Eighteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

This paper examines the moral implications of mitigating climate change by forceful means. If the current state of the world is not conducive of current and future generations’ abilities to satisfy their basic needs, the situation might be characterized as an unjust peace, thus making it morally permissible to alter it by means of just war. This paper examines possible jus ad bellum justifications for ‘climate wars’ and their moral implications. Assessing the just war principles in relation to environmental sustainability exposes certain novel problems in military ethics while also emphasizing the non-ideal nature of sustainability ethics. This study is a critical reappraisal, which analyses the descriptive accounts on environmental sustainability and the normative accounts on military ethics to expose contradiction and to construct a consistent view on justifying forceful means for combating climate change. The first task concentrates on characterizing jus ad bellum principles in the context of climate wars, while the second task concentrates on analyzing their moral implications in wars fought for environmental sustainability. Climate change as a moral problem seems to make just war principles self-defeating in a way that renders them a hindrance to the moral values they are meant to advance. In climate contexts jus ad bellum principles seem to induce militaristic attitudes inconducive of moral determination in war and in sustainably mitigating climate change. Although, in theory, the principles seem perfectly applicable to climate wars, in effect they expose the morally non-ideal nature of climate change and novel problems of warfare in general.