Technological Ethics: Faith and Climate Control — Harold Sjursen Harold Sjursen Philosophy of Technology & Global EthicsHarold Sjursen

This paper is published, here is the citation:

Sjursen, Harold P. “Technological Ethics, Faith and Climate Control: The Misleading Rhetoric Surrounding the Paris Agreement.” In The Implementation of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, 151–63. London: Routledge, 2018. doi:https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315212470.

Technological Ethics, Faith and Climate Control: The Misleading Rhetoric Surrounding the Paris Accords

Introduction

Harold P. Sjursen

What is referred to as climate change is an aggregate of problems including the warming of the earth’s atmosphere to a level where many interactive natural processes are challenged. Climate change is thus a term that summarizes many data points from many systems. Our understanding of the constituent systems is not uniform and draws upon sciences that employ variations of method making their integration into a single assessment difficult. This complexity challenges our ability to understand the nature of the threat (if indeed it is a threat) that extreme climate change portends, but it likewise makes knowing what to do all the more difficult. Of course the question of knowing what to do is highly politicized with differing national and regional priorities leading to multiple interpretations of the nature and severity of the threat.

With the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the political dynamics influencing the global response to how to address the variously interpreted matter of climate change became even more fraught than they were at the time of the Paris Accords, the approval of which was to a significant degree influenced by an understanding reached between China and the United States under the leadership of President Obama. The assertion by Trump that the United States will withdraw from the Accords, from the perspective of scientific assessment, may not make too much difference as new technologies to reduce emissions will continue to be deployed in the United States for economic reasons, but the political turmoil and the sense of what is fair or just is intensified. In various (especially developing) countries, national policies that imply an increase in suffering and cost may now seem exploitive and beneficial to affluent nations at their expense. This reality makes any declaration of a course of action all the more difficult.

Knowing what to do similarly is a multi-leveled problem. One level is self-interest where factors of comfort, convenience, safety, economic success and others come into play. One of the apparent consequences of global climate change is the more frequent occurrence of extremely heavy rain storms. The costs incurred in an affected port city like Hong Kong are enormous. Climate change in this example becomes, among other things, a matter of cost containment necessary to keep the shipping industry viable. Thus one can argue on straightforward business or economic terms for the necessity of controlling the disruptive effects of tumultuous rain. Depending upon cost this might be in the form of installing better drainage sewers, developing more effective modes of flood abatement, or some other kind of response to improve the infrastructure to manage the increased volume of water. Because it is less immediate and arguably costlier, as well as more ambiguous in its result, to eliminate or significantly abate the source of climate change on this level is a less attractive solution.

The incentive is limited because under no circumstance will the result be the end of climate change nor the return to the predictable and relatively stable climate patterns of an earlier era in the 20th century that many have come to regard as normal. Regardless of whatever measures are put in place significant and irreversible changes have taken place, and much of the future will have to be taken up with the establishment of new social institutions to respond to the mostly unprecedented circumstances due to new flood-drought cycles, different zones for agriculture, and the consequent shortages of necessary goods and interruptions of essential services. The world may come to look more like a Hobbesian state of nature than it ever has before.

Indeed, the environmental activist Bill McKibben argues that our focus now should be on scaling back and building societies that can manage the unprecedented troubles – difficulties that portend the failure of many of the norms of civil society -- that will inevitably result from climate change.1 Whereas McKibben is resigned to the inevitability of climate change induced crisis, the call to pre- emptive action is still being made.

In a speech on the topic of the Paris Climate Accords, delivered at the Stern School of Business at New York University on May 30, 2017, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, stated:

The moral imperative for action is clear. The people hit first and worst by climate change are the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalized. Women and girls will suffer as they are always the most disproportionately affected by disasters. The nations that will face the most profound consequences are the least responsible for climate change and the least equipped to deal with it. Droughts and floods around the world mean poverty will worsen, famines will spread and people will die. As regions become unlivable, more and more people will be forced to move from degraded lands to cities and to other nations. We see this already across North Africa and the Middle East. That is why there is also a compelling security case for climate action. Around the world, military strategists view climate change as a threat to global peace and security. We are all aware of the political turmoil and societal tensions that have been generated by the mass movement of refugees. Imagine how many people are poised to become climate-displaced when their lands become unlivable. Last year, more than 24 million people in 118 countries and territories were displaced by natural disasters. That is three times as many as were displaced by conflict. Climate change is also a menace to jobs, to property and to business. With wildfires, floods and other extreme weather events becoming more common, the economic costs are soaring.2

Guterres’s message is unambiguous: questions of climate science are settled; devastating economic consequences are foreseen; the nations of the world have a moral imperative. By saying that it is a moral imperative he implies that through the implementation of the Paris Accords a salutary difference will be made and that we can reasonably hope for a continuation of normalcy for our grandchildren and great grandchildren.

However, there are other levels to the discussion. One is at no loss to specify the variety of pragmatic approaches to the larger problem that will probably resolve one or several crucial aspects but equally probably not the general problem. Unfortunately, it is not likely that a piecemeal approach, often good engineering practice, will work to fix the problem generally, although the strategy of the Paris Accords – for real political reasons – appears to be just that.

The problem is that it is global and the sum of the self-interests does not equal the whole. More than that it is not so much a problem for the “now” as it is for the “future” when both the causal conditions and the world suffering the change may be fundamentally different. There is very little analogy between the kind of problem solving exercise needed to address flooding in Hong Kong and the sort of thinking required to engage the multiple questions regarding the effects of mutations to the natural environment upon a world beyond the horizons of our imagination. In a sense this is not a “problem” at all, although certainly economics, natural science, engineering and technology and politics are all in

1 Bill McKibben, Eaarth, New York: Henry Holt, 2010, passim.
2 António Guterres, Vital Speeches of the Day, July 2017, vol. 83, Issue 7, p. 197.

play. But overwhelmingly this is an ethical issue. What must we, citizens of the 21st century, do in order to act responsibly on behalf of a future world community that we do not know and will never meet? What sort of imperative has been given to us? How do we understand our duty to the future? And were we to understand this imperative and duty, would we be able to carry it out? These questions are ethical questions and must be considered as such.

Bjorn Lomborg is well-known as a skeptic when it comes to the approaches to climate change advanced in Kyoto, Copenhagen and now Paris. In an article he himself lauds as “my peer reviewed research paper” he asserts that the agreement forged in Paris in light of the benefits he has calculated if it is implemented will be “the costliest in history”. Here is the abstract from his paper:

This article investigates the temperature reduction impact of major climate policy proposals implemented by 2030, using the standard MAGICC climate model. Even optimistically assuming that promised emission cuts are maintained throughout the century, the impacts are generally small. The impact of the US Clean Power Plan (USCPP) is a reduction in temperature rise by 0.013°C by 2100. The full US promise for the COP21 climate conference in Paris, its so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) will reduce temperature rise by 0.031°C. The EU 20-20 policy has an impact of 0.026°C, the EU INDC 0.053°C, and China INDC 0.048°C. All climate policies by the US, China, the EU and the rest of the world, implemented from the early 2000s to 2030 and sustained through the century will likely reduce global temperature rise about 0.17°C in 2100. These impact estimates are robust to different calibrations of climate sensitivity, carbon cycling and different climate scenarios. Current climate policy promises will do little to stabilize the climate and their impact will be undetectable for many decades.3

The main critical points Lomborg makes were summarized as follows in a blog posting by Marlo Lewis:

1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

3 Lomborg, Bjorn. “Impact of Current Climate Proposals.” Global Policy 7, no. 1 (November 9, 2015): 109–18. doi:10.1111/1758-5899.12295.

4 https://www.globalenergyinstitute.org/european-unions-2050-global-greenhouse-gas- emissions-goal-unrealistic
5 @webpage{Lewis:2016uy,author = {Lewis, Marlo},title = {{Lomborg Exposes Paris Accord{\textquoteright}s Climatological Insignificance}},year = {2016},month = may,

url = {http://www.globalwarming.org/}}

Like its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, the COP 21 treaty is likely to be a costly exercise in

futility — substantial economic pain for no discernible environmental gain.

COP 21 is envisioned by its architects as a first step. Decarbonizing of global energy is to be

achieved through a succession of more aggressive emission-reduction targets beyond those

specified in the current INDCs.

Those who say we must adopt the Paris treaty for the sake of our children and grandchildren

have not thought things through. Under the global regime envisioned by COP 21, each

generation will have to make greater economic sacrifices than their parents did

Since developing country emissions already exceed and are increasing much more rapidly

than industrial country emissions, 4 the biggest emission cuts under COP 21 and beyond must

come from precisely those countries that can least afford to cut emissions.

Lomborg says his analysis “clearly indicates that if we want to reduce climate impacts

significantly, we will have to find better ways than the ones currently proposed.”5

Lomborg’s position, if his analysis holds up, is fairly simple. It is that unless a solution is economically sustainable its implementation is unlikely. If it is carried out it will not ultimately achieve the intended purpose because of the unintended consequences. His view situates possible solutions to climate problems within the constraints of contemporary capitalism and social/political expectations and does not acknowledge any ethical imperatives that might question either the efficacy or the justice of these constraints or an approach that demands their revision. Whereas Guterres sees a clear moral imperative to arrest an impending global crisis, Lomborg seems to view such an approach as unwarranted, ineffective and ultimately damaging meddling.

Whether or not the facts of climate change propose a moral imperative is an important question since under that category an entirely different set of actions may be justified. In some cases, an ethical imperative will compel sacrifice or deprivation, that is, under such circumstances what from an economic point of view is not sustainable as a general practice, may as an exception be compelled by a moral or ethical imperative. The forgiving of loans provides an ordinary example of this principle. Certainly as a general practice it is not economically sustainable for a financial institution to forgive debts but under specific circumstances it should be done on ethical grounds. That is to say, it should be done even when a consequence might be the serious weakening or even destruction of the financial institution. A question therefore is whether the scientifically calculated prospect of climate change and the COP21 formula for remediation is ethically required even if doing so will weaken global finances in a way that undermines the economic well-being of many.

As a platform on which to debate the ethical issue, specifically the notion that there is an ethical imperative, i.e., duty or obligation, that mandates that we collectively act in ways that may lead to a degree of suffering, and which may also abrogate ordinary notions of fairness, the general proposition of Bjorn Lomborg will be granted, not because it is evidently correct, but because it requires that the ethical questions surrounding global climate change be given full consideration.

In what follows the criticism of Lomborg will be considered from an ethical perspective that is not limited to the conditions proscribed by economic values he believes to be axiomatic. Indeed, the agreement suggested by the Paris Accords does not limit itself to a singular set of economic principles insofar as it explicitly honors that different countries, especially less developed and wealthy countries, will according to their own various governance models implement the principles of the treaty in various ways. This allowance was the strategy, different in approach than Kyoto or Copenhagen, that makes all signatories responsible for the achievement of the overall goal of the treaty to limit the rise in global temperature to under 2 degrees from pre-industrial levels.

Yet, in Lomborg’s view, whether a single economic blueprint were imposed or numerous national approaches to meet the general goals were taken, the result would be that destructive costs and ever expanding responsibilities would overwhelm whatever benefits resulting from the mitigation of changes to the climate were achieved.

The key question then centers on the kind of ethical responsibility invoked by the treaty, and more generally to the broad issue of climate change. Lomborg’s critique implies either that (1) the approach taken in or implied by the treaty is not as such responsible, or (2) that the responsibilities implied by the treaty cannot be achieved because the economic burdens and escalating costs that will ensue will entail a degree of sacrifice and a burden that is unfair to future generations, particularly in underdeveloped countries. So the treaty will either fail or do significantly more harm than good while obviating economic freedom of choice. This is not an argument to do nothing nor to deny that there may be an ethical imperative; rather his claim would seem to be that the provisions of the Paris Accords and the strategies for implementation do not express an ethical imperative.

But parsed in this fashion Lomborg’s position is essentially an ethical one resting on ideas of fairness and freedom. He is opposed to the treaty because framed within his economic assumptions it would not be a responsible action because it promises what is unattainable and is therefore a kind of lie; if it is forced it will do great harm and/or cause much unnecessary suffering. Lomborg’s argument in part is that it is simply wrong for an agreement to deceive or lead to unnecessary suffering. This is an ethical position, although one that accepts a priori an economic world order based on certain fundamental principles of global capitalism. Is it possible to step back and understand the ethics of the situation in a manner that is not registered within current political/economic worldviews?

Perhaps some economists might argue that the current system of global capitalism cannot be adjusted, that markets alone are determinative, but if so that means that ethics, law and politics become subordinated to economics. This idea seems incoherent because much of economics is an expression of political will. So the question here becomes, can ethical considerations and priorities demand an adjustment to the economic status quo? Given the consensus that the climate change induced global warming that is largely the consequence of human behavior is actual and portends grave destruction to the natural environment that supports the quality of life we know and enjoy, an ethical imperative to do something – to change business as usual – has emerged. Lomborg suggests that the Paris Accords are not that imperative.

The Ethical Question

António Guterres’s predecessor as United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, in a message for the World Day of Social Justice in February, 2011, declared:

Social justice is more than an ethical imperative; it is a foundation for national stability and

global prosperity. Equal opportunity, solidarity and respect for human rights — these are

essential to unlocking the full productive potential of nations and peoples.6

This formulation finds moral imperatives within the larger category of social justice. In a sense, this is

consistent with Lomborg, but makes clear that the economic system should reflect principles of social

justice. Let us suggest that social justice implies fairness, and responsibility implies freedom and its

attendant self-determinism.

Fairness and freedom are both notions that are problematic within the histories of ethics and political theory. John Rawls has famously argued that justice rests upon fairness and tried to reconcile differing views of what constitutes fairness in order to arrive at a universally accepted concept of justice. Despite his grand effort global justice remains a much disputed idea. However connected, responsibility is perhaps an even more troubled notion. Commonly the notion of responsibility is associated with accountability. This is insufficient as an explanation because in many instances clear accountability is not possible. Since a concept responsibility is something like duty or obligation, the first question is the derivation of duties or obligations.

A prima facie responsibility to others includes fairness. One cannot exercise responsibility toward others in an unfair way: “I am responsible for you” or “My actions on your behalf are based upon my responsibility to you” cannot coherently include exploitive or damaging actions. In the sense that I am responsible for my ward, responsibility minimally demands that my actions be fair. One can say that fairness goes in both directions and thus means that responsibility does not extend to actions that damage me or my interests. Let us consider this a weak or minimalist notion of responsible action, i.e., actions which are mutually fair in their care for another. In short we can call responsibility in this sense a matter of fair care. In fair care actions that affect many, in many-to-many actions for example, all affected must share the burden and responsibility, whether as initiator or recipient. (The objection that may arise in the minds of some that we do not have a responsibility for the future, except possibly

6 United Nations (press release): http://www.un.org/press/en/2011/sgsm13403.doc.htm
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for the immediate future, because we do not interact with it, will be ruled out. We do not interact with the distant or indefinite future directly, but through the extraordinarily increased empowerment of modern technology, but we do -- mediated by such technology -- affect changes that surely will have a significant impact on this unknown future.)

However, in the case of many-to-many actions that are also long term and especially those where the consequences may not be recognized until sometime in the fairly distant future, the determination of what would constitute fair care actually becomes nearly impossible. The nature and magnitude of the burdens, financial and otherwise, that the Paris Accords will create is a function of many interacting factors whose efficacy will change due to undetermined future events. As a general rule this is a problem with technologically driven actions. Modern technology permits, often with great ease for the performer, actions that result in very powerful changes (such as permanent and irreversible alterations to the environment) that become manifest long beyond the horizon of the enabler’s awareness. Consider the uses of nuclear energy as an example. This creates a special type of ethical dilemma, one where the consequences of an action are not and cannot be known by the actor.

One could reasonably assume in such cases that some version of the precautionary principle should be applied: Because I cannot know reliably whether an action initiated at this time will result in the future in the desired outcome, and because it is possible that it will result in something quite different and undesired – even possibly disastrous, the action should not be performed until such knowledge can be had. The precautionary principle is that when unaware of what an outcome may be, but given some risk of serious danger, one should not initiate the action. The precautionary principle borders on a principle of non-action.

Of course this strategy would only make sense if precaution didn’t default to something about which we do have the knowledge that an undesirable outcome – indeed a disaster – is already in process. This is the case with climate change. Thus, if we accept our ethical responsibility toward the future, regardless of whatever short term or self-interested actions we take, we cannot for very long adopt the precautionary principle of watchful waiting. But given our ignorance in whatever degree about the future, what action is proper?

There is a tendency, especially during times when ordinary actions and accountability seem inadequate, to embrace ad hoc suspensions of ordinary procedures. In times of war or under the threat of terrorism, for example, the principle of habeas corpus may be suspended. Is the crisis of climate change such that a radical approach that abandons normative legal and economic constraints might be justified? And if so, how is the proper course of action to be chosen? These questions will be taken up below.

Technological Intervention

This sort of question led Hans Jonas to proclaim that a new technological ethics, an ethics for the future, was needed. In Das Prinzip Verantwortung he argues as follows:

Modern technology, informed by an ever-deeper penetration of nature and propelled by the forces of market and politics, has enhanced human power beyond anything known or even dreamed of before.

The altered nature of human action, with the magnitude and novelty of its works and their impact on man’s global future, raises moral issues for which [all] past ethics ... has left us unprepared.

Responsibility is a correlate of power and must be commensurate with [its] scope ... we need lengthened foresight ... a scientific futurology.7

His most salient points in this context are that due to the kind of power technology has granted us the very nature of human action is different and cannot be measured by traditional standards; all of our great ethical systems rest upon the traditional understanding of human action and thus offer only limited guidance; the fate of humanity and the stability of nature are in our unknowing hands and we must learn how to use them responsibly proportionate with their greatly enhanced strength.

In his work Jonas puts environmental issues among the most crucial and vexing ethical problems. There is no question, of course, that environmental issues are pressing and demand response, but his concern is that lacking an adequate ethical-theoretical basis, the response and the decisions taken to initiate action, lacking such grounding, will be short sighted and expressive of one or another special interest rather than that of the global, common good. Indeed, he thinks that in the fog of unknowing the likely outcome is disaster for the natural world and of course all life including humanity that is dependent upon it.

The issue of climate change leads to this kind of hand wringing. Not knowing the extent of our power and thus not knowing how to measure its consequences, we wish for a reset, to go back to a normal where climate and the natural processes dependent upon it, are restored. The Paris Accords purport to chart a way to a condition close to that at the time of the rise of industrialization: “...

same.

Even before the specific problems of technology and climate change are introduced, the question of how to determine responsibility in the sense of fair care is situated at the intersection of knowledge and duty. Simply put the determination of what one (an individual, agency or collective) ought to do requires a complex consideration of what outcome is sought, in this case justice and fairness, what is possible (on the levels of technology, economics and politics), and to what degree. These factors are constrained by the quality and depth of knowledge and when the outcome is at least partly in the distant future by the lack of knowledge.

There is thus an overall issue within the epistemology of ethics. Ethics is not a matter of calculation and although cost benefit analyses may help to inform ethical judgment the latter cannot be reduced to the former. In the modern hospital physicians, their patients and loved ones, routinely face circumstances where it is obvious both that the economic cost of a procedure is a factor that cannot be ignored and that the basis regarding the decision to use the procedure at all transcends economic considerations, and calls upon fundamental beliefs and values, individual and collective, contemporary and traditional, that cannot be mapped against financial considerations. In the end, however, many life and death choices are made where the influence of these two incommensurable modes of understanding compete in a rush to judgment. The problem of climate change is analogous. Of course projected costs should not be ignored, and certainly accepting the burden of expenses unlikely to be met, undermines the very idea of responsible choice. Yet the dilemma remains. One approach, the one it seems has been taken by Lomborg, is that if the procedure is justified on non- economic grounds then we will undertake it only if the projected costs can be met without undue burden. The argument being presented here is that this approach does not properly acknowledge ethical imperatives. These ethical imperatives rest upon judgments that cannot be made by calculative reasoning. How then are they to be made?

7 Jonas, Hans. “The Imperative of Responsibility, In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age” Preface to the English edition, University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. ix – x.
8 From the final document of the Paris accords.

to pursue efforts

to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this

would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change."8 Although the document

acknowledges that this goal does not represent a restoration, the spirit in which it is encouraged is the

Decisions requiring action often appear to be binary. In the case of climate change a series of binary decisions: (1) Is climate change the reality and likely to persist? If yesà(2) Is it (at least partially) the result of human behavior that can be changed? If yes à (3) Can we (scientifically/technically) do action x? If yesà(4) Will all parties agree? If yesàCommence action. Questions (1) and (2) pertain to the past and thus should permit adequate answers. Questions (3) and (4) are in the future and along with knowledge of the actual outcome and its impacts is beyond complete or certain knowledge. In the realm of ethics or duty, where we are frequently faced with uncertainty about the impact of an action, our choices are formed within categories compatible with cultural traditions and beliefs. These certainly vary but in the West the pattern tends to be binary, an ethical either/or. Something of the sort seems evident in Lomborg’s approach: it’s not worth doing because it won’t work as anticipated. What is the ethical motivation within such a stark and impractical attitude?

An understanding of this may be found by exploring the kinds of ethical dilemmas that arise in cases where an undefined duty drives one to take an action. In such a case one is required to carry out an action because of a compelling duty which is for the sake of a general good. The precise nature of that general good is not known – it is to preserve a good in a future context which is not disclosed. This is the case with the climate accords. Although the condition of nature (particularly the global climate and all the interacting systems that it comprises) in the indefinite future cannot be known with a high degree of specificity, it is presumed that it will be analogous to what it is in the present. This presumption is based upon inductive reasoning about the history of the globe’s climate, the ambiguity of which has led to a number of disputes regarding the cause of climate variations and the attendant arguments, often a matter of ideological bias, about whether these variations are fundamentally natural or result from human activity. But regardless of whether one holds climate change to be induced by human activity or not, the duty to respond comes either from a general obligation to nature or out of a sense of responsibility to the future. Neither admits of a calculated or analytical clarification. Thus, our feeling of an imperative to do something to forestall the degradations surely to occur if global warming continues its ascendant path is motivated by a sense of duty that we embrace as an existential commitment.

Divine Intervention?

The dilemma posed by the view that there is an ethical imperative to act in the face of incipient disaster on a global level, an apocalyptic scenario overwhelmingly affecting the already disadvantaged, induced by (mostly) post-industrial human activity, leads to a radical kind of ethical thinking that goes beyond ethics. Presented in this way climate change is an existential threat against which rational calculation can offer no more than a temporary and unequally distributed reprieve. That is to say, the reasoned compromise of the Paris Accords does not answer to the ethical imperative and does not lead to social justice. In the face of the ethical-political crisis one recalls the words of Martin Heidegger in his famous interview with Der Spiegel:

“Philosophy will not be able to effect any direct transformation of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of any simply human contemplation and striving. Only a god can save us now.”9

Heidegger is commenting, in the context of modern technology, not only upon the limitation of calculative, techno-scientific problem solving, but also the human capacity to think, in a deep sense, about the condition of human kind in the world. This sort of fatalistic outlook is one response that appears in the face of ethical crisis of climate change. Alternatively, an existential commitment to action, despite the lack of clear rational grounds, embraces the ethical imperative.

Martin Heidegger, “’Only a God Can Save Us Now’: An Interview with Martin Heidegger,” trans.

David Schendler, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6:1 (1977), pp. 5–27.

`
8

The paradigmatic exposition of an existential commitment to a duty with obvious ethical implications, but where the ethical principle itself is obscure, is Søren Kierkegaard’s troubling account of the binding by Abraham of his son Isaak to fulfill a duty he cannot understand.10 Kierkegaard poses the problem abstractly with the question, Is a teleological suspension of the ethical possible? What he means by this formulation is, can it be that an overriding duty to the highest good demands that one violates the universal-ethical in order to fulfill that duty? This possible violation of the universal- ethical does not overthrow or refute the ethical but only suspends it to return to it once again. How can this be? He means that the suspension of the ethical does not invalidate the ethical because the suspension is only necessary when the circumstances are beyond the comprehension of the ethical. The argument seems to be that the ethical consciousness itself has limits such that some duties cannot be grasped by ethical reflection or that the rational effort to understand the validating principle of the imperative fails and the demanded duty appears to be wrong. Kierkegaard’s discussion of this of course is framed by extremes where the duty (God’s instruction to Abraham to sacrifice his son) is utterly inexplicable and even suggests psychological impairment on the part of anyone willing to follow this duty. Yet the structure is the same as in Lomborg’s reticence to commit to the accords. If the duty implied by the ethical imperative of responsibility cannot be justified by ethical norms or principles of social justice, one looks with an Abraham like faith for a redemptive intervention to save the day.

What can be made of this pattern of thinking? Is this another example of the inadequacy of traditional ethics to address the unprecedented dilemmas that result from advanced technology? For whether or not one believes that global warming and the degradation of the natural environment are a consequence of the deployment of too much technological power, it is still the case that our awareness of the likely fate of the planet is expressed in the discourse of science and technology which, unlike an encounter with the God of Abraham and Isaac (or in mythological drama), we must acknowledge it as the stepchild of our own rational endeavors. If we cannot understand our fate, let alone control it, what are our options?

Technology suggests a spirit of optimism. We understand technology to be creative problem solving, in a sense innovation to save us from ourselves. In the case of climate change the plausible use of technology is ambiguous; our connection to the future is undefined, the specific problem that is to be solved is unknown, the subject of our responsibility unclear.

The impending or already begun crisis of a global climate inhospitable to life on terms that humanity has come to believe is natural may resemble another myth – the myth of the Golem or of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation – one where we have through our technology so to speak outsmarted ourselves. Of course we should not take this analogy too far as we may well be able make the necessary correction. Our understanding of the dynamics of the problem, while certainly not meeting the mostly now abandoned criterion of certainty, on the level of ethics where we are still influenced by the notion of absolute duty, has created an expectation of purity that we are unlikely to realize and which may not serve us well.

Conclusion

The problem of climate change has led us to unusual considerations. As the issue has been moved in its most fundamental form from the arenas of technology, economics and politics and been put forth as a specifically ethical question, the limits of ethical discourse have been reached. The question is not, as Kierkegaard might have put it, one of the ethical within the ethical, but rather one where the limits of ethical reasoning are transcended by what appears to be a duty to act in ways that cannot be justified ethically.

10 This discussion draws primarily on Kierkegaard’s influential text “Fear and Trembling” which was published originally in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio.

The posing of the problem as one that presents an ethical imperative, and the suggestion that the adoption of the Paris Accords fulfills that imperative, has obscured the status of the remediation that may be possible. Bill McKibben’s argument that we need to adjust to the now inevitable deteriorating natural environment, does not seem to have the redemptive purity of an ethical imperative. The Paris Accords stand for compromise and do not force commitment to a single approach. The often unspoken truth that the suffering due to climate change that is likely in much of the under developed world will be ameliorated only slightly if at all undermines the force of declarations of a moral imperative.

Moreover, the notion of an ethical imperative to stop if not reverse the degradation of the natural environment by limiting climate change steers the discussion away from the broader and multifaceted issue of global social justice. It is perhaps this attempt to redirect the prognosis for the world’s future toward the phenomenon of climate change that has led critics of the Paris Accords like Lomborg to object.

If Lomborg’s analysis is correct then it would be ethically wrong to implement the Paris Accords.
Yet his suggestion is that there are alternative protocols that would not lead to the negative consequences his prognosis anticipates. Although what these would be is not clear, economic accommodation for different levels of development is part of it, otherwise the advantage that developed nations have would place undue burdens on less advantaged or less developed nations and still lead to unfair consequences such as those pointed out by António Guterres. To rectify this within the concept of fair-care justice would minimally require, given the long term and dynamic nature of climate change, a kind and degree of knowledge that is not possible. Regarding the impact of climate change in the far distant future neither the assurance of fair care justice nor the certification that it will not be achieved is possible. Since the precautionary principle in the form of watchful waiting is futile and damaging to short term interests it is not ethically justifiable. Thus from an ethical point of view the nature of the issue changes ground to one of pure duty. What duty or obligation (if any) does humankind have for the well-being of the natural order in an indefinite future we cannot know and in the situation where our actions taken in the present might or might not have the consequences we assume? This situation produces a dilemma where our choice is either to ignore the issue and default to addressing short term concerns (mostly self-interest) or to take Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”.

For a transactional and nationalist politician like Donald Trump the embrace of this notion of duty is simply absurd. According to some, we are faced with an absurd situation and our only hope may be in providence. The concern, on the contrary, is for the loss of the status quo. That this may already have been lost, the position argued by McKibben, is denied by Trump as well as the ethical imperative absolutists.

If we were to believe that a divine imperative enjoined us, for example, to cease using carbon based energy sources, then we would, despite other concerns that might constrain a rational actor, go forward in the faith that our concerns would somehow be addressed. Lomborg is not willing to take this step. On the contrary he believes that a rational solution can be found that could provide fare care justice in the present and future. Given the epistemological challenges mentioned above, this solution will be elusive.