{"title":"Why Leave the Car at Home, If That Doesn’t Save the Climate?","authors":"Adriano Mannino","doi":"10.1163/18756735-00000126","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nWhy take individual action against collectively caused evils such as climate change? Prima facie, one’s individual contribution may seem to make a negligible difference at best. Consequentialists as well as consequence-sensitive nonconsequentialists should be interested in whether a consequence-based justification for taking individual climate action can be found nonetheless. The author argues that even though individual agents are able to make a non-zero difference in expectation, the altruistic expected value may be so small as to be insufficiently worthwhile, given the agents’ opportunity cost. In this case, altruistic agents may face a Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), i.e. an altruistic public goods problem. Hence, the consequence-based account of why to leave one’s car at home could be vindicated if the PD can be solved in a consequence-based way. The author offers tentative grounds for optimism about solving the PD in a consequence-based way, and for acting accordingly.","PeriodicalId":43873,"journal":{"name":"Grazer Philosophische Studien-International Journal for Analytic Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2020-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Grazer Philosophische Studien-International Journal for Analytic Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18756735-00000126","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"PHILOSOPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Why take individual action against collectively caused evils such as climate change? Prima facie, one’s individual contribution may seem to make a negligible difference at best. Consequentialists as well as consequence-sensitive nonconsequentialists should be interested in whether a consequence-based justification for taking individual climate action can be found nonetheless. The author argues that even though individual agents are able to make a non-zero difference in expectation, the altruistic expected value may be so small as to be insufficiently worthwhile, given the agents’ opportunity cost. In this case, altruistic agents may face a Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), i.e. an altruistic public goods problem. Hence, the consequence-based account of why to leave one’s car at home could be vindicated if the PD can be solved in a consequence-based way. The author offers tentative grounds for optimism about solving the PD in a consequence-based way, and for acting accordingly.