Bioethics and Climate Change: A Need for Fresh Ethical Theory
Thursday, October 12, 2023
4:00 PM – 5:15 PM ET
Location: Atlantic (Third Floor)
Van Rensselaer Potter’s Bioethics: Bridge to the Future conceived of the field as integrating our understanding of biology with values to help ensure human survival by attention to ecology and unsustainable pursuit of progress. It is a contingent fact of history that bioethics evolved to sideline environmental degradation from its mainstream concerns. Anthropogenic climate change (AGC) has spurred bioethicists to reembrace ecological concern even as a cadre of scholars have pleaded for this for decades. The healthcare industry is an undeniable contributor to the AGC and the threat to health it entails. This presentation, drawing inspiration from Herschell Elliot’s observation, “An acceptable system of ethics is contingent on its ability to preserve the ecosystems which sustain it,” will argue that confronting the AGC’s threat requires an ethics which norms can genuinely weigh short-term benefits and risks against long-term benefits and risks. Based on this premise, the presentation will then argue that bioethics’ conceptual ethical resources are not adequate to this task, proving bioethics an invalid ethics. The presentation will then offer some reflections on how ACG problematizes our scientific understanding in ways that will require a flexible moral imagination to understand moral responsibility for action in ways that extend beyond the anthropocentric, atomistic ethics to an ethics that accounts for human, animal, and ecological good. It will conclude with a call for Bioethics to embrace this theoretical challenge to prepare us to respond to ACG ethically.