Climate Change: Ethics and Politics

The primary goal of the course is to teach students the method of philosophical reflection in this field, which involves:
- identifying an environmental problem and accurately describing it from a scientific point of view;
- reflecting on the distribution of responsibility, both in terms of having caused the problem (backward-looking responsibility) and in terms of being able to solve or address it (forward-looking responsibility);
- identifying the agents who can or should intervene—whether individuals, institutions, or both;
- developing a moral theory capable of solidly justifying the attribution of responsibility to the identified agents.

By the end of the course, students will have acquired basic competencies regarding some of the key issues addressed in environmental ethics, such as climate change; the role and capacity of institutions to manage it effectively; what individuals may be called upon to do; and on what moral grounds such expectations can be based.