In person icon Climate in Crisis: Kantian Approaches and Kantian Solutions

Abstract

There is a growing consensus that, despite worries from earlier commentators in environmental ethics, Kantian thought remains relevant for ecological challenges of today, including climate change. In the last decade, for example, commentators have re-assessed and applied aspects of Kant’s aesthetic, ethical, and teleological thought for such challenges (Breitenbach 2009, Brady 2013, Svoboda 2015, Varden 2020, and Vereb 2022). Still, with a few exceptions (Lo Re 2022, Pinheiro Walla 2020, and Pollok 2021), Kant’s political theory remains an untapped resource for helping us rethink the climate crisis. Papers in this panel examine selected problems associated with the climate crisis—including climate refugee crises, resource shortages, sea-level rise, the plight of future generations, international policy deadlocks, and related challenges of the Anthropocene—primarily from the perspective of Immanuel Kant’s political thought. One aim of this panel is to examine the extent to which Kant’s thought provides analytical tools for examining the climate crisis from varied social, economic, political, and ethical vantage points. A second and related question panel papers explore is whether methods can be developed on the basis of Kant's thinking that can be used productively to solve or at the very least mitigate the climate crisis. Though Kant's groundbreaking writings on ethics, law, and international politics, such as Towards Perpetual Peace (1796) or the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), were written at the turn of the epoch-making industrial revolution responsible for climate change, it is the thesis of the present panel that ideas from these texts stand to teach us much today.

Title	Details
Reinventing Kantian Reciprocity in the Age of Polycrisis: The Reciprocene as a New Moral Paradigm	View Paper Details
Climate Change, Right and Kant	View Paper Details
Kantian Lessons in Times of Crisis: From Culture to Climate	View Paper Details
Kant on the Relations of Politics and Nature	View Paper Details