| Better Wing nuts than No-nuts, for now & 4ever |
Jan. 20th, 2016|11:42 am |
nē, jūs lūc nedomājiet, ka es kemtreilerus pētu tikai no sev līdzīgu konspirtolōgu zemnīcas. labprāt ielūkojos, ko tad Lielie Puikas saka šai sakarā. lūk, manās roķelēs nonākusi Cambridge University Press 2013. gada 330 lpp. bībelīte Climate Change Geoengineering: Philosophical Perspectives, Legal Issues, and Governance Frameworks, kurā pat voodoo&taboo vārds “chemtrails” minēts 2 reizes (pretstatā “aerosol” (spraying), kas izlec vismaz 100kārt)
Finally, it is interesting to note that geoengineering has also been noticed by more than a few conspiracy theorists such as believers in the “chemtrails” conspiracy, which holds that the U.S. government is secretly spraying chemicals on the population, by means of jet contrails. Indeed, this author was one of the earliest sources for this meme, when chemtrails activists discovered my 1998 article, and linked its discussion of SRM to their preexisting suspicions about government chemical trails. Today, there is an entire Web site, geoengineeringwatch.org, which provides exceptionally detailed descriptions of CM science and policy debates, as well as deeply troubling information, such as directions to the offices of leading CM advocates. Of course, such wing nuts remain on the fringes of public discourse – for now. [CM = climate management; SRM = solar radiation management]
Diezgan daudz šie šarlatāni pļūtī par ētiku, lai gan, teikšu godīgi, tīri estētiski gandrīz ik teikums rauj uz vemsli.
Our ethical framework for SRM experiments includes three basic principles:
The Principle of Respect requires that researchers secure the global public’s consent, in some appropriate form, before commencing an experiment. The Principle of Beneficence and Justice requires that researchers protect the basic rights of persons affected by their experiments, minimize the risk–benefit ratio of those experiments, and aim to distribute those risks and benefits justly across persons, animals, and eco-systems. The Principle of Minimization requires that experiments should not last longer, cover a greater geographic area, or exert a greater influence on the climate than is necessary to test the specific hypotheses in question.
The analogy between SRM and biomedical research is, like all analogies, imperfect. The key limitation of this analogy is that individuals decide for themselves whether to participate in and face the risks of a biomedical experiment, whereas we must decide collectively whether to subject ourselves to the risks of an SRM experiment. Imagine two people who are considering participating in a trial of an experimental antidepressant. The first person’s decision about whether to participate has no effect on the other’s decision; it neither precludes nor requires that the other person participate. Thus, the first person’s decision does not expose the second to any risks. SRM is different. To “participate” in an SRM experiment, in the relevant sense, is to be subjected to the alteration of the climate. Thus, no one can participate in the experiment unless everyone participates in the experiment. In this respect, an SRM experiment is more like a public health intervention or collective social policy than it is a medical experiment. For example, individuals cannot easily opt out of mandatory vaccination policies, the fluoridation of drinking water, or national pension schemes.
The necessity of “collective participation” in SRM experiments changes the way we think about risk and consent. In the biomedical case, we need to consider only the risks to the individual participant (and, in some cases, his or her family). With SRM, we need to consider both the scale and the distribution of risks. In the bio-medical case, we can and should require the informed consent of each participant. If universal informed consent is ethically required for SRM experiments, then ethical SRM experiments are impossible. In general, however, we rarely require unanimous agreement in making collective decisions. Examples of this include democratic governments that sometimes impose military service requirements, change tax rates, institute redistributive social safety nets, protect species or ecosystems, and prohibit or regulate the use of certain technologies, even when significant fractions of the population do not and would not consent to those policies. In discussing consent and SRM experiments, we suggested that some indirect form of consent – such as consent voiced through national representatives – may be ethically sufficient. In what follows, we consider the features that an institution would need in order to serve as a vehicle for such indirect consent.
3. Collective Decisions, Legitimacy, and Global Governance
We contend that in collective decisions, the central normative concern is the legitimacy of decisions and decision makers rather than universal individual consent. Thus, the ethical conduct of SRM research requires an institution that has the global political legitimacy to make decisions about SRM experiments.
Political philosophers recognize both a normative and a descriptive (i.e., positive) concept of legitimacy. Roughly, an institution is legitimate in the normative sense if it has the right to govern, and it is legitimate in the descriptive sense if it is widely believed to have the right to govern. Because the ethical conduct of SRM research depends on an institution that has the right to govern SRM research, rather than one that is merely believed to have that right, we focus on the normative sense of legitimacy.
Political philosophers also distinguish between the legitimacy of political institutions and the legitimacy of decisions made by those institutions. To say that an institution is legitimate is to say that with respect to some range of issues, it has the moral authority to make binding decisions for the people within its jurisdiction. To say that a particular decision is legitimate is to say that the institution has the moral right to decide that particular issue in the particular way that it has. The distinction between legitimate institutions and legitimate decisions matters because legitimate institutions can sometimes make illegitimate decisions. A decision might be illegitimate because it does not result from the proper procedure. If, for instance, a legislative body requires half of its members to be present for a quorum, then a decision is illegitimate if it is made when only a third of the membership is present. Similarly, if a state’s legislature enacts a law that violates a right protected by the state’s constitution, the law is illegitimate; the only legitimate procedure for abridging that right is to change the constitution. A decision could also be illegitimate if it is grossly unjust. Although states can be legitimate without being perfectly just, not even a legitimate government of a legitimate state has the moral authority to violate the basic rights of its citizens in systematic ways. For instance, procedural propriety presumably would not confer legitimacy on a decision to strip a particular ethnic minority of basic civil rights.
In political (i.e., collective) decision making, legitimacy plays the role that consent plays in individual decision making. Anyone who voluntarily cedes authority over some range of issues to a trade union, a board of directors, a government, or a similar decision-making body thereby acknowledges that legitimacy is an appropriate standard for evaluating collective decisions. As Allen Buchanan puts it, consent, despite its prominence in social contract theorists’ accounts of political legitimacy, is “ill-suited to the political world” because “politics seems to be concerned … with how to get along when consent is lacking.”
As “participation” in an SRM experiment is a collective choice, not an individual one, researchers whose experiments have the legitimate approval of an appropriate institution will satisfy the demands of the Principle of Respect. An appropriate institution, in this context, is one with the global political legitimacy to make decisions about SRM experiments.
For the purposes of assessing possible models for a global SRM governance institution, we adopt Allan Buchanan and Robert Keohane’s Complex Standard of legitimacy for global governance institutions (GGIs). In broad strokes, the Complex Standard has three parts, each of which we elaborate on below. First, a legitimate institution must enjoy the ongoing consent of democratic states. Second, a legitimate institution must meet certain “substantive” conditions: namely, it must exhibit “minimal moral acceptability,” maintain its institutional integrity, and deliver positive benefits relative to alternative feasible institutional arrangements. Third, a legitimate institution must manifest certain “epistemic” or “deliberative virtues,” which provide sufficient transparency and accountability to ensure meaningful participation by and due consideration of its stakeholders. |
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