Value-Able Valuers: Anthropogenic Climate Change and Expanding Community to the “Radically Other”

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change creates unique challenges for policy and ethics, but also new opportunities for conceptualizing moral community. Through the lens of valuing, I develop a framework for approaching climate change through the lens of expanding those whom we consider relevant to our own lives and evaluative processes. Distant humans are an important to this expansion, but the ultimate goal includes non-humans in our moral community. In becoming more receptive to the interests of those very unlike ourselves, we create opportunities for greater resilience, both for ourselves and for other organisms and ecosystems.