Pragmatism and political savvy are always the order of the day in Washington in general, and on Capital Hill in particular. Still, it’s impossible for a concerned observer to miss an incredible lack of moral and ethical seriousness in the climate change debate. And congress is not, in general, actually a total ethics-free zone. If a congressman from a coal state or a farm state or what have you were to fly to Bangladesh, massacre a whole village, steal their stuff, then fly back home and redistribute the proceeds of his slaughter to his constituents nobody in the press corps would shrug and say “well, he’s just looking out for his district.”
It’s not the same, I know. But still, to make a somewhat serious point an awful lot of Derek Parfit’s errors in moral mathematics seem to be taking place when people think about the climate change.
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