Fourteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Ecocide has been proposed as a fifth crime under the International Criminal Court. This paper explores the most recently proposed definition with a principled bioethical lens and argues for the legal professions immediate and unanimous support. First, I explain why the legal community has a duty to address ecologically destructive acts in the international forum. I frame this duty within the context of bioethics and contrast the relative silence of the legal profession with unanimity of medical and religious professionals. Second, I use a case-based approach to respond to certain critiques of ecocide. In doing so, the term maleficient difference will be introduced as a framework to measure the damage caused by actors and assess the reasonableness of guilt. While academic literature has been generated on the need for bioethical insights on climate change, to date I have not been able to locate any literature on bioethics within the context of ecocide specifically.