ENTS Lecture Series Continues with Discussion on Ethics

Environmental studies scholar and philosopher Dale Jamieson will return to Carleton to present a lecture entitled “The Ethics of Global Climate Change.” The lecture, part of Carleton’s ongoing lecture series on the topic of climate change, will take place Thursday, May 8 at 7:30 p.m. in the Boliou Hall Auditorium. Jamieson’s presentation is free and open to the public and refreshments will be served.

“The problems engendered by the possibility of climate change are not purely scientific but also concern how we ought to live and how humans should relate to each other and to the rest of nature,” writes Jamieson. “These are problems of ethics and politics.” While Jamieson argues the importance of taking action against the detrimental effects of global climate change, he emphasizes the inadequacy of our current values system to “guide our thinking about global environmental problems, such as those entailed by climate changes caused by human activity.”

For Jamieson, the contemporary problem is that while the global environment may be destroyed, no one individual will be at fault. Explains Jamieson, “Our current value system presupposes that harms and their causes are individual, that they can readily be identified, and that they are local in space and time. …This paradigm collapses when we try to apply it to global environmental problems. … It is for this reason that we are often left feeling confused about how to think about [them].” Jamieson offers possibilities for a hopeful future and makes suggestions for ideological changes that may inform our actions.

Jamieson is Director of Environmental Studies at New York University, where he is also Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, and Affiliated Professor of Law. Formerly he was Henry R. Luce Professor in Human Dimensions of Global Change at Carleton College, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was the only faculty member to have won both the Dean’s award for research in the social sciences and the Chancellor’s award for research in the humanities.

Jamieson’s appearance is part of a yearlong public lecture series on the topic of climate change sponsored by the Carleton College Environmental and Technology Studies (ENTS) program. Carleton’s ENTS program grew out of the conviction that the College has a responsibility to respond to the grave threats posed to natural ecosystems by patterns of human development. ENTS students and faculty seek to explore the relationships between human and nonhuman worlds with the intention of better understanding how these worlds interact and may coexist.

For more information or disability accommodations, contact ENTS educational associate Adam Smith at (507) 222-7018, or at smithad@carleton.edu.