Ethical frameworks for climate change

The ‘consequentialist’ and ‘welfarist’ approach – the assessment of a policy in terms of its consequences for individual welfare – that is embodied in standard welfare economics is highly relevant to the ethics of climate change.

In Section 2.3, we described the standard approach to ethics in welfare economics i.e. the evaluation of actions in terms of their consequences for consumption by individuals of goods and services. We emphasised that ‘goods and services’ in consumption were multi-dimensional and should be interpreted broadly. In this appendix we examine that approach in a little more detail and compare it with different ethical perspectives of relevance to the economics of climate change.

For many applications of the standard theory, the community is defined as the nation-state and the decision-maker is interpreted as the government. Indeed this is often seen as sufficiently obvious as to go unstated. This is not, of course, intended to deny the complexities and pressures of political systems: the results of this approach should be seen as an ethical benchmark rather than a descriptive model of how political decisions are actually taken.

Nevertheless, questions such as ‘what do individuals value’, ‘what should be their relation to decisions and decision-making’, ‘what is the decision-making process’ and ‘who are the decision-makers’ arise immediately and strongly in the ethical analysis of climate change. These questions take us immediately to different perspectives on ethics.

Economics, together with the other social sciences, has in fact embraced a much broader perspective on the objectives of policy than that of standard welfare-economic analysis.