“Our thesis is that there is no moral requirement to refrain from emitting reasonable amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) solely in order to enjoy oneself. Joyriding in a gas guzzler (joyguzzling) provides our paradigm example”
– explain Ewan Kingston and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of the Philosophy Department, Duke University, Durham, NC, US, in a new paper for the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
“We stress that it may well be optimal or virtuous to refrain from joyguzzling. However, the path to showing a moral requirement to refrain from joyguzzling does seem to contain very difficult hurdles. Approaches that try to show an adequate connection between single acts of emitting and the bad effects of climate change must deal with the fiendish complexity of the causal pathways connecting emissions with extreme weather events and gradual harms.”
See: What’s Wrong with Joyguzzling?, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, February 2018, Volume 21, Issue 1, pp 169–186.
Note: Professor Sinnott-Armstrong is co-director of MADLAB at Duke.