Ethics in the Anthropocene: Moral Responses to the Climate Crisis

Abstract

This review essay looks at Andrew Brei’s edited volume, Ecology, ethics and hope (Rowman & Littlefield, London, 2016), Candis Callison’s How climate change comes to matter: The communal life of facts (Duke University Press, Durham, 2014), Randall Curren and Ellen Metzger’s Living well now and in the future: Why sustainability matters (MIT Press, Cambridge, 2017), Willis Jenkins’ The future of ethics: Sustainability, social justice, and religious creativity (Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 2013), and Byron Williston’s The Anthropocene project: Virtue in the age of climate change (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015). These recent works highlight various normative approaches for engaging with what is often referred to as the Anthropocene. Drawing on virtue ethics, pragmatism, and concepts such as intergenerational justice, they seek to address some of the defining moral challenges of our time: how we should respond to this unprecedented era of anthropogenic climate and environmental change, and what ethical resources we can draw on to guide our response. On a larger level, they reveal how the climate crisis is testing the limits of our current moral systems and helping to drive greater ethical innovation and adaptation in the process.