Global Warming raises difficult moral issues because the need to allocate limited funds and resources requires some classes, peoples, and generations to be prioritized over others. Bioethics seeks to create rational frameworks to facilitate the resolution of these issues.

Bioethics is a discipline that seeks to determine the most ethical course of action when faced with a decision involving medical care, medical or biological research, or life and living processes generally. As such, it is implicated in many decisions dealing with the human response to climate change, because those decisions require balancing the interests of people in different locations, of different classes, and of different generations.

Sensitivity to temperature, and to change in temperature, is a central fact of almost all physical objects and processes, living or not. Extremes of cold and of heat disrupt physiological processes and thereby undermine ecological stability. Heat waves in summer in large population centers, for example, frequently result in illness and death. Such health threats create practical problems of predicting and planning for them, as well as training for and executing appropriate responses. They also raise many of the issues familiar in discussions of medical ethics.

A central question in preparing responses to possible threats related to global warming is that of prioritization. Finite resources must be allocated equitably or according to some other compelling moral principle. It may be necessary to sacrifice a group or individual to advance the well-being of others or to abrogate property rights to serve the general welfare. Moreover, because predicting the future is never a certainty, principles must be established to measure or evaluate the uncertainty of predictions and the acceptable level of risk. Often, a balance must be struck between the two: If an event seems unlikely and its consequences would be minor, preparing for it is less important than preparing for either a near certainty with minor consequences or an unlikely event with severe consequences.

A particularly thorny issue involves intergenerational equity, the comparative claims of present and future generations. The moral philosopher John Rawls spoke of the "just savings" a society is required to put aside for the future. Choices made today will often affect those who live decades or centuries from now. Insofar as these effects can be anticipated, the needs, preferences, and well-being of future generations must be taken into account. It is difficult, however, to weigh those interests against those of the present generations, not least because only one party is able to participate in making decisions. This means not only that the decision makers will be biased in favor of themselves but also that it is impossible to determine with certainty what the preferences of unborn future generations will be. Indeed, as utilitarian theorist Derek Parfit emphasizes, it is possible that the choices made by present generations will determine which individuals are and are not born to be members of future generations.

In order to make ethical decisions regarding the proper response to global warming, it is necessary to establish a framework for evaluating future harms and benefits. Some economists invoke a social "discount rate" to resolve this problem. This method entails calculating the current cost of preventing future harm and comparing it to the cost of that harm in the future.

Even restricting attention to the present, serious questions arise regarding the most ethical distribution among and within nations of the burdens of climate calamity and the costs of avoiding it. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, treats developing and industrialized nations differently and establishes more stringent standards for the latter. To hold every nation to the same standard (say, so much greenhouse gas emission per capita) would advantage those nations already well developed industrially, which would thereby benefit from their past pollution, and disadvantage developing nations that need to produce significant pollution in the present if they are to progress economically.

On the other hand, using different standards may disadvantage industrialized nations that are competing with developing nations in a global market. More stringent rules regulating labor and environmental impact, for example, can make production in developed nations more expensive than production of the same products in developing nations. However, the lax standards that make production cheaper in developing nations may impose indirect costs not only on companies but also on all members of society. As journalist Alexandra Harney remarks, pollution from Asia is believed to be affecting weather up and down the west coast of North America. . . . The sacrifices China makes to stay competitive in manufacturing affect the rest of the world.

Bioethics is a branch of applied ethics, a relatively recent subdiscipline of the ancient discipline of ethics. Bioethics seeks to ascertain consistent principles to guide decisions regarding such literal life-and-death issues as euthanasia, medical ethics, and proper responses to global warming. Because climate change is such a large-scale phenomenon, both spatially and temporally, the unique challenges it poses to bioethics involve the need to reconcile the disparate interests of all nations and their inhabitants, as well as present and future generations. The scale of the problems posed by climate change requires both individuals and governments to think globally while acting locally.

Bibliography:

1)         DeVries, Raymond, and Janardan Subedi, eds. Bioethics and Society: Constructing the Ethical Enterprise. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1998.

2)         Friedman, Thomas L. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution, and How It Can Renew America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

3)         Garvey, James. The Ethics of Climate Change: Right and Wrong in a Warming World. New York: Continuum, 2008.

4)         Lomborg, Bjorn. Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. New York: Knopf, 2007.

5)         Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

6)         Posner, Richard. Catastrophe: Risk and Response. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

7)         Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.

8)         Reich, W. T. "The Word 'Bioethics': Its Birth and the Legacies of Those Who 'Shaped It.'" Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 4 (1994): 319-335.

9)         Singer, Peter. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. 2d ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

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