Going beyond climate ethics: virtuousness in climate change initiatives

This paper examines the place of virtuousness in climate change initiatives and presents a framework to assess the extent of virtuousness in mitigation and adaptation strategies. Although some argue that climate change is fundamentally an ethical issue, compared to the scientific literature on climate change, the body of climate ethics literature is more recent and considerably smaller. According to Posas (2007), since the first warning of climate change by an oceanographer in 1957, the most significant milestones in terms of introducing an ethical perspective to climate change was the Buenos Aires Declaration in December, 2004. At the same time, there has been a growing interest in academia of what is now come to be known as 'climate ethics'. The climate ethics discourse now includes philosophical contributions, such as of Singer (2002) and Gardiner (2004), and the role of religion in climate ethics (Posas, 2007).