Research Seminars Application: Climate Ethics and Climate Economics

The chief goal of the series is to get economists and legal scholars talking with philosophers and political theorists about the ethical foundations of their arguments. Economic arguments about climate change often embody ethical assumptions, such as the claim that future costs and benefits should be given less weight than present-day ones--which philosophers find problematic. Yet while contemporary climate philosophers have devoted extensive attention to the climate economics literature, economists have by and large not returned the favour. In the rare instances where economists do seek to draw explicitly on moral theory-such as Kenneth Arrow's invocation of Samuel Scheffler's 'agent-centred prerogatives' to defend giving less weight to the future (1999: 16)--philosophers sometimes wonder whether the economists have really grasped the arguments (Caney 2008: 550).

Some mainstream economists, in turn, seem to doubt that philosophers have any business intervening in the debate. This reflects not only a divide between disciplines, but a disagreement between some British economists and mainstream economists in the United States. British economics explicitly draws on the utilitarian philosophical tradition. In contrast, US economists tend to hold that analyses of costs and benefits should not try to make ethical judgements, but follow preferences revealed through markets (Nordhaus 2008: 176; Broome 2012: 105-6; Jamieson 2013: 121). Thus Yale's William Nordhaus accused a major report sponsored by the British government--the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change--of reflecting a 'Government House utilitarianism' that 'takes the lofty vantage point of the world social planner, perhaps stoking the dying embers of the British Empire' (2008: 174), and Harvard's Martin Weitzman that it took a 'decidedly minority paternalist view.... relying mostly on a priori philosopher-king ethical judgements' (2007: 707, 712).

Prominent US legal scholars have also played a major role in US debates about climate ethics and policy in such works as Richard Posner's Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004), Cass Sunstein's Worst-Case Scenarios (2007) and Eric A. Posner's and David Weisbach's Climate Change Justice (2010). While addressing ethical considerations more explicitly than US economists, many of these writers are strongly influenced by the latter's views. Along with US economists, this workshop aims to draw them into a dialogue with British and European scholars.

Interdisciplinary dialogue on climate change matters, because economics, political theory and philosophy all have strengths but also blind spots, and these have contributed to the strikingly different recommendations they have given policy makers. The seminar series will also make a direct effort to encourage the participation of non-academic economists, policy makers and journalists by funding their attendance at the seminars.

The series will consist in six seminars over two years:

1. Climate change and discounting the future, University of Nottingham, January 2016.
2. 'Borrowing from the future'-a novel way to fund mitigation? University of Nottingham, April 2016.
3. Fat tails: imposing and redistributing risk, London School of Economics, July 2016.
4. Economic growth and climate justice. Political Economy Institute and Tyndall Centre, University of Manchester, January 2017.
5. Risk, uncertainty, and catastrophe scenarios. Cabot Institute, University of Bristol, April 2017.
6. Discounting the future: what have we learned? University of Nottingham, July 2017.

Each workshop will involve six presenters, including two keynote speakers who will deliver public lectures before or after the seminar. We will circulate papers three weeks in advance, and after short presentations most time will be spent on discussion.

Academic scholars in this area have themselves exercised significant influence over public debates. Economists such as Nicholas Stern have played a key role, above all through the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern Review. Some legal scholars writing in this area also have readerships that go well beyond the academy, most notably Cass Sunstein, whose work on 'nudging' has influenced both public discourse and the British government. While moral philosophers and political theorists have enjoyed less widespread attention, their arguments received extensive discussion in chapter 3 of the IPCC's recent Fifth Assessment Report (2014).

This workshop, then, is already likely to have an indirect wider impact through influencing the views of scholars working in universities. We also plan to invite participants from bodies such as the IPCC, the Committee on Climate Change-which advises the British government-and Oxfam, and have budgeted funds for their attendance. Steffen Brunner, Senior Economist of Working Group III of the IPCC, and Michael Jacobs--who was Gordon Brown's Special Adviser on Climate Change--have already accepted.

Potential direct beneficiaries from the discussions include:

1. Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose Assessment Reports draw heavily on the scholarly literature on the economics, and now increasingly the ethics, of climate change.

2. National governments formulating policies toward climate change. The Stern Review, for example, drew on both the economic and philosophical literature.

3. Local government bodies formulating adaptation policies. These bodies must take both economic and ethical factors into account, and these considerations are sometimes in tension (or perceived to be so). One of our co-investigators (O'Neill) has engaged in extensive research and advisory work in this area.

4. Journalists covering environmental and economic issues. We have budgeted funds to cover the expenses of one national journalist at each session, as well as to invite a local journalist to the conference dinner.

5. Students and the attentive public: Each of our two keynote speakers will deliver a public lecture on the day before or after the seminars.

6. Future generations. One of the most challenging problems posed by climate change is that it will affect humans and non-humans for a very long way into the future, yet there is no agreement about how their interests should be taken into account, how much weight they should receive, or how precautionary we should be toward threats that could permanently impoverish the environment. The issue of discounting concerns this question directly, but other topics do as well.

National and local governments must address questions such as how to set the discount rate, whether a trade-off exists between economic growth and environmental protection-and if so, how to make it- and how to distribute the risks and costs of climate change and the burden of mitigating it. We do not expect these workshops to yield simple, pat answers to any of these questions. Nor are we likely to be able to trace particular policy decisions directly to the influence of our seminar series. Rather, the goal is to improve thinking about these issues both within and outside of the academy in the long term.