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Defining Risk, Motivating Responsibility and Rethinking Global Warming

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Abstract

This paper breaks with the sociological notion of ‘risk society’ and argues in favour of a philosophical view that sees the two planetary threats of late modernity, nuclear weapons and global warming, as ultimate challenges to morality and politics rather than risks that we can take and manage. The paper also raises the question of why we should feel responsible for the effects of these two global challenges on future generations and in this sense elaborates on the transgenerational chain of parenthood rather than on considerations of justice.

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Notes

  1. There is more on all this in the first chapter Risk or Challenge? of Cerutti (2007). Klinke and Renn (2006) include uncertainty in a broader definition of risk as one of eight evaluation criteria, though they share the notion of risk as the combination of probability and the extent of damage.

  2. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, as summarized in the New York Times of 11 March 2008.

  3. This notion is rather analytical and neutral and does not coincide with Giddens’ “manufactured risk” (Giddens 1999, p. 4), an idea that contains a whole philosophy of history as it is based upon the assumption of an “end of nature” and an “end of tradition”.

  4. It seems to me that only responsibility for others, including future generations, and therefore for the environment, justifies not doing something that could cause harm, even if full scientific evidence of that harm is not yet provided; cf. Whiteside (2006). In this sense the precautionary principle is based on the principle of responsibility.

  5. The nature of the human animal requires civilization (work, communication and trade) as the main tool of survival and well-being.

  6. In the sense of my theory of global challenges the ultimate problems are up to now global warming and ozone layer depletion, but other issues—think of human biotechnology—may in the future be added as soon as enough scientific evidence of their global and lethal character comes up.

  7. To be clear, the primary problem is if we want to take on responsibility for humankind’s survival, while the second is a problem of fairness, that is, if we want to extend it impartially to future generations, far beyond those with whom we have emotional ties.

  8. The complete argument regarding normative doctrines, particularly Rawls’s, is developed in chapter five of Cerutti (2007); there is no room here for a discussion of the two formulations of §44 in the 1971 and 1999 editions of A Theory of Justice. Nor can I enter a broader discussion of normative approaches to climate change, cf. Gardiner (2004), and, for an attitude closer to Dworkin than Rawls, Gosseries (2007).

  9. The mental experiment (in moral philosophy) of imagining a generation ceasing to generate children altogether is of little interest to political philosophy, which is used to reflect on actual or likely, rather than fictitious, states of the world.

  10. This view is not uncontested, cf. Gosseries (2004, pp. 20–21).

  11. As the previous discussion of moral arguments, the idea of redefining ‘humankind’ in the face of global challenges and the discussion of its not-so-linear political consequences are developed in the second part of Cerutti (2007).

References

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Florence, via Bolognese 52, 50139, Florence, Italy

    Furio Cerutti

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  1. Furio Cerutti
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Correspondence to Furio Cerutti.

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Cerutti, F. Defining Risk, Motivating Responsibility and Rethinking Global Warming. Sci Eng Ethics 16, 489–499 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9176-8

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