Opinion to previous Ice Age shifts (4-6 degrees Celsius or more) that would be catastrophic for the United States as well as for other countries. Consequently, a President genuinely focused on the long-term, intergenerational interests of Pittsburgh, or the United States in general, would not allow the climate threat to develop further. If President Trump had chosen Miami or New Orleans or New York as examples, this would have been obvious. Miami, for example, cannot survive the sea level rise that will be brought on by a rapid rise in global temperatures.
Elsewhere I have argued that climate change is one instance of an underappreciated collective action problem that I call the tyranny of the contemporary. Since there are serious time-lags in the climate system, a significant part of the problem involves earlier generations taking short-term benefits for themselves while imposing severe and perhaps catastrophic harms on future generations. Such intergenerational buck-passing is ethically unconscionable. It also encourages a corruption of the discourse. There is a strong incentive for those who wish to engage in intergenerational buck-passing to cover up their behaviour with misleading framings.
Unfortunately, the “President of Pittsburgh” catch-phrase fits the bill nicely by encouraging a lazy myth that remains popular in some policy circles. The myth claims (explicitly) that national governments can be relied upon to act in the interests of their citizens, and (implicitly) that this is true intergenerationally, over decades and even centuries into the future. Both parts of the myth are dubious, but the implicit claim is peculiar to the point of absurdity. Unfortunately, this has not stopped it creeping into some philosophical analyses of climate change, often through the diagnosis that countries face a traditional tragedy of the commons or prisoner’s dilemma situation, under the implicit assumption that each country represents the interests of its citizens in perpetuity. (Sometimes the implicit assumption is masked by the tortured phrase “intergenerational prisoner’s dilemma”.) In my view, we should banish such absurdities and highlight the real threat posed by the tyranny of the contemporary to conventional political philosophy, political institutions, and perhaps to humanity itself. For instance, perhaps we should take the Pittsburgh President at his word – as insisting that his responsibilities are only to the very short-term – and emphasise that there is a serious governance gap when it comes to representing intergenerational concern. Elsewhere I propose that the first step in meeting this “democratic deficit” should be a global constitutional convention focused on future generations. President Trump’s recent decisions make taking that step even more urgent.
Stephen M. Gardiner is professor of philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is also director of the program on values in society. He is the author of A Perfect Moral Storm; co-author of Debating Climate Ethics; editor of Virtue Ethics, Old and New; and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics; and Climate Ethics: Essential Readings.
16
