Moral Enhancement and Climate Change : Might it Work?
Abstract
Climate change is one of the most urgent global problems that we are facing today. The causes are well understood and many solutions have been proposed. However, so far none of them have been successful. Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu have argued that this is because our moral psychology is ill-equipped to deal with global problems such as this one. They propose that in order to successfully mitigate climate change we should morally enhance ourselves. In this chapter we look into their proposal to see whether moral enhancement is indeed a viable solution to the climate crisis. We conclude that due to various theoretical and practical problems it is most likely not.