Gianfranco Pellegrino

Climate change is a key challenge in the contemporary world. This volume studies climate change through many lenses: politics, law, ethics, philosophy, religion, and contemporary art and culture. The essays explore alternatives for sustainable development and highlight oft-overlooked issues, such as climate change refugees and food justice. Designed as four parts, the volume: first, offers an astute diagnosis of the political and moral intricacies of climate change; second, deals specifically with topics in the political theory of climate change governance; third, focuses on the moral theory of climate change; and, finally, analyzes the specific ramifications of the climate change problem. With contributions from experts across the world, this will be especially useful to scholars and students of climate change studies, development studies, environmental studies, politics, and ethics and philosophy. It will also interest policy-makers, social activists, governmental and non-governmental agencies, and those in media and journalism.

I am very grateful to the contributors for this symposium for their essays on my Punishment book. Each focuses with different elements of my work. Antony Duff examines the definition of punishment in my first few pages. Michelle Madden Dempsey analyses the importance given to coherence in my account and critique of expressivist theories of punishment. Richard Lippke considers my statements about negative retributivism in an important new defence of that approach. I examine each of these in turn below. While I do not change my position, they draw attention to certain features in my overall argument worth reflecting on at greater length. So I welcome this opportunity to address and clarify these now and grateful for their helping me to rethink my original arguments.

Il saggio introduce le tematiche di questo numero, soffermandosi in parti- colare sulla rilevanza etica e politica del cambiamento climatico. Dopo una rapida spiegazione dell'effetto serra naturale e artificiale, si ripercorrono le teorie che concepiscono il cambiamento climatico come un problema di giustizia distributiva. Secondo alcuni autori queste teorie non sono suffi- cienti per dare strumenti adeguati, perché il cambiamento climatico rappre- senta un problema etico nuovo, che richiede una strumentazione etica ine- dita. Il saggio approfondisce alcune delle caratteristiche nuove dell'etica del cambiamento climatico, soprattutto in relazione all'impatto che le scelte presenti avranno sulla qualità della vita delle generazioni future.It is an introduction to the topic of the present issue of "La società degli in- dividui", dealing with the ethical and political relevance of climate change. After a brief account of the greenhouse effect, various approaches to clima- te change as a matter of distributive justice are considered. According to many authors, these approaches are inadequate, because climate change is a new issue, requiring new tools. The paper focusses on some of the new fea- tures of climate ethics, mainly in connection with the effects that our pre- sent choices may have on the quality of life of future generations

In this paper, two different axiologies of pleasure are attributed to Hutcheson and Mill. Hutcheson endorsed a hedonist axiology, where quality of pleasure works as a still quantitative factor, able to counterbalance other quantitative features of pleasurable mental states - such as intensity and duration. By contrast, in Mill's view of value, the quality of pleasures is the only value-making feature, silencing any contribution from other quantitative elements. Therefore, the presence of certain qualitative characteristics - namely, the connection of certain pleasures with human active faculties - becomes a necessary and sufficient condition of value. Due to this unique role of quality, Mill's axiology opens the way to non-pleasurable experiences being valuable - for non-pleasurable exercises of the human active faculties meet the condition to be valuable states. Thus, Mill's theory of value is declared non-hedonistic - against the recent claims to the contrary put forth by W. Donner.

This paper focuses on a specific proposal connected with the issue of mitigating climate change by reducing GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. The idea of campaigning in favour of a temporary reproductive suspension, to be addressed to a range of citizens of developed countries, is explored. Some details of the proposal are specified, and the proposal itself is defended against four objec- tions: 1. that it encroaches reproductive freedom; 2. that it subtracts from the overall value the value of future lives; 3. that it is costly and ineffectual; 4. that it is unfair, especially when women are considered.

Michael Thompson recently advanced a “naïve action theory” as an alternative to the “sophisticated” accounts of action displayed by ordinary folk psychology. In what follows I defend the plausibility of intentional psychology and folk psychological explanations. I do this in two ways. First I question that naïve explanations are more naïve than the ones provided by folk psychology and suggest that the latter are phenomenologically prior to the former. Second, I focus on the role of intentionality in deliberation and action planning, suggesting that folk psychology provides a better answer than naïve theory to the question of what makes actions intentional.

Punishment is a topic of increasing importance for citizens and policy-makers. The same can be said for academic researchers and students. Mass imprisonment has reached record high levels while public confidence is often lacking. New thinking is required urgently to address these challenges. Moreover, there have been several key developments in the philosophy of punishment over the last 20 years absent in leading guides including the communicative theory of punishment, restorative justice and my novel unified theory of punishment. My book Punishment is a critical introduction to the philosophy of punishment attempting to offer a new and refreshing approach to benefit scholars and students alike. While the book is primarily philosophical, it brings together relevant insights from law, criminology, criminal justice, politics and sociology. The aim is to provide both a comprehensive overview with new insights on many familiar theories of punishment.

Population ethics is defined and presented, and some of the paradoxes it encapsulates are spelled out. It is argued that the concept of the quality of a life or of a life worth living can- not be avoided if inquiry on many relevant ethical and political topics is to be pursued in a theoretically fitting mode. In particular, the article deals with the asymmetry between rea- sons for not creating unhappy lives and reasons for creating happy lives, the well-known repugnant conclusion and the paradox of mere addition