Undergraduate Course: Climate Justice (PLIT10118)
Course Outline
| School | School of Social and Political Science |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course will enable students to address questions around the normative implications of anthropogenic climate change, using the tools of moral and political philosophy: Why is climate change an injustice? Do we have duties of justice to future generations, or even to non-humans? Who is responsible for climate harm, given that each individual's emissions may make no perceptible difference? How should the burdens of mitigation, adaptation, and compensation be distributed across states? How just is the Paris Agreement? How should global negotiators respond to urgency and non-compliance? Should extreme measures such as geoengineering or population controls be considered? What should individuals be doing: cutting emissions, promoting local, state or global action, aiding the victims of climate change, even having fewer children? |
| Course description |
The course raises and assesses questions of justice and morality around climate change, including population justice and duties to other species. Students will develop and use the tools of moral and political philosophy, applied to a salient global challenge.
Three areas of climate justice are debated:
- How debates around climate change push the boundaries of justice and morality, covering issues such as human rights and collective responsibility, duties of future generations, potential duties to non-human animals, population growth and procreative rights.
- The normative collective challenges posed by climate change and population, against a broader framework of global justice. These include questions such as what collective climate policy should involve (mitigation, adaptation, compensation), how these burdens should be distributed, whether population or geoengineering policy could ever justifiably be part of this, and how justifiably to respond to non-compliance.
- The moral dilemma facing the individual in the face of collective failure to respond adequately to climate change: "What Should I Do?" It covers whether we have individual moral duties (even primary duties) to cut our own emissions or to promote collective (e.g. political) action.
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- apply an empirically-informed understanding of contemporary debates on climate justice from a relevant range of normative perspectives
- navigate specialist in-depth knowledge of specific areas and issues in relation to climate justice
- critically engage with key theories, concepts, and arguments in the study of climate justice
- deploy effective communications skills, both written and verbal, to provide clear and concise analysis of the topic and arguments at hand
- engage in critical thinking, reflection and debate for academic and non-academic consumption
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Reading List
Gardiner, S., Caney, S., Jamieson, D. & Shue, H. (2010). Climate Ethics: Essential Readings. Oxford University Press.
Shue, H. (2014). Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection. Oxford. Oxford University Press
Arnold, Denis G. (2011). The Ethics of Global Climate Change. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Cripps, E. Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual duties in an interdependent world. (2013) Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Conly, S. (2015). One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? New York: Oxford University Press
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
- Think and reason critically
- Draw on theoretical materials to develop and support a line of informed normative argument, written and oral
- Present information and arguments visually and orally
- Participate in informed, constructive debate
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| Keywords | Climate change |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Ewan Kerr
Tel:
Email: |
Course secretary | Mr Daniel Jackson
Tel: (0131 6)50 2309
Email: |
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