Kent A. Peacock

RésuméCet article défend une approche à la philosophic et à l'éthique environnementale qui a originalement été avancée par Aldo Leopold. Selon cet auteur, l'éthique peut être comprise, d'un point de vue biologique, comme la forme spécifiquement humaine de la symbiose. La question cruciate de notre époque est de savoir si les humains peuvent coexister avec l'environnement global en un état de symbiose. La philosophie et les sciences humaines en général peuvent contribuer grandement à l'atteinte de ce but, à cause de la façon très spéciale dont le caractère même des actions et des æuvres humaines peut être amplifié par l'écosystème. Je critique un argument thermodynamique qui a été formulé contre la possibilité de la symbiose humaine; et je mets en garde contre les tendances à l'autoritarisme et è l'évasion par l'introspection qui sont typiques des cultures en état de crise écologique.

This paper is a report on the viability, both technical and ethical, of negative emissions technologies (NETs) in climate change mitigation. Given present levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, NETs are almost certainly required in order to avoid the most serious consequences of anthropogenic carbonization. Critics argue that we should not rely on the promise of future NETs because that could be taken as an excuse to avoid decarbonization in the near term. The concern is genuine, but if the prima facie arguments for drawing down carbon as soon as possible are correct, ways must be found to counter the incentives to defer the immediate deployment of NETs and other forms of mitigation. A policy instrument is sketched which could help accomplish that task.

ABSTRACTJames Hansen and others have argued that climate scientists are often reluctant to speak out about extreme outcomes of anthropogenic carbonization. According to Hansen, such reticence lessens the chance of effective responses to these threats. With the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet as a case study, reasons for scientific reticence are reviewed. The challenges faced by scientists in finding the right balance between reticence and speaking out are both ethical and methodological. Scientists need a framework within which to find this balance. Such a framework can be found in the long-established practices of professional ethics.

James Hansen and others have argued that climate scientists are often reluctant to speak out about extreme outcomes of anthropogenic carbonization. According to Hansen, such reticence lessens the chance of effective responses to these threats. With the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet as a case study, reasons for scientific reticence are reviewed. The challenges faced by scientists in finding the right balance between reticence and speaking out are both ethical and methodological. Scientists need a framework within which to find this balance. Such a framework can be found in the long-established practices of professional ethics.

It continues to be alleged that superluminal in uences of any sort would be inconsistent with special relativity for the following three reasons: they would imply the existence of a ‘distinguished’ frame; they would allow the detection of absolute motion; and they would violate the relativity of simultaneity. This paper shows that the first two objections rest upon very elementary misunderstandings of Minkowski geometry and on lingering Newtonian intuitions about instantaneity. The third objection has a basis, but rather than invalidating the notion of faster-than-light influences it points the way to more general conceptions of simultaneity that could allow for quantum nonlocality in a natural way.

Suppose you woke up one morning having utterly forgotten what year it was, or, indeed, what century and what millennium it was, but with all your cognitive faculties otherwise intact. In particular, you remember that human population increases monotonically with time, implying that, in later years, there are far more positions you could be occupying in the whole set of all persons who have ever lived or will live. Then, John Leslie tells us, you will apply your knowledge of probability theory in a certain way and conclude that, whatever year you may be in, it is probable that it is uncomfortably close to the point at which the human species meets its quietus. You think, “My God, I’ve overslept and missed most of history.”

Not too many metaphysicians in these hypercritical times would dream of offering a theory of everything, but Storrs McCall, who modestly compares his new book to The Origin of Species, claims that his theory may accomplish nothing less than to "illuminate, perhaps even resolve" problems such as "the direction and flow of time; what causation consists of; the nature of scientific laws; the interpretation of quantum mechanics; objective probability; counterfactuals and related conditionals; the identity of individuals across possible worlds; essential properties... practical reason and decision, and the problem of free will". His attempt is breathtaking in its thoroughness and ingenuity.

I present a thought experiment in quantum mechanics and tease out some of its implications for the doctrine of “peaceful coexistence”, which, following Shimony, I take to be the proposition that quantum mechanics does not force us to revise or abandon the relativistic picture of causality. I criticize the standard arguments in favour of peaceful coexistence on the grounds that they are question-begging, and suggest that the breakdown of Lorentz-invariant relativity as a principle theory would be a natural development, given the general trend of physics in this century.