TEST POST

Stephen Gardiner’s A Perfect Moral Storm tries to uncover the way we are heading to the wrong direction in terms of maintaining sustainability. He has objected his work to focus on ethics in trying to explain what he is interested in, correlating it to the issue of climate change – arguably one of the most critical yet often overlooked global phenomenon.

            Perhaps the first question that might come to mind is: why ethics? Why not something else that is perhaps more obvious? This work of his is opened particularly on answering such questions. In such regards, Gardiner argues that the issue of climate change, or rather our reaction to it, is open to moral assessment and account for moral responsibility and important interests. Things which put us entirely in the ethics domain. The way the nature is utilized for the purpose of conducting activities would not have been there without humans following their moral and ethics. Therefore, it is fairly arguable that the issue of climate change itself is relevant to ethics and morality. This results in peculiar features of the climate change problem which create obstacles to our ability to make the hard choices necessary to address it – this is Gardiner’s thesis, and arguably, it has trueness going for it.

            Next up, Gardiner explains about what he calls as ‘the global storm’, which is sort of his fancy way to say climate change. It does come with a twist by pointing out three characteristics of this issue, which are dispersion of causes and effects, fragmentation of agency, and institutional inadequacy. These characteristics illustrate the true scale of climate change, with the first states that any small cause effects widely, contributing to global climate change. The second states that the issue is caused by a large number of actors which are not in a structure.  Gardiner immediately brings this to the game of prisoner’s dilemma/tragedy of the commons (with a very thorough explanation), then correlates this to how nation states have the dilemma of either restricting their policies together or to not do it and free-ride on others who do. Thus, the outcome can go four ways. Then he brings this to third point, leading to arguments about global governance.

            That paragraph above, I think, is the main bulk of the chapter. The rest of the chapter is, admittedly, giving great insight towards the role of ethics and morals in the issue of global climate change. One particularly interesting part in about the theoretical storm, in which Gardiner puts an economic approach of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) into the mix. This turns out to bring great relevance to his work, since this leading economic approach is arguably using morals and ethics in its existence, where considerations are taken in which ways of thinking play an undeniably important role.

            The next chapter is primarily about consumption tragedy. This covers how the consumption habit caused and worsen climate change. Interestingly, this chapter emphasized game theory even more, trying to point out why game theory is appropriate in this regard.