What Should Individuals Do about Climate Change?

Marion Hourdequin is a Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College whose work focuses on environmental philosophy, climate ethics, and relational ethics. She is the author of Environmental Ethics: From Theory to Practice (2nd edition, 2024) and co-editor, with David Havlick, of Restoring Layered Landscapes (2016). She served as President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics from 2022 to 2024, and she is an Associate Editor for the journal Environmental Ethics.Dan C. Shahar is MBA Program Director and a Teaching Assistant Professor at West Virginia University. His research explores the moral and political dimensions of humanity's relationship with the natural world. He is the author of Why It's OK to Eat Meat (Routledge, 2021), co-editor (with David Schmidtz) of Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works (3rd edition, 2018), and author of over a dozen journal articles and book chapters.Allen Thompson is Associate Professor of Ethics and Environmental Philosophy at Oregon State University.

• Opening Statements 1. Opening Statement: Why Individual Emissions Matter - Marion Hourdequin 2. Opening Statement: Facing our Limits – Dan C. Shahar Replies 3. Reply to Shahar: The Pervasiveness of Climate Change Provides Reasons and Opportunities to Act – Marion Hourdequin 4. Reply to Hourdequin: Defending Specialization and Division of Moral Labor – Dan C. Shahar Concluding Statements 5. Closing Statement: Individual Actions Matter for Climate Change – Marion Hourdequin 6. Closing Statement: Embracing Diversity among Altruists – Dan C. Shahar

“The authors agree that climate change is a serious problem and there are many ways people can appropriately respond; they disagree about the threat posed by climate change, the relevant moral normativity, and I think, ultimately, about ethics and the constitution of a person’s ethical agency. In the end, both positions are reasonable. There’s no crucial error to be found here, on one side or the other. Taking a side in this debate, it seems, is to hold one of two competing ways to think about who we are and the best ways to respond to problems posed by climate change.”– Allen Thompson, from the Foreword