reducing carbon footprints is one's moral duty towards mother earth?
Answers
Answer:
here you go
Explanation:
Several climate ethicists have recently argued that having children is morally equivalent to over-consumption, and contributes greatly to parents’ personal carbon footprints. We show that these claims are mistaken, for two reasons. First, including procreation in parents’ carbon footprints double-counts children’s consumption emissions, once towards their own, and once towards their parents’ footprints. We show that such double-counting defeats the chief purpose of the concept of carbon footprint, namely to measure the sustainability and equitability of one’s activities and choices. Furthermore, we show that proposals to avoid double-counting have other unacceptable implications. Second, we show that the key arguments for a supposed moral equivalence of procreation and consumption overgenerate and lead to unacceptable consequences in many cases, such as for the work of doctors who save lives or enable procreation. Finally, we propose that rather than counting children’s emissions towards their parents’ carbon footprints, we should consider these emissions as part of the parents’ carbon impact, i.e. the difference that their choices make to the overall global carbon emissions. It is from the perspective of impact that we should think about the ethics of procreation in an age of climate change.
What should you, as an individual, do to prevent catastrophic climate change? You could fly less, go vegan, or turn down the thermostat in your home. Your choices about these matters all make a significant difference to your personal carbon footprint. Yet, one choice seems to undo or outdo them all: Whether to have a(nother) child. After all, your child will cause immense emissions by eating, heating, travelling, etc. over her lifetime. Moreover, she might have children herself who will cause yet more emissions.
This line of thought has been popularized in newspaper pieces which have stated “Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children” (Carrington 2017), have wondered “Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?” (Ludden 2016; Murtaugh 2015), and have even asked whether parents “are the worst climate sinners” (Kramper 2017) and whether “procreation is pollution” (Christinaz 2018). It has made an ongoing impact in climate change activism and advocacy as well, e.g. in movements such as the “BirthStrike” campaign group (see Elks 2019)Footnote1 or on-line recommendations for cutting your personal carbon footprint (e.g. Chandler 2019).
These provocative claims and questions are inspired and backed by a number of recent philosophical discussions of the climate ethical implications of procreation, which in turn draw on statistical analysis of how various activities and lifestyles impact the climate. Based on these calculations, several philosophers and statisticians have argued that if we want to fight climate change, then we should shift our focus from consumption to the yet