Marcus Dux - 12/1/25 - Environmental Ethics

Shivani Dharanipragada's article, "Is Climate Engineering Viable? And if it's Viable, is it Ethical?," really brings up the biggest, scariest trade-off in our course. It's wild that after eliminating most options as too costly or ineffective, except for maybe Stratospheric Particle Injection (SPI) and Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB), we're still left with this enormous ethical problem. The article frames it perfectly using the Markkula Center’s ethical lenses: Utilitarianism and the Common Good lenses say, "Go for it," because the planetary-scale benefit of slowing climate catastrophe clearly outweighs localized harm. But the Care Ethics lens is completely opposed, pointing out that SPI and MCB could trigger devastating, localized side effects, like floods or droughts, for specific communities who had no say in the matter. This feels like the ultimate "ends justify the means" dilemma. How do we, as global citizens, decide that saving the planet is worth deliberately sacrificing a vulnerable community to drought? The socio-political section confirms that implementing centrally-controlled technologies in "common spaces" like international waters will inevitably lead to conflict and disproportionate burdens on poorer countries. The biggest question I have, which the article only touches on, is this: isn't pursuing geoengineering itself an example of anthropocentric hubris, where we choose to just manage the planetary temperature with a technological fix rather than accepting the responsibility to drastically reduce our own emissions? I lean toward the latter, but the article makes it clear that we might not have a choice soon.

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