NickNack wrote: ↑Fri Dec 18, 2020 8:29 pm
Is there a moral difference between killing someone by stabbing them versus killing someone through climate change? Are we no better then a murderer when we drive our cars or use technology that contributes to global warming?
I think there is a moral difference because in the case of stabbing there is a clearer knowledge about what you are doing and a more direct cause and effect. So in my view a person that kills someone through stabbing has usually committed a morally worse action.
However, killing someone through global warming is also questionable.
I have done some calculations and I reckon 10,000 tonnes of CO2e into the atmosphere kills 1 human from climate change. That is a rough estimate, it could be plausibly be 10 times better or worse. I can share my workings if you like.
Now if one life will be lost for every 10,000 tonnes emitted then we can easily calculate say 30,000 tonnes will kill 3 people. But when we emit 1 tonne we can then calculate we have killed 0.0001 people. But that is a nonsense - what does that mean?
One way to think about it is that one death is 30 years of life lost. 30 because I assume that the average person killed by climate change would have lived to 70, and their average age of death is 40. I´m assuming here that climate change kills people of all ages indiscriminately, but older people have slightly higher risk on average.
So now we have a figure of 10,000 tonnes = 30 years of life lost. From this we can calculate, due to climate change, how many minutes, hours or years of life you have likely taken away from someone with any activity, and I think this is a better, more robust way of thinking about it than getting tied up with thoughts like "Is contributing 1/1,000,000 to a deer's death the same moral equivalent as pinching the deer?".
Here are some calculations I did:
Eating a meat burger
= 5 minutes of life lost
Driving 6 miles in a petrol car
= 3 minutes of life lost
Eating a normal amount of meat for the rest of your life, and you live 40 years more
= 2 months of life lost
Long haul flight
= a few days of life lost
Delaying getting an electric car until 2026 rather than 2021 =
10 days of life lost
An entire lifetime´s emissions =
2 years of life lost
The difference between not making any effort whatsoever to reduce your carbon footprint for your whole life vs making a big effort to live sustainably
= 1 year of life
So far as stated this considers only the effect on human life lost, not human suffering or animal death or suffering. Getting into even more speculative and uncertain territory, I´ll now try to come up with the total negative impact.
Usually famines, disasters,disease etc cause multiple injuries/illnesses for every one life lost. It seems reasonable to suggest that the overall negative effect of multiple serious injuries, emotional stress etc is similar to one death, so I think we can double the negative impact.
Climate change will likely cause a larger number of animals to suffer and die than humans, but we can also argue that 1 human life is worth more than 1 animal life, and that humans may be capable of more acute suffering than animals. If these two effects cancel out then we can say that animal suffering and human suffering are similar, and double the negative impact again.
The numbers only include climate change, but not pollution. Pollution causes a similar number of deaths to climate change (again I can share sources for this if needed) so that is another 2x for cars and meat (maybe not for planes - not sure pollution half way across the ocean matters as much).
We now have 8x the negative impact (because I doubled the negative impact three times) being the total estimated impact. (Maybe lower, perhaps 4x for planes.)
So for example I stated that driving 6 miles in a petrol car causes 3 minutes of (human) life lost. We can now think of the total impact as being about 8x that. Equivalent to perhaps 24 minutes of human life lost or passed in severe suffering.
And then remember the margin for error is that it could be 10 times higher or 10 times less. So the range is about 2 minutes to 4 hours of life taken away or made very unpleasant if you drive 6 miles in a petrol car.
I suggest you use this way of thinking about things for decision making. If the total negative impact you would cause is greater than or similar to the positive benefit to yourself, do not do it.
Remember that the positive benefit to yourself of an activity is not the absolute enjoyment of the activity but the relative additional enjoyment vs whatever else you will do instead.
For instance the benefit from a long haul flight, is not the absolute enjoyment you would get by having a foreign holiday but any
additional enjoyment you would get from a foreign holiday relative to having a holiday near your home. After accounting for the mild unpleasantness of jet lag, planes and airports the overall benefit is probably close to zero. And therefore in most cases, taking a long haul flight for a holiday is probably not morally justified for example.