Climate change: life and death - by John Broome - 30.6.2016

What can philosophy contribute to climate policy? The need for thinking about fairness and justice is widely recognized, in determining how the effort to reduce climate change should be distributed between countries. This lecture argues that there is also an important need for value theory, in evaluating the harm that climate change will do and in determining what effort should be put into reducing it. Among other applications of value theory, we need to judge the value of changes in the world's human population. Climate change and climate policy will have major effects on population. If climate change is extreme - as is possible - it will even cause a collapse in the population. Yet policymakers have so far paid no attention to evaluating these changes. The philosophy of population ethics is needed to close this gap.

Prof. John Broome, University of Oxford, is Emeritus White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy and Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College.