Darrel Moellendorf, "Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty" (Oxford UP, 2022)
New Books in Philosophy
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The Importance of Uncertainty in Preventive Measures
Much of climate change involves uncertainties in the sense that it's impossible to attach a probability for any particular outcome. There are uncertainties that exist in virtue of the outcome being at least in part the product of human action. And these uncertainties I call moral uncertainties. But then there's another, a whole other class of uncertainties that I refer to as epistemic uncertainties. These exist when our understanding of the events or the outcome just are insufficient to predict the likelihood. Sometimes they're just unprecedented or they're singular kinds of events. We don't know exactly what will tip the tipping point but we have an obligation to try to limit warming as much as possible.
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