851-0101-80L Basic Problems of Environmental Ethics

Abstract	Climate change exerts a pressure on us to significantly change our individual and collective behaviour. Such a pressure raises questions like: Who has to give up what? What is a fair distributions of the burdens in the struggle against the cllimate change? What is the reasonable understanding of our relation to nature? How should we run our economies?
Learning objective	Participants should become familiar with basic approaches to central problems in environmental ethics. The course will try to give an argument-based answer to the question: What are the responsibilities for individuals (e.g. as consumers), and for collectivities (e.g. states and firms). Another focus will be to clarify the concept of "climate justice". The course should also enable participants to evaluate different answers to the question how we should organize our economies for securing our ecological niche.
Literature	Preparatory Literature 1. Dieter Birnbacher, Klimaethik, Stuttgart: Reclam 2016. 2. John Broome, Climate Matters, New York/London: Norton 2012. 3. Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm. The Tragedy of Climate Change, Oxford: University Press 2015. 4. Naomi Klein, Die Entscheidung: Kapitalismus vs Klima, Frankfurt/M.: Fischer 2016.