Human Responsibility to Global Warming

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The last moral theory is virtue ethics. Virtue ethics is more of an approach to ethics and moral questions as opposed to it being a moral theory. Virtue ethics focuses on a person’s character (Mosser, 2014). An ideal virtuous person is someone who has admirable characteristics that are seen as balanced and all of their characteristics work in sync. This person possesses the right amount of moral wisdom and knows when and how to use and apply each virtuous characteristic. Taking a stand to help decrease the global warming issue would appear as a virtuous characteristic in a place where global warming is affecting human’s way of life. To a virtuous person, human’s responsibility in helping to decrease global warming would be looked at as the noble thing to do. A person using virtue ethics as a moral theory would morally conclude that it would be a virtuous act for human’s to start taking responsibility for the human controlled things that are contributing to global warming today.

In my honest opinion, Deontology is the best moral theory overall. The theory of deontology looks at the rightness of an act and not the consequences. In the case of human’s having a responsibility to help decrease the global warming, the consequences, although not important when applying this theory, would also turn out positive. The theory of utilitarianism would conclude that human’s responsibility to help reduce the global warming is morally right because it produces the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, but we would have to define who the people are and what the people want. Virtue ethics is sort of a selfish moral theory because it only concerns the person and how they are perceived by their society. So, if the virtuous person’s society frowns upon humans being responsible for helping to reduce global warming, or are uneducated about the issue, that person wouldn’t be looked at as displaying virtuous characteristics. As the great Immanuel Kant wrote in the Groundwork for the metaphysic of morals, “…a person who does something because it is the morally right thing to do is especially commendable, more than a person who does something for some sort of gain...” (Kant, I. 2008).

In this paper I have presented the issue of global warming and examined the issue of humans being responsible for helping to decrease global warming through the moral theories of utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. After applying all three theories to the problem I was able to conclude that deontology was the best moral theory overall because of its ability to only look at the rightness of an act as opposed to the greatest good or being virtuous for others. Hopefully, we will all be able to one day become responsible enough to let a few of our earth damaging ways go in order to decrease the global warming that’s taking place in our world today.

Word Count: 1365

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References

Kant, I. (2008). Groundwork for the metaphysic of morals. In J. Bennett (Ed. & Trans.), Early

Modern Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/kant1785.pdf

(Original work published in 1785).

Lim, H., Jafri, M. M., Abdullah, K., & Rajah, J. (2009). A case study of global warming in Penang Island, Malaysia. IOP Conference Series: Earth & Environmental Science, 6(41), 1. doi:10.1088/1755-1307/6/41/412029

Mosser, K. (2014) Understanding Philosophy. Bridgepoint Education Inc. San Diego, CA

Trenberth, K.E. (2001). Stronger evidence of Human Influences on climate. Environment, 43(4)8. EBSCO host database