, but to better understand their own values as well as the values of those who hold different ethical positions, as well as to develop their moral reasoning skills.
“Human-induced climate change is a profound and complex ethical dilemma,” she says. “What we are trying to do is to provide ethical literacy skills to scientists and climate change policy-makers so that they can understand ethical issues they will confront and to think about the implications in a responsible way.”