April 25, 2024

Savulescu on changing the world – literally

Xavier Symons

In a recent Practical Ethics post, Oxford bioethicist Julian Savulescu defended the notion of geoengineering, suggesting that it could be the only way to combat climate change.

Academics advocating geoengineering usually encounter strong resistance, and sometimes ridicule, amongst their peers. Many say you risk creating problems worse than the ones you are trying to solve.

In a recent Practical Ethics post, Oxford bioethicist Julian Savulescu defended the notion, suggesting that it could be the only way to combat climate change.  

By genengineering, Savulescu is referring to large-scale interventions by which we can alter the structure of the environment, making it more conducive to human inhabitation. He used as an example the introduction of ants, iron sulphide, and artificial trees to combat global warming.

Savulescu suggests that genengineering is already occurring in the form of massive carbon omissions. Insofar as it is already happening we shouldn’t be concerned to engage in large-scale geoengineering to bring the world back to normal.

He also challenges the claim that the ‘natural’ climate is the best. We should rely less on assessing how things naturally are, and more on deciding how they should be:

“We cannot avoid asking and answering the question: what is a good human life? Likewise, we cannot avoid the ethical question: what is a good climate?”

Savulescu argues for a kind of long-term genengineering, as this will have less immediate negative effects (if any):

“We should prefer interventions that slowly modify climate over generations, rather than rapid interventions that carry risk within a single generation, if we wish to adopt a person-affecting precautionary approach.”

Savulescu defends large-scale geoengineering
Xavier Symons
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