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Moral Conflicts in Distance: Reflections on Longdistancism and Longtermism in the Context of Climate Crisis
Authors: Rozen David | Vojtěch Svěrák
Year: 2024
Type of publication: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster
Page from-to: nestránkováno
Titles:
Language Name Abstract Keywords
eng Moral Conflicts in Distance: Reflections on Longdistancism and Longtermism in the Context of Climate Crisis The notion of distance plays a central role in ethics. But in pursuing objectivity and universality, some moral (especially utilitarian) theories attempt to strip distance of any relevance in two fundamental ways. The first step was arguing against the moral relevance of distance in space, as famously exemplified by Peter Singer, who claims that not giving all you have to charity for people starving in Bengali is basically the same as letting die a child you see drowning in a lake because you don’t want to get your clothes muddy (Singer, 1972). The second step (which could be understood as the accomplishment of the utilitarian project) is arguing against the moral relevance of distance in time as exemplified by the movement called longtermism which, following the thinking of Derek Parfit (1984, 2011), argues that we are at a pivotal moment in history, as our decisions will affect developments for thousands of years to come, and urges us to take the interests of future persons as seriously as those of present persons (MacAskill, 2023). Both of these tendencies respond to crucial global challenges related to population growth, technological innovation, or climate crisis and stimulate the fundamental questions we must ask ourselves today. However, as we will show, the abandonment of spatial and temporal distance fails to provide satisfactory answers to the crucial contemporary questions from whose reflection it arose. Furthermore, the popular forms of these trends operate with inappropriate tools and problematic assumptions. This is particularly so in that they place the isolated individual at the center of the theory as the primarily responsible actor, thereby ignoring the structural and systemic aspects of the problems they seek to address (Young, 1998; Adams, 2023). Our contribution will aim to explore what kind of moral conflicts are raised by these two types of distances and mainly in which respect they should be taken into account when thinking about these issue

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