Poster's note - the famous "trolley problem" applied to SRM https://www.academia.edu/8971006/Redirecting_Threats_the_Doctrine_of_Doing_and_Allowing_and_the_Special_Wrongness_of_Solar_Radiation_Management
[email protected] Ethics, Policy & Environment , 2014 Vol. 17, No. 2, 143–146, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2014.926073 Redirecting Threats, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, and the Special Wrongness of Solar Radiation Management PATRICK TAYLOR SMITH McCoy Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA Introduction David Morrow (2014) argues that solar radiation management (henceforth SRM) fallsafoul of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (henceforth DDA). If we were to engage in large-scale climate engineering, then we would be—on Morrow’s view—initiating or sustaining a new causal chain that would result in harm. By contrast, simply continuing our current emissions behavior, while similarly resulting in harm, would be merely anallowing or enabling of an already existing threat. Since doing—understood as initiating or sustaining—is harder to justify than allowing, SRM is especially difficult to justify morally even when its risk profile is superior to that of doing nothing. This motivates adefeasible yet strong presumption against the deployment of SRM technologies inresponse to climate change.My response to Morrow’s thought-provoking paper makes two points. First, SRM is more plausibly conceived of as a redirection, which is not a doing on Morrow’s view.Second, SRM as redirection provides a strong foundation for the particularly high justificatory burden SRM must meet, regardless of whether the continuation of our current emissions behavior is a doing or an allowing. Redirection and the DDA You are at a railroad switch that currently directs a runaway trolley onto a track where itwould kill five people. You activate the switch, directing the trolley onto a track where it will kill only one. Have you killed or merely let die? One might consider it a doing since the threat to the one is initiated by the flipping of the switch; the one would have been perfectly safe otherwise. Yet, you were not the person who initiated the causal chain thatresulted in the trolley being a threat to somebody . What’s more, you are not needed to sustain that threat; the five people will certainly die without your intervention. So, there isa sense in which you simply enable an already existing threat to harm one group ratherthan another.So, it seems that the action of redirecting a threat fits uneasily with the DDA, and this is reflected in the fact that we tend to think redirections are more easily justified than strictdoings. You may redirect the trolley even if you cannot save five hospital patients bymurdering someone and harvesting their organs. Or to follow Morrow’s example, there isa difference between starting a flood to stop a fire and deciding to deploy what fewfirebreaks that are available to direct the fire towards a less damaging location. Solar Radiation Management and Redirection SRM certainly looks like a doing. We initiate a new causal chain by inserting sulfateaerosols into the atmosphere or by deploying mirrors between the Earth and the Sun. As aconsequence, individuals will suffer harms they otherwise would not and be subject tothreats and risk from which they would have—absent the use of SRM—been completelysafe. Yet, when we attend more specifically to the nature and causes of anthropogenicclimate change, it is more plausible to conceive of SRM as a redirection and not as a doing.SRM is a response to a particular threat: anthropogenic climate change. Climate changeresults from the fact that the Earth is retaining—in virtue of the greenhouse gases emittedby humans—more of the sun’s energy as heat, causing global temperatures to rise. The threat of climate change results from a combination of the energy emitted from the sun andthe relevant atmospheric conditions. Current plausible SRM strategies alter theseatmospheric conditions in order to increase the reflectivity, or albedo, of the planet, andthereby decreasing the amount of energy that remains. This will have the consequence,presumably, of cooling the planet while decreasing and redistributing the costs of climatechange. With this in mind, here’s an initial objection to Morrow’s analysis: SRM is the redirection of sunlight away from a location where it will have dangerous effects, just as activating the switch redirects the trolley to a less harmful track. So, just as redirecting thetrolley is not subject to the same justificatory burden as a standard doing, SRM is not subject to the constraints described under the DDA. Yet, we might think that this is too quick. Sulfate aerosols—the most plausible current SRM proposal—generate harmful consequences that are not reducible to redirection of sunlight. For example, the adding of radiative forcing materials like sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere is likely to have significant effects on the amount and distribution of precipitation, creating serious risks to the global agriculture and water supply. These potential threats seem to result from theinitiation of a new causal chain and not from the redirection of a prior threat. There are three things to say in response. First, this objection only concerns harms that are the side effects of particular strategies for altering our planet’s albedo. The higher justificatory burden only applies to those side effects and not the direct effects of there direction. So, imagine a trolley that can be redirected towards the one, but only by creating splinters that may harm another person sitting alongside the tracks. The higher justificatory burden would apply to the harm caused by the splinters and not to the harm to the person on the tracks. Similarly, the harm caused by the atmospheric side effects of SRM might be subject to a higher justificatory burden, but the direct harms caused by the radiative forcing would not be. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
