Dale Jamieson

The rise of physicalism and naturalism, the development of cognitive science, and the explosion and popularization of knowledge about animal behavior has brought us to see that most of the properties that were once thought to distinguish humans from other animals are shared with other animals. Many people now see properties that are morally relevant to how it is permissible to treat animals, such as sentience, as widely distributed. Agency, however, is one area in which the retreat from human uniqueness is halting. In this essay I suggest that we should feel the same pressure to bring together accounts of human and animal agency that we feel with respect to sentience and other such characteristics. I go on to diagnose the resistance, and briefly sketch how things might look if we were to see agency as continuous.

I begin by providing some background to conceptions of responsibility. I note the extent of disagreement in this area, the diverse and cross-cutting distinctions that are deployed, and the relative neglect of some important problems. These facts make it difficult to attribute responsibility for climate change, but so do some features of climate change itself which I go on to illuminate. Attributions of responsibility are often contested sites because such attributions are fundamentally pragmatic, mobilized in the service of a normative outlook. We should be pluralists about responsibility and shape whatever conceptions can help to explain, guide, and motivate our responses to climate change. I sketch one such notion, ‘intervention-responsibility’, and argue that it should be ascribed to international regimes and organizations, states and other jurisdictions, individuals, and firms. Each has different capacities and thus different intervention-responsibilities responsibilities, but these differences are not always mirrored in public discussion. In particular, the moral responsibility of firms has been greatly neglected.

Il cambiamento climatico globale pone sfide senza precedenti ai nostri mo- di di concepire la morale e la politica. Siamo abituati a vedere un problema morale in situazioni in cui un individuo chiaramente identificabile inten- zionalmente ne danneggi un altro, a sua volta chiaramente identificabile; e in cui sia gli individui coinvolti, che il danno in questione, stiano fra loro in una relazione spazio-temporale di vicinanza. Il cambiamento climatico glo- bale danneggerà senz'altro milioni di persone, ma secondo modalità com- pletamente diverse da queste. Dal punto di vista politico, d'altro canto, l'in- trattabilità del fenomeno è dovuta al fatto che siamo abituati a prendere de- cisioni pubbliche in base a preferenze momentanee, piuttosto che interessi a lungo termine e valori condivisi. Per affrontare il cambiamento climatico globale abbiamo dunque bisogno di riformare sia i nostri modi di concepire la problematicità morale, che il nostro stile di deliberazione politica. Per fare questo, è necessario partire dagli individui: fornendo una visione ideale di che tipo di carattere sia più adatto per vivere in un mondo globalizzato e altamente interconnesso come il nostro.Global climate change poses unprecedented challenges to our moral and political systems. We are used to see a situation as morally problematic when a clearly identifiable individual intentionally damages another, her- self clearly identifiable; and when these individuals, as well as the damage done, are close in space and time. Global climate change will certainly da- mage millions of people, but will do so in ways quite different from that. From the political point of view, the intractability of the problem is due to our often taking public decisions based on transitory preferences, rather than long-term interests and shared values. In order to face global climate change, we thus need to reform both our ways of conceiving moral pro- blems, and our style of political deliberation. To do so, we must begin from individuals: providing an ideal of character for what is required to live in a highly interconnected, globalized world

Some ecologists, philosophers, and policy analysts believe that ecosystem health can be defined in a rigorous way and employed as a management goal in environmental policy. The idea of ecosystem health may have something to recommend it as part of a rhetorical strategy, but I am dubious about its utility as a technical term in environmental policy. I develop several objections to this latest version of scientism in environmental policy, and conclude that our environmental problems fundamentally involve problems in our institutions of governance, our systems of value, and our ways of knowing. These are the problems that most need to be addressed

The problem of Evolutionary Altruism (EA) "is to show how\nbehaviors that benefit others at the expense of self can\nevolve;" group selection is the key to the solution of this\nproblem. The problem of Psychological Altruism (PA) is to\ndetermine whether people "have altruistic desires that are\npsychologically ultimate." After carefully considering the\narguments of both psychologists and philosophers, Sober and\nWilson render the verdict "not proven." But just in the\nnick of time, evolutionary biology rides to the rescue; it\nsucceeds where psychology and philosophy fail in\nvindicating our good nature. In this paper, I will discuss\nSober and Wilson's treatment of PA. (edited)