Abstract
Climate change is changing not only our physical world, but also our intellectual, social, and moral worlds. We are realizing that our situation is profoundly unsafe, interdependent, and uncertain. What, then, does climate change demand of economists, as human beings and as professionals? A discipline of economics based on Enlightenment notions of mechanism and disembodied rationality is not suited to present problems. This essay suggests three major requirements: first, that we take action; second, that we work together; and third, that we focus on avoiding the worst, rather than obtaining the optimal. The essay concludes with suggestions of specific steps that economists should take as researchers, teachers, and in our other roles.
Originally published as: Nelson, J.A. 2013. Ethics and the economist: What climate change demands of us, Ecological Economics, 85(0), 145–154.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In computer-speak, a potentially buggy version of a software package released for testing by prospective users is called a “beta version.” Later releases considered error-free and stable enough for general use (though they will usually be further revised) are often referred to by version numbers.
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Weitzman (2010), quoting climate scientist Wallace Broecker.
- 5.
Or, as put by a broader-thinking ethical philosopher: “Ethics is not about what detached, impersonal, objective , rational agents engaged in grand theorizing deduce. Rather, ethics is and should be about what imperfect human beings living in particular historical, socioeconomic contexts can and should do, given those contexts” (Warren, 2000, p. 114).
- 6.
Or, perhaps, we arrive at the judgments opportunistically. Mary C. Gentile recounts this tale of an MBA graduate being asked about what he had learned in a traditional course on business ethics graduate explained that he had “learned all about the models of ethical analysis…and that whenever he encountered a conflict, he could decide what he wanted to do and then select the model of ethical reasoning that would best support his choice” (Gentile, 2010, p. xi).
- 7.
See Frank, Gilovich, et al. (1993) for evidence that economics teaching has this effect.
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In Nelson (2005) I call this “asymmetric mutuality.”
- 9.
While U.S. culture seems to draw less from these later two than many other cultures, they are not completely absent: “Ask not what your country can do for you,” President John F. Kennedy famously exhorted, “but what you can do for your country.”
- 10.
Perhaps more acceptance by scholars of climate change of such demands on us would also help create better ties between scholars and members of more traditional cultures or moderate religious groups. A haughty attitude of superior secularism, and out-of-hand dismissal of the sorts of rituals and practices that encourage communal and spiritual identities, does not win academics many friends.
- 11.
Exactly how specific environmental structures (e.g., default rules, incentives, framing factors, feedback or lack thereof, and peer pressure) can has been interestingly demonstrated in two recent explorations. Gigerenzer reports on the analysis of the judgments of a group of English magistrates. While perceiving themselves as making complex and rational decisions in the service of justice, the magistrates in actuality acted more in accord with a goal of not being blamed for bad releases of criminal suspects (Gigerenzer, 2007, p. 197). Kitcher, in a refreshing change from philosophies of science that treat science as a pure search for truth, takes into account the more personal goal of a scientist to be “the one who found out the truth” (2011, p. 238), and looks at the implications of this for that social project. A similar study of economists does not come to mind, though a brief study by Margolis suggests that economists are just as prone to the errors of logic that rational choice theorists disdain (Margolis, 1982).
- 12.
Kitcher writes, for example, that “…our Paleolithic predecessors sat down together to decide on the precepts for governing their group life” (2011, p. 42). Relevant to the discussion of the previous section, Kitcher also seems to prioritize reason over emotion when thinking about human motivation. Kitcher assumes that his imagined contemporary human conversationalists, in their weighing of benefits and economic costs, are more moved by the idea of harm to future humans than by issues of species extinction, so that the moral focus should be on the former (2011, pp. 296–7). Yet it seems, empirically, that people are—for better or (mostly, from a humanitarian viewpoint) worse—often more moved by the plight of their pets, to whom they have emotional attachments, and by the plight of big-eyed animals that bring out protective feelings, than by human suffering abroad (especially chronic poverty). While it may be appealing, from the point of view of ethical principles, to disdain the human tendency to focus on “charismatic metafauna” such as baby seals and polar bears, from the point of view of ethical motivation it is not so clear that vividly describing the effects of climate change on Fido and Whiskers is a bad idea.
- 13.
The idea that companies are immune from ethical concerns because their nature is to maximize profits is a creation of economists—strongly preached by Milton Friedman, and weakly preached in all orthodox economics classes. It does not need to be believed (Nelson, forthcoming).
- 14.
See also DeMartino (2011, pp. 144–153) for a discussion of the ethical implications of economists advocating “optimal” but (since much is unknown) potentially damaging structures.
- 15.
For an example of advocacy of this from within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, see Carlin (2008).
- 16.
Other economistic approaches are also apparent in his work—for example, in the idea that (a la Schelling) a loss of agriculture in wealthy countries would not hurt much because agricultural production makes up a small proportion of GDP (Sunstein, 2002/2003, p. 36), and in a pervasive framing of the issues in terms of cost–benefit individual freedom (Sunstein, 2005).
- 17.
This definition has been used by Institutional, social, and feminist economists (e.g., Nelson, 1993).
- 18.
- 19.
This approach is used in teaching materials from the Global Development and Environment Institute (e.g., Goodwin, Nelson, et al., 2008).
- 20.
This includes even prominent women directing important U.S. economic offices: See the comments made by Sheila Bair, chair of the FDIC (in Scherer, 2010).
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Financial support for this project was received from Economists for Equity and the Environment.
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Nelson, J.A. (2016). Ethics and Climate Change Policy. In: Searing, E., Searing, D. (eds) Practicing Professional Ethics in Economics and Public Policy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7306-5_8
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