Quote

In trying to develop an impartial, expansive ethic we are trying to get ethical systems to do something which they did not evolve in order to do. This doesn't mean that it can't be done or that we shouldn't try to expand the reach of our ethical frameworks, only that there are reasons to be skeptical about its success.

Dale Jamieson

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Dale Jamieson
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: October 21
Academic
Jurist
University Teacher
Sioux City
Iowa
Order
Systems
Expansive
Reason
Ethics
Impartial
Done
Shouldn
Ethic
Mean
Develop
Skeptical
Trying
Reasons
Expand
Something
Reach
Framework
Success
Ethical
Doesn
Evolve
Frameworks

More quotes by Dale Jamieson

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Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.
Dale Jamieson
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If you have a flat, fixed view of state interest then it is difficult to understand why some states adopt aggressive climate change policies, even when that risks economically disadvantaging them, and other states do not even when it would be in their economic interests to do so.
Dale Jamieson
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I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna.
Dale Jamieson
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If you're interested in doing something about climate change as we all should be, all of us who care about future people and creatures that will inhabit this world. Then buying a Prius is a good thing but an even better thing would be to be on the streets demanding urgent action from the United States' Congress.
Dale Jamieson
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Every country now has its own domestic political debate about how to respond to climate change. This is where the action is.
Dale Jamieson
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It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address.
Dale Jamieson
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The seas will continue to rise no matter who gets elected president.
Dale Jamieson
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Attitudes are changing very quickly.
Dale Jamieson
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Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.
Dale Jamieson
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Climate change is not going to be prevented. It's not even going to be mitigated to the degree a rational person would want. As a result we're going to have to live with climate change and try to reduce the extent and rate of change as much as possible. This is not an inspiring or sexy project.
Dale Jamieson
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We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.
Dale Jamieson
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In the face of the collective action problems that are at the heart of the environmental crisis, consequentialists should seek to inculcate the green virtues which includes the virtue of cooperativeness. This would not bring about the best possible world but it would set us on the path of making it better.
Dale Jamieson
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If you look globally you see a patchwork of jurisdictions (nations, states, provinces, cities) that have taken aggressive action on climate change, and a patchwork of jurisdictions that have not. These various policies reflect the politics of each jurisdiction and the values of its citizens.
Dale Jamieson
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Our traditional systems of decision-making are just not up to preventing changes in fundamental earth systems that are driven by a constant barrage of individually negligible emissions of an invisible, odorless gas, by billions of people all over the world.
Dale Jamieson
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Ethical systems are fundamentally conservative and primarily directed towards regulating interactions within communities.
Dale Jamieson
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In this era of globalization we are witnessing struggles within individual states about what their identity and interests consist in.
Dale Jamieson
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Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.
Dale Jamieson
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When it comes to climate change it's all the usual barriers: greed, mendacity, ignorance, short-sightedness and so on, manifest in the extreme power of corporations, the weakness of government, and the indifference of citizens.
Dale Jamieson
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Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as reduce suffering) and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.
Dale Jamieson
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The very essence of civilized culture is that we deliberately institute, in advance of the happening of various contingencies and emergencies of life, devices for detecting their approach and registering their nature, for warding off what is unfavorable or at least for protecting ourselves from its full impact.
Dale Jamieson