For the 3.7 billion years that Earth has had a climate (Hessler, 2011), it has been changing, but until the late twentieth century, it had never been considered an ethical issue. According to almost anyone who is a public figure or considered an expert with a voice in mainstream media modes (including social media), climate change (CC) is a major ethical crisis. The current orthodoxy on CC believes that the Earth is speeding to a cataclysmic extinction event and, according to their many predictions, should have arrived there several times in the past four decades. Heterodox thinkers, scientists, academics, and public figures follow the scientific method and are not convinced CC is what the orthodoxy claims it to be, and in part are vindicated by the orthodoxy’s inability to predict the endpoint despite supposed worsening conditions that should, logically, hasten the cataclysm. The heterodoxy is more concerned with pollution and habitat destruction than a trace gas in the atmosphere that feeds plants and trees. Both orthodox and heterodox camps believe that the environment must be tended to and cared for to maintain its life-sustaining capacities; however, how to achieve this stewardship is where they disagree. The question to ask then is: is there an ethical framework that can accommodate both groups or can such an ethical framework be created? To answer this question, one must first understand ethical frameworks and how they are made.
Both groups generally agree that ethics and morality are separate and different but are intrinsically related. According to Garvey (2008), two moral theories have direct application in thinking about CC; Bentham’s hedonistic moral theory of utilitarianism and Kant’s duty-bound moral theory of deontology. Although these schools of thought differ in many ways, they both have the common element of consistency. Utilitarianism encourages consistency from the perspective that everyone’s pleasure and pain are as important as every other individual’s pleasure and pain; the importance of every individual is consistent with that of every other individual. Bentham’s theory sets rationality as the central driver of morality, and perhaps because Bentham was a notable legal scholar of his time, as the main inspiration for legislation regarding crime and punishment. Deontology holds that moral principles must be applied consistently, and if they are, they will result in an internally consistent ethical framework to guide people’s actions in the direction of their duty. Utilitarianism is focused on consistent outcomes or the consequences of actions that are right, whereas deontology focuses on the consistent application of right moral principles to generate right outcomes. Recognised utilitarian, Hume, however, asserts that ethics might constrain people’s thinking on how to act in the right way, but ultimately the prime movers for action are intuitive morals.
During the past four decades, a consistency that has emerged from the CC debate is that the aforementioned approaches have consistently disagreed; neither has been able to produce an ethical framework that both sides agree could work to address CC. A significant reason chain why CC is such a challenging issue to address is that there are multiple narratives based on the supposed scientific knowledge circulating regarding the legitimacy of the orthodox CC claim. Those narratives generate intuitive, emotional responses which activate people’s internal moral system. The moral system outputs are then parsed through sociocultural and political norms and realities as part of the attempt to reason out an ethical framework to constrain any possible solutions that may be considered. This process generates a diverse range of ethical systems at the population level because every person generates their own unconscious ethical systems to help them prosper in their respective societies and cultures. It is the same for ethical frameworks for people everywhere to view and think about CC; hence, the result is general disagreement on how to approach and deal with CC.
Jonathan Haidt has been studying moral philosophy and moral psychology since the late 1970s; in particular, he has dedicated at least two decades to identifying and understanding the universal principles of morality, i.e., the common principles that exist cross-culturally. One universal principle described by Haidt using an analogy (2006, pp. 1-22; 2012, pp. 1-84) when it comes to morals and ethics, people’s decision-making psyches are essentially split into two components: an animal (intuitive moral reactions), and the animal’s rider (post-intuitive ethical reasoning). Biologically, morality is innate; anatomically, you could think of morality as being generated by the older parts of our evolutionary brains (subcortical) and the ethical systems as being the most recent adaptation, the driver of executive function, the neocortex (Kawaguchi & Karube, 2009; Takesian & Hensch, 2013). As part of his investigations, Haidt concluded that reasoned ethics emerged out of an intuitive moral system and that ethical frameworks are essentially strategic reasoning aimed at justifying the actions that are endorsed by intuitive, emotional responses shaped by a person’s morality (which is a combination of nature and nurture) (Haidt, 2012, pp. 106-107). The culmination of his work in this field was the formulation of the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), which is evidence-based, and reliably produces accurate predictions of political behaviour based upon the calibration of the six bi-polar cognitive modules of moral systems that constitute morality: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and liberty/oppression (see below). MFT uses these six universal cognitive modules as an analytical and explanatory framework for the moral systems all cultures produce; it gives insight as to how moral systems limit values and behaviour, account for cross-cultural variations and the subjective nature of morality, and describe the moral foundations of politics (Graham & Haidt, 2010; Haidt, 2012; Haidt & Graham, 2007; Haidt et al., 2009; Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Joseph et al., 2009). The last point is important regarding the “ethics of CC” because, for better or worse, while CC is a political topic, at least in part, it has been hyper-politicised in the global media and social media discourse (Chinn et al., 2020; Grassle, 2021; McCright & Dunlap, 2011; Pepermans & Maeseele, 2016; Pew Research Center, 2016).
Table 1
Moral Foundations Theory Cognitive Modules
| Care/ harm | Fairness/ cheating | Loyalty/ betrayal | Authority/ subversion | Sanctity/ degradation | Liberty/ oppression | |
| Adaptive challenge | Protect and care for children | Reap benefits of two-way partnerships | Form cohesive coalition | Forge beneficial relationship within hierarchies | Avoid contaminants | Living in small groups and avoiding tyrannical rule |
| Original triggers | Suffering, distress, or neediness expressed by one’s child | Cheating, cooperation, deception | Threat or challenge to group | Signs of dominance and submission | Waste products, diseased people | Signs of attempted domination, aggression, controlling behaviour |
| Current triggers | Baby seals, cute character | Marital fidelity, broken vending machines | Sports teams, nations | Bosses, respected professional | Taboo ideas (communism, racism) | Almost anything perceived as imposing illegitimate restraints on liberty |
| Characteristic emotions | Compassion | Anger, gratitude, guilt | Group pride, rage at traitors | Respect, fear | Disgust | Anger, hatred of oppression and tyranny |
| Relevant virtues | Caring, kindness | Fairness, justice, trustworthiness | Loyalty, patriotism, self-sacrifice | Obedience, deference | Temperance, chastity, piety, cleanliness | Defence of victims, underdogs |
Through weighted questionnaire data collection, MFT has revealed three patterns of moral matrices that can predict political decision-making reliably in modern Western societies. The three patterns are the liberal moral matrix, the libertarian moral matrix, and the social conservative matrix (see below). Each matrix has a line that connects it to each of the MFT cognitive modules; the thickness of the line denotes how heavily the matrix uses the respective module. From the below figures, it is worth noting that socially conservative people will often disagree with liberals and libertarians because the ethical frameworks that emerge from their moral matrices perform much more complex reasoning than liberals and libertarians. It is also worth noting that the increased complexity of reasoning allows social conservatives to detect threats to moral capital that liberals and libertarians cannot detect; this, in part, explains why they advocate conserving uncorrupted moral institutions because they hold them as sacred and essential to doing what is right. To address the alleged CC, these three moral matrices represent the entire voting population in any modern Western society. Any proposed legislation designed to address CC must satisfy the ethical frameworks produced by these moral matrices.
Figure 1
The Liberal Moral Matrix
Figure 2
The Libertarian Moral Matrix
Figure 3
The Social-Conservative Moral Matrix
In sum, there are multiple reasons why CC is a difficult issue to address ethically. However, underneath all the disagreement on scientific knowledge, both sides can never agree because the ethical frameworks derived from their moral matrices are so different that liberals and libertarians have an ethical threat blind spot roughly equivalent to only seeing half of what social conservatives can see. Also, due to the political polarisation that has been exploited by legacy corporate media and big-tech social media for clicks and advertising revenue since 1985 (big-tech social media did not exist until the creation of Facebook in 2004) (Chinn et al., 2020), it is questionable whether liberals and libertarians will ever be calm and rational enough to try and truly understand what social conservatives are saying.
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