ABSTRACT
This chapter explains complex interactions between ethical, economic and scientific aspects of global warming. The utilitarian philosophers and economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries argued that the ultimate goal of all activity should be to maximize the sum total of human welfare or happiness. Economists not only try to understand how economies function, but also try to design policies to increase their conception of welfare. Ethical assumptions and values, regarding what is desirable and what is not, are a central feature of much economic analysis, though not always made explicit. The traditional neoclassical approach to economics has often ignored distributional impacts on the poor and on future generations, and the resulting neoliberal policy focus on a narrow concept of efficiency and aggregate economic performance in terms of GDP has dominated current thinking on the economics of climate change. Climate catastrophe, or just unequal access to environmental resources, may also prevent individuals today or in the future from functioning.
