ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the key moral issues posed by climate change. It first considers overarching issues: the appropriate target for harm prevention; the distinction between duties of mitigation and duties of adaptation; instances in which efforts to fulfill these duties will be self-defeating or work at cross-purposes; and the distribution of the economic burdens of fulfilling those duties. The remainder of the chapter reviews challenges to the capacity of traditional moral theories to come to grips with questions of moral responsibility. Some challenges are generic; they are applicable to both individual and institutional agents under any moral theory, while others are specific to agent-types or particular theories. The chapter then surveys differences in the way wrongness is conceptualized, including theories that view wrongness as necessarily linked to harming someone, wronging someone without harming, and doing wrong without wronging anyone. The chapter concludes by showing how the challenge of developing a plausible theory of climate change ethics is magnified by the fact that the adverse consequences are a function of what numerous individuals and institutions do or fail to do, having both international and intergenerational impact.
