Tim Mulgan

Our everyday notions of responsibility are often driven by our need to justify ourselves to specific others – especially those we harm, wrong, or otherwise affect. One challenge for contemporary ethics is to extend this interpersonal urgency to our relations with those future people who are harmed or affected by our actions. In this article, I explore our responsibility for climate change by imagining a possible ‘broken future’, damaged by the carbon emissions of previous generations, and then asking what its inhabitants might think of our current behaviour, our moral thinking, and our excuses. In particular, I will focus on a simplified scenario where present people can only avoid a broken future by sacrificing Rawlsian favourable conditions. Suppose we refuse to avoid a broken future, on the grounds that we cannot be expected to make such great sacrifices. If the broken future lacks favourable conditions, will its inhabitants accept our excuses? Will they hold us responsible for things we regard as excusable? If so, should we be guided by their judgements or by our own?

An introductory ethics course serves many and often disparate ends, so much so that it may be difficult to find a theme or question that can tie these ends together in a coherent course narrative. This paper shares the author’s attempt to do so. In addition to high student interest in the subject, the topic of our obligation to future generations has the advantage of naturally leading a course through several systematic areas of philosophical importance. This topic lends itself not only to moral theory (e.g. the Nonidentity Problem), but also metaphysics (e.g. the metaphysics of personhood underpinning the Nonidentity Problem), political theory (e.g. utilitarian vs. Rawlsian answers to the question), and applied ethics (e.g. population policies). The author speaks to this topic’s adaptability to various levels of study (introductory, advanced, and graduate) and explains how the theme is taught at each level.

Il cambiamento climatico presenta caratteristiche inedite che mettono in di- scussione il pensiero morale cui siamo abituati. In questo saggio, si rico- struiscono le modifiche che sarebbero necessarie per pensare le questioni morali poste dalla prospettiva di un mondo che subisca gli effetti del cam- biamento climatico: si potrebbe trattare di un mondo in frantumi, dove non ci sono più le condizioni minime di benessere, e le nozioni cui siamo abi- tuati – come certi diritti o l'ideale dell'eguaglianza – non valgono più e debbono venire sostituite da una nuova etica, che non potrà più affidarsi a intuizioni morali, per quanto solide e radicate.Climate change has new features that challenge our standard ethical thought. In this paper, the changes that are needed to deal with the moral is- sues raised in a world affected by the consequences of climate change are outlined. A climate-change-affected world might be a broken world, where no favorable conditions hold and notions which we were used to – such as rights or the ideal of equality – are no longer valid and should be replaced with a new ethic. No appeal to entrenched moral intuitions will work in such a new world

Two familiar worldviews dominate Western philosophy: materialist atheism and the benevolent God of the Abrahamic faiths. Tim Mulgan explores a third way. Ananthropocentric Purposivism claims that there is a cosmic purpose, but human beings are irrelevant to it. Purpose in the Universe develops a philosophical case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism that it is at least as strong as the case for either theism or atheism. He draws on a range of secular and religious ethical traditions to conclude that a non-human-centred cosmic purpose can ground a distinctive human morality. Our moral practices, our view of the moral universe, and our moral theory are all transformed if we shift from the familiar choice between a universe without meaning and a universe where humans matter to the less self-aggrandising thought that, while it is about something, the universe is not about us.