Letting Climate Change

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
CHARLOTTE FRANZISKA UNRUH
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Real World ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Moral Relevance ◽  
Additional Argument ◽  
Moral Guidance

Abstract Recent work by Ingmar Persson and Jason Hanna has posed an interesting new challenge for deontologists: How can they account for so-called cases of letting oneself do harm? In this article, I argue that cases of letting oneself do harm are structurally similar to real-world cases such as climate change, and that deontologists need an account of the moral status of these cases to provide moral guidance in real-world cases. I then explore different ways in which deontologists can solve this challenge and argue that the most promising way to conceive of cases of letting oneself do harm is as nonstandard cases of allowing harm, supplemented with an additional argument for the moral relevance of one's own agency. The upshot is that cases of letting oneself do harm are both more theoretically challenging and practically important than has been acknowledged.

Act Consequentialism and the No-Difference Challenge

2020 ◽  
pp. 633-654
Author(s):  
Holly Lawford-Smith ◽  
William Tuckwell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Real World ◽  
Global Poverty ◽  
Difference Making ◽  
Act Consequentialism

According to act-consequentialism, only actions that make a difference to an outcome can be morally bad. Yet, there are classes of actions that don’t make a difference, but nevertheless seem to be morally bad. Explaining how such non-difference making actions are morally bad presents a challenge for act-consequentialism: the no-difference challenge. In this chapter we go into detail on what the no-difference challenge is, focusing in particular on act consequentialism. We talk about how different theories of causation affect the no-difference challenge; how the challenge shows up in real-world cases, including voting, global labor injustice, global poverty, and climate change; and we work through a number of the solutions to the challenge that have been offered, arguing that many fail to actually meet it. We defend and extend one solution that does, and we present a further solution of our own.

scholarly journals Transforming Cultural Ideas of Aging and Disability to Improve Policy and Practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 645-645
Author(s):  
Anne Ordway
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Quality Of Health Care ◽  
Real World ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Full Participation

Abstract Aging and disability are normative processes that extend across the lifespan. However, ageism and ableism are incorporated into many of our practices, programs, and policies—devaluing the lives of older adults and people aging with disabilities and ultimately preventing their full participation in society. Ageism and ableism are closely connected. For example, both systems identify impairment as an individual and social liability. As recent studies have demonstrated, this has real world implications for the quantity and quality of health care requested, delivered, and received by both older adults and people with disabilities. In this session, we discuss the connections between these two forms of oppression and present recent work by researchers in both fields and the FrameWorks Institute that shows how to transform our cultural ideas of aging and disability and development more inclusive policies and services. Part of a symposium sponsored by the Lifelong Disabilities Interest Group.

The future of utilitarianism

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-166
Author(s):  
Tim Mulgan
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Climate Change Impact ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Future People ◽  
Change Impact ◽  
Change Climate ◽  
Practical Implications

My recent work has focused on the demands of utilitarianism, and our obligations to future people. In my current work, I draw on that earlier work, and ask how utilitarians might deal with the ethical challenges of climate change. Climate change has obvious practical implications. It will kill millions of people, wipe out thousands of species, and so on. My question in this paper is much narrower. How might climate change impact on moral theory — and especially on the debate between utilitarians and their non-utilitarian rivals?

scholarly journals Multifaith Third Spaces: Digital Activism, Netpeace, and the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geraldine Smith ◽  
Anna Halafoff
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Real World ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
Digital Activism ◽  
Faith Traditions ◽  
Third Spaces ◽  
Material Religion

Multifaith spaces typically imply sites where people of diverse faith traditions gather to participate in shared activities or practices, such as multifaith prayer rooms, multifaith art exhibitions, or multifaith festivals. Yet, there is a lack of literature that discusses online multifaith spaces. This paper focuses on the website of an Australian multifaith organisation, the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC), which we argue is a third space of digital activism. We begin by outlining the main aims of the multifaith movement and how it responds to global risks. We then review religion and geography literature on space, politics and poetics, and on material religion and embodiment. Next, we discuss third spaces and digital activism, and then present a thematic and aesthetic analysis on the ARRCC website drawing on these theories. We conclude with a summary of our main findings, arguing that mastery of the online realm through digital third spaces and activism, combined with a willingness to partake in “real-world”, embodied activism, can assist multifaith networks and social networks more generally to develop Netpeace and counter the risks of climate change collaboratively.

scholarly journals On the Attribution of a Single Event to Climate Change

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (22) ◽  
pp. 8297-8301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit Hansen ◽  
Maximilian Auffhammer ◽  
Andrew R. Solow
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Confidence Interval ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Extreme Weather ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Attributable Risk ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Single Event ◽  
Weather Events

Abstract There is growing interest in assessing the role of climate change in observed extreme weather events. Recent work in this area has focused on estimating a measure called attributable risk. A statistical formulation of this problem is described and used to construct a confidence interval for attributable risk. The resulting confidence is shown to be surprisingly wide even in the case where the event of interest is unprecedented in the historical record.

scholarly journals Disembodying cognition

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anjan Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Real World ◽  
Grounded Cognition ◽  
Perceptual Information ◽  
Knowing How ◽  
Neuronal Ensembles ◽  
Sensory Motor ◽  
Motor Information

AbstractThe idea that concepts are embodied by our motor and sensory systems is popular in current theorizing about cognition. Embodied cognition accounts come in different versions and are often contrasted with a purely symbolic amodal view of cognition. Simulation, or the hypothesis that concepts simulate the sensory and motor experience of real world encounters with instances of those concepts, has been prominent in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Here, with a focus on spatial thought and language, I review some of the evidence cited in support of simulation versions of embodied cognition accounts. While these data are extremely interesting and many of the experiments are elegant, knowing how to best interpret the results is often far from clear. I point out that a quick acceptance of embodied accounts runs the danger of ignoring alternate hypotheses and not scrutinizing neuroscience data critically. I also review recent work from my lab that raises questions about the nature of sensory motor grounding in spatial thought and language. In my view, the question of whether or not cognition is grounded is more fruitfully replaced by questions about gradations in this grounding. A focus on disembodying cognition, or on graded grounding, opens the way to think about how humans abstract. Within neuroscience, I propose that three functional anatomic axes help frame questions about the graded nature of grounded cognition. First, are questions of laterality differences. Do association cortices in both hemispheres instantiate the same kind of sensory or motor information? Second, are questions about ventral dorsal axes. Do neuronal ensembles along this axis shift from conceptual representations of objects to the relationships between objects? Third, are questions about gradients centripetally from sensory and motor cortices towards and within perisylvian cortices. How does sensory and perceptual information become more language-like and then get transformed into language proper?

The Carnivore Strikes Back

Dialogue ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 661-668
Author(s):  
L. W. Sumner
Keyword(s):  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Real World ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Food Source ◽  
The Real ◽  
Common Concern ◽  
Food Scarcity ◽  
Moral Vegetarianism ◽  
Moral Frameworks

Since philosophers began thinking seriously about the moral status of non-human animals, many of the practices we once took for granted have come to be condemned as unjustifiable, among them our reliance on animals as a food source. While the arguments which have been adduced in support of moral vegetarianism invoke quite different (indeed incompatible) moral frameworks, they begin with a common concern for the welfare of animals. In the real world of practising vegetarians, this concern tends to be subordinated to considerations of health or food scarcity. Philosophical vegetarians need not deny, and have not denied, the importance of these further considerations. But among philosophers the case for moral vegetarianism has rested primarily on arguments from animal welfare.

Shame, Guilt and Morality

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrice Teroni ◽  
Otto Bruun
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Moral Relevance ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
The Social ◽  
Shame And Guilt

AbstractThe connection between shame, guilt and morality is the topic of many recent debates. A broad tendency consists in attributing a higher moral status and a greater moral relevance to guilt, a claim motivated by arguments that tap into various areas of morality and moral psychology. The Pro-social Argument has it that guilt is, contrary to shame, morally good since it promotes pro-social behaviour. Three other arguments claim that only guilt has the requisite connection to central moral concepts: the Responsibility Argument appeals to the ties between guilt and responsibility, the Autonomy Argument to the heteronomy of shame and the Social Argument to shame's link with reputation. In this paper, we scrutinize these arguments and argue that they cannot support the conclusion that they try to establish. We conclude that a narrow focus on particular criteria and a misconception of shame and guilt have obscured the important roles shame plays in our moral lives.

scholarly journals Hidden altruism in a real-world setting

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 20130884 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. J. Raihani
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Real World ◽  
Opposite Effect ◽  
Empirical Models ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cooperative Behaviour ◽  
Real World Setting ◽  
Interaction Partners ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Using Data

Concerns for reputation can promote cooperative behaviour. Individuals that behave cooperatively stand to benefit if they gain in influence, status or are more likely to be chosen as interaction partners by others. Most theoretical and empirical models of cooperation predict that image score will increase with cooperative contributions. Individuals are therefore expected to make higher contributions when observed by others and should opt to make contributions publicly rather than privately, particularly when contributions are higher than average. Here, however, I find the opposite effect. Using data from an online fundraising website, I show that donors are more likely to opt for anonymity when making extremely low and extremely high donations. Mid-range donations, on the other hand, are typically publicized. Recent work has shown that extremely generous individuals may be ostracized or punished by group members. The data presented here suggest that individuals may hide high donations to avoid these repercussions.

scholarly journals Sound Symbolism in Baseball Player Names

Names ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-35
Author(s):  
Stephanie S. Shih ◽  
Deniz Rudin
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Real World ◽  
Major League Baseball ◽  
Sound Symbolism ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Major League ◽  
Physical Attributes ◽  
Naming Practices

Recent work has argued that sound symbolism plays a much larger part in language than previously believed, given the assumption of the arbitrariness of the sign. A slate of recent papers on Pokémonastics, for example, has found sound symbolic associations to be rampant in Pokémon names cross-linguistically. In this paper, we explore a real-world dataset that parallels Pokémon, in which human players similarly have physical attributes of weight, height, and power: Major League Baseball. We investigated phonological correlations between baseball player statistics and their given first names, chosen baseball-official first names,and baseball nicknames. We found numerous sound symbolic associations in player-chosen names and nicknames, where conscious design may play a role in choosing a name that communicates an attribute. These associations were often mediated by language-specific hypocoristic formation processes. We conclude that sound symbolism occurs in real-world naming practices, but only when names are chosen in cognizance of the relevant attributes.

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