“the human moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify … a complex, large-scale and unintentionally caused phenomenon as an important moral imperative” … Either we can do this or we can’t. If we can’t do it for climate change, we can’t do it for anything else; so why focus on this issue rather than any of the many other such issues? And what causes, and who decides, a particular issue to be a “moral imperative” rather than a problem without moral overtones? A lot of question-begging here. The issue is, surely, can sufficient of us grasp the extent to which alleged catastrophic global warming is a real practical issue, what the costs and benefits are, whether or not it is sensible to take action, what priority should this have compared to other issues, e.g. lack of clean water and sanitation for billions of people? Presenting alleged CAGW as a “moral imperative” with which we are allegedly ill-equipped to deal might be an interesting intellectual exercise, but it’s peripheral to the main game of whether or not there is merit in taking costly action to address the alleged threat.
↧