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Articles

Greening the Gadfly

Paul Keeling on why we need environmental philosophy now.

Suppose that every time you turned on a light in your house five people in Bangladesh were instantly vaporized. Throwing your light switch would suddenly become a moral issue,wouldn’t it – a matter of life and death? Now, suppose flipping the switch made the death of five people in Bangladesh very likely, sometime in the next ten years. You’d probably still hesitate. Suppose, yet again, that instead of human deaths, flipping the light switch meant the extinction of a rare butterfly species on a distant continent. How much damage are you willing to accept for your home lighting?

The question generalizes.

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