Climate Change Ethics: Life and Death

Speaker: John Broome, Visiting Scholar, Professor of Moral Philosophy at University of Oxford

Talk abstract:

Climate change raises important and difficult issues of ethics. Broadly they fall into two classes. There are issues of justice concerned with how the work of dealing with climate change should be shared among countries and people. There are issues of value concerned with judging the harm that climate change will do, and the benefits of measures to control it. I shall concentrate on value, and particularly on the special problems for value theory that arise from the life-and-death effects of climate change. Climate change will shorten many people's lives, and it will affect the number of people who will be born. How should we value these effects?

Bio:

John Broome is Emeritus White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Stanford. He was previously Professor of Economics at Bristol. His books include *Counting the Cost of Global warming* (1992), *Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World*

(2012) and *Rationality Through Reasoning* (2013).