Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them. Dale Jamieson More Quotes by Dale Jamieson More Quotes From Dale Jamieson Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to support their research or to fund their crackpot solutions. Dale Jamieson supportresearchpeople We need more science, but what we especially need is science fiction. Dale Jamieson science-fictionfictionneeds Climate scientists think of nothing but climate and then express their concerns in terms of constructs such as global mean surface temperature. But we live in a world in which all sorts of change is happening all the time, and the only way to understand what climate change will bring is to tell stories about how it manifests in people's lives. Dale Jamieson meanpeoplethinking When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue. Dale Jamieson issuesclimatepeople People will suffer and so will nature, but life is likely to go on with a great deal of loss and mourning. Human adaptability and resilience will still be alive, and so will that great need and resource of ours called love. Dale Jamieson mourninglosspeople It's possible that we'll screw up the climate so badly that most of us will die and a few breeding pairs will remain somewhere in the arctic. What's more likely is that we'll continue remaking the planet, driving many species to extinction, killing millions of people through the indirect effects of climate change, making life even harder for the poor and powerless than it is now, and making it a little more difficult for the global middle class to live the lives to which they have become accustomed - in other words, business as usual, only worse. Dale Jamieson screw-upsclasspeople Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years. Dale Jamieson apocalypsehappensyears Obama's clean power plan, methane regulations, and increased fuel economy standards are about as good as our political system can do at this point in our history. Let's embrace these things, make them work, and push for more, rather than denouncing them because they're 9th best (which they are). Dale Jamieson fuel-economyregulationpolitical Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted. Dale Jamieson billsgenerationssuffering The seas will continue to rise no matter who gets elected president. Dale Jamieson presidentmattersea Climate change is not going to be prevented. It's not even going to be mitigated to the degree a rational person would want. As a result we're going to have to live with climate change and try to reduce the extent and rate of change as much as possible. This is not an inspiring or sexy project. Dale Jamieson sexywanttrying The erosion of agency has consequences for our politics. As a result of all this, the fundamental ethical challenge of the anthropocene is the recovery of agency, or alternatively to come to terms with its loss and to understand how to go on. Dale Jamieson recoveryagencyloss The bizarre thing about the anthropocene is that never has humanity been more powerful and never have individual humans felt so powerless. This is because so much that drives the circumstances of the anthropocene is the aggregation of apparently negligible acts, often amplified by technology, rather than decisive acts by autonomous decision-makers. Dale Jamieson technologypowerfuldecision The most fundamental challenge of the anthropocene concerns agency. For those who lived the Enlightenment dream (always a minority but an influential one), agency was taken for granted. There were existential threats to agency (e.g., determinism) but philosophy mobilized to refute these threats (e.g., by defending libertarianism) or to defuse them (e.g., by showing that they were compatible with agency). Dale Jamieson takendreamphilosophy Every country now has its own domestic political debate about how to respond to climate change. This is where the action is. Dale Jamieson climatepoliticalcountry The Paris climate conference in December, 2015 was a recognition that countries bring their climate policies to international meetings rather than create them during the negotiations (much less do they receive orders from the international community and then go home and implement them). Dale Jamieson homeordercountry Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased. Dale Jamieson philosopherunbiasedsmart Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever. Dale Jamieson environmentalphilosophicalway Environmental problems provoke challenges about what kind of world we want, how important we think it is if something is brought about by human action or by brute nature, what we think of the value of human life compared to that of other living things. Dale Jamieson environmentalchallengesthinking It's obvious that there are vast variety of consequentialist views, depending on what we think goodness consists in, what our notion of consequence is, and what level (or levels) of human action we think the principle should be applied. Dale Jamieson principlesviewsthinking
