Ethics of the Anthropocene

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

You will be the one to decide whether or not to take this class (perhaps based on how engaging you find this paragraph!). This is in part because culturally we’ve decided that students (or perhaps students and their parents) ought to be able to choose their classes—just like they choose which college to attend and what to major in and which career to pursue. We promote individuals choosing the clothes to wear, food to eat, hobbies to pursue, who to court, and whether to have children. If you’re among the elite, you choose what career to pursue, where to live, and will likely have real sway over things like how your neighborhood or city (or perhaps even country) develops. Broadly speaking, we see this as a good. We think that individuals (or perhaps families) designing their lives is part of living a good life. But what about nature? Should we be making choices about nature? We’ve entered a new era of collective design—one where we begin to design things over which we previously had no influence and where the impacts of our design choices are orders of magnitude greater than in any previous human era. The ubiquity of human design and impact is one way of characterizing the Anthropocene. Particularly relevant for the Anthropocene are a host of ethical issues. Are there moral limits to human engineering of organisms and their environments? How do we decide what parts of “nature” to engineer? What principles should guide such engineering? How should we ethically distribute the benefits and burdens of such engineering? In exploring the ethics of designing biological life and life systems, we’ll focus specifically on issues of human and animal enhancement, ecological adaptation and restoration, and geoengineering.