Public Lecture: Elizabeth Cripps on “What Climate Justice Means and Why We Should Care”

Climate change is an unprecedented technical, scientific, political, and economic challenge but, underlying all of these, it is also a moral crisis. To recognise this, we need no controversial philosophical view of justice: climate change violates the bare minimum we owe one another as human beings.
Elizabeth Cripps exposes this fundamental wrong, then rejects common ‘excuses’ for inaction. ‘Climate change isn’t real.’ ‘I’m not harming anyone.’ ‘We don’t owe justice to distant strangers, let alone people who aren’t born yet.’ ‘It’s too hard.’ She links climate harms and historical atrocity, exposing this as a racial, gender and intersectional injustice, and a wrongful harm to the nonhuman world.
Then she looks forward. What would climate justice would look like? Who, ideally, should bear the costs of mitigation, adaptation, and compensation? What are the ‘least unjust’ options in the face of global players set on perpetuating fossil fuel use? And the most pressing question for many individuals: what should I do, when those around me are doing nothing at all?
Professor Elizabeth Cripps is a senior lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh. Her research addresses environmental philosophy, including questions around climate change, population and parenting, environmental ethics, environmental politics, and environmental justice. Her most recent book is Parenting on Earth: A Philosopher’s Guide to Doing Right by Your Kids (MIT Press).
This event is organised by the Center for Philosophy, Ethics and Religion of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, in collaboration with festival Forum Rohanum and the Sekyra Foundation. It will take place at the Faculty of Arts, Náměstí Jana Palacha, room 300.