Climate Ethics

This article outlines key developments in the philosophical literature on climate change. The allocation of the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas emissions between states and individual duties of climate justice are two major topics that climate ethics scholars have discussed by drawing on deontological theory, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. This article explores the connections between ethics and climate justice to present these two topics. In addition, it introduces three emerging sub-fields in climate ethics: the ethics of climate engineering, non-anthropocentric climate ethics, and the ethics of procreation. It concludes that as the remaining global carbon budget dwindles, radical lifestyle changes become more and more pressing and should move to the forefront of the debate.