The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change Values, Poverty, and Policy

About this book

The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change examines the threat that climate change poses to projects of poverty eradication, sustainable development, and biodiversity preservation. It discusses the values that support these projects and evaluates the normative bases of climate change policy. It regards climate change policy as a public problem that normative philosophy can shed light on and assumes that the development of policy should be based on values regarding what is important to respect, preserve, and protect. What sort of policy do we owe the poor of the world who are particularly vulnerable to climate change? Why should our generation take on the burden of mitigating climate change caused, in no small part, by emissions from people now dead? What value is lost when species go extinct, because of climate change? The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change presents a broad and inclusive discussion of climate change policy, relevant to those with interests in public policy, development studies, environmental studies, political theory, and moral and political philosophy.

Contents

1. Danger, poverty, and human dignity
2. The value of biodiversity
3. Risks, uncertainties, and precaution
4. Discounting and the future
5. The right to sustainable development
6. Responsibility and climate change policy
7. Policy and urgency
8. Frankenstorms

Appendix 1. The anti-poverty principle and the non-identity problem
Appendix 2. Climate change and the human rights of future persons: assessing four

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Biography

Darrel Moellendorf is Professor of International Political Theory at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat, Frankfurt am Main. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Justice (2002) and Global Inequality Matters (2009). He co-edited Jurisprudence (2004, with Christopher J. Roederer), Current Debates in Global Justice (2005, with Gillian Brock), Global Justice: Seminal Essays (2008, with Thomas Pogge) and The Handbook of Global Ethics (2014, with Heather Widdows). He has been a Member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a recipient of DAAD and NEH Fellowships, and a Senior Fellow at Justitia Amplificata at Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg.