Here I argue that the hyper-individualistic and rationalistic ethical paradigms – originating in the late eighteenth century and dominating moral philosophy, in various permutations, ever since – cannot capture the moral concerns evoked by the prospect of global climate change. Those paradigms are undone by the temporal and spatial scales of climate change. To press my argument, I deploy two famous philosophical tropes – John Rawls's notion of the original position and Derek Parfit's paradox – and another that promises to become famous: Dale Jamieson's six little ditties about Jack and Jill. I then go on to argue that the spatial and especially the temporal scales of global climate change demand a shift in moral philosophy from a hyper-individualistic ontology to a thoroughly holistic ontology. It also demands a shift from a reason-based to a sentiment-based moral psychology. Holism in environmental ethics is usually coupled with non-anthropocentrism in theories constructed to provide moral considerability for transorganismic entities – such as species, biotic communities, and ecosystems. The spatial and temporal scales of climate, however, render non-anthropocentric environmental ethics otiose, as I more fully explain. Thus the environmental ethic here proposed to meet the moral challenge of global climate change is holistic but anthropocentric. I start with Jamieson's six little ditties about Jack and Jill.Footnote ¹

Ditty 1.

This is as clear a case as one could want of the classic parameters of modern moral philosophy. An identifiable individual human agent acts reprehensibly on an identifiable individual human patient. Whether we account for the reprehensibility of Jack's action in terms of Jill's lost utility or in terms of the violation of Jill's dignity and associated rights is beside my point here.

As Jamieson goes on to say, ‘If we vary the case on any of these dimensions, we may still see the resulting cases as posing a moral problem, but their claims to be … paradigm moral problems will be weaker…’Footnote ²

Ditty 2.

In this case, the reprehensibility of bicycle theft is distributed over a set of agents, Jack among them, and thus the personal reprehensibility of Jack's action is proportionately attenuated.

Ditty 3.

This case is the obverse of the previous one. The harm Jack inflicts is distributed over a set of patients, and the harm Jill suffers is proportionately attenuated. Jill still has a bicycle, but she has to replace, say, the saddle. And Jack presumably assembles a bicycle from the parts he steals – a saddle from Jill, a sprocket from Jane, a wheel from Joan, and so on.

Ditty 4.

In this case, the spatial dimension is varied. Jack does not act in proximity to Jill. Further, Jack does not intend to harm Jill. Jack innocently buys a bicycle in Jamaica, let us say, which was stolen by Joe from Jill in Japan.

Ditty 5.

In this case, the temporal dimension is varied. Here too Jack does not act in proximity to Jill, nor too does he intend to harm Jill. Indeed, as I shall show with Parfit's help, had Jack and his cohort been more frugal, Jill would not exist and Jane would have her bicycle.

Ditty 6.

In this case all the dimensions of the original paradigmatic (un)ethical exchange vary at once: multiple agents adversely, but unintentionally, affect multiple patients who are distant in both time and space.

Jamieson's Ditty 6 is an allegory about climate change. Acting independently, we in the industrialized world have unintentionally set in motion a chain of events – burned fossil fuels and in consequence increased atmospheric carbon and other green house gases – that will cause a large number of future people to suffer the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change. Clearly, this a moral problem; indeed a moral problem of colossal proportions. But by the classical eighteenth-century ethical über-paradigm (inclusive of both its consequentialist and deontological variants), we can intelligibly assign responsibility for this problem only to individual agents – Jack₁, Jack_2, Jack₃ … Jack_n – for the harm they inflict on innocent individual patients – Jill₁, Jill₂, Jill₃ … Jill_n. If so constrained in our moral ontology, then individual responsibility for causing global climate change and for mitigating it or for aiding individual patients in adapting to it is so distributed (over literally billions of individual agents) that each contemporary denizen of the industrial world can be assigned only a negligible share. Those conscientious enough to install solar-energy panels on their rooftops, drive hybrid vehicles, and undertake other life-style changes to reduce their carbon footprints also negligibly contribute to mitigating global climate change. Such an ethic of personal virtue is spiritually ennobling, but relieves the human suffering or the violation of human rights attendant on global climate change – presently, soon, or in the distant future – not one iota.

If we hold the temporal dimension constant and consider only the present generation and foreseeable future generations, the classic individualistic moral ontology can be made to serve, at least in theory. Those who are presently and will soon suffer the greatest harm from global climate change are the least responsible for causing it and the least able to cope with it. Thus philosophers wed to the classic individualistic moral ontology approach the problem as one of international justice.Footnote ³ In theory, the individual industrialized Jacks of the world could be compelled to compensate the individual non-industrialized Jills. Attempting to match up an individual Jack with an individual Jill to effect such compensation is as incoherent as it is impractical – because, as Jamieson's allegory clearly shows, the causal chain of events that link individual agent and individual patient are indirect (and indeed nonlinear). Industrial governments might tax their citizens and pay into a global escrow fund in proportion to the aggregated carbon footprints of their citizens and the fund might be distributed to governments of the countries most vulnerable to global climate change, with the presumption that the recipient governments spend the restitution payments for adaptation projects, such as sea walls. In addition, the governments of the industrialized Jacks might impose a carbon tax on their citizens or adopt cap and trade measures to reduce green house gas emissions and thus mitigate more drastic global climate change.

Of course, there are huge practical impediments to the success of such an international climate-justice regime – the political intransigence of the governments of industrialized nation states and rampant corruption in the governments of non-industrialized nation states being, perhaps, the most salient. But, this is philosophy and we are here concerned only with the conceptual cogency of essentially Enlightenment moral philosophy confronted by the biggest moral problem of the new millennium. And an actually implemented government-to-government international climate justice regime – however improbable it may be to effectively implement – would penalize individual Jacks and compensate individual Jills for harms indirectly and unintentionally inflicted on the latter by the former.

So far, so good: Enlightenment moral philosophy meets the challenge by (1) collectivizing moral agents and patients via state-to-state exchanges and (2) then distributing monetized penalties to individual perpetrators and damages to individual victims. The prevailing individualistic ethical ontology is strained by the planetary spatial scale and causal indirection and diffusion of the moral problem of global climate change. But, as we see, it holds up under the strain, at least in theory. The centennial and millennial temporal scale of global climate change, however, swamps that ontology and challenges environmental philosophers to think in new and fresh ways about ethics.

For those of us of a certain age – my age – future generations exist right along side us. Let us stipulate that the span of a generation is twenty-five years. I am about seventy years old. My son is about forty-five years old and his son, my grandson, is about 15 years old. Suppose I live to see my grandson's son or daughter – my great grandson or great granddaughter – born five or ten years hence. Someone born in the year 2015 or 2020 has an excellent chance to live into the twenty-second century. I can thus be concerned personally about individuals who now exist or fairly soon will exist about a century out. And I badly want the world they will inherit to be habitable and a world worth living in. But beyond a century into the future it is logically impossible to be concerned about future generations individually – because of a permutation of the Parfit Paradox.

Derek Parfit considers two cases of pregnancy.Footnote ⁴ Parfit's own imagined case of a fourteen-year-old girl who decides to become pregnant and thus give her son or daughter an ill-defined ‘bad start in life’ is problematic for obvious reasons.Footnote ⁵ So let's construct a clearer permutation: A woman discovers that she is both pregnant and ill with a disease that, if untreated, will cause her child to be born with a serious disability. Surely classic individualistic ethics, whether utilitarian or deontological, would mandate that the woman treat her disease and spare her child living a life burdened by a serious disability. Another woman is not now pregnant, but she has been trying to become pregnant, whereupon she discovers that she is ill with a different disease that would cause a child she might conceive to be born with a serious disability. Her disease, however, cannot be treated, but she will get over it and return to health in a few months. Should she postpone her pregnancy? The two cases seem to be morally identical except for the temporal dimension, but the temporal dimension sharply divides them. If, in the second case, the woman postpones her pregnancy a different individual will be born because a different egg, with a different set of genes, will be fertilized by a different sperm. One individual who might have existed did not exist because the woman postponed her pregnancy. Is it better to exist and to be burdened by a deformity or to have been deprived of existence altogether?

Peter Singer infamously endorsed infanticide because, in his utilitarian opinion, it would indeed be better not to exist at all than to exist with a serious disability that caused or occasioned much suffering.Footnote ⁶ The storm of outraged protest by disabled persons that subsequently greeted Singer – he was shouted down, during the summer of 1989, and prevented to speak in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria – suggests that his answer to that question is by no means definitive.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, those who have the greatest stake in how that question is answered – those who would not have existed if Singer had been able to influence reproductive policy – answered that question oppositely to him.

One may wonder if such speculation about the preferences of non-existent individuals is so much philosophical nonsense. John Rawls is one of the most highly acclaimed and persuasive moral philosophers of the twentieth century. His theory of justice as fairness rests on the conceptual plausibility of imagining a purely hypothetical ‘original position’ behind a ‘veil of ignorance’.Footnote ⁸ Rawls asks us to imagine a cohort of free and rational individuals about to enter into a social contract who do not know with what the accidents of birth will endow them. They do not know their eventual gender, race, physical and mental endowments, tastes, values, and so on. Free from all such potential biases, Rawls inquires into what basic principles of justice persons in the original position would settle on and what policies and laws, flowing from those principles, they would write into a social contract that all would be willing to sign? Surely they would prohibit discrimination based on race or gender, for example, not knowing what race or gender they might turn out to be. We might parfit, as it were, Rawls's original position and imagine that some of their policy choices would expose them to the risk, not that they would suffer from discrimination, but that they would not exist at all. Quite apart from speculation about what policies those in this parfited original position would be inclined to enact, my point is simply that, thanks to Rawls, we have become quite complacent about considering the preferences of non-existing but potentially existing individuals.

Still, one may wonder what has all this to do with intergenerational ethics and the temporal scale of global climate change. Just this. As Parfit goes on to note, if now we make radical changes in environmental policy and law (in an effort to mitigate global climate change) that will entail radical changes in such aspects of our lives as transportation, lighting, heating, diet, and so on. Those changes will lead to changes in the way men and women chance to meet, to fall in love, when they will copulate, and thus what individuals will be given birth to. So, return now to Rawls's original position, as parfited. Those in it would have us make no change whatsoever in environmental policy and law because those changes would entail that other individuals would exist instead of them. Or, to make another permutation of the Rawls-Parfit paradox, those individuals destined to compose future generations if we do nothing to mitigate climate change, would, if given the choice, have to choose between living in a world of ever more violent weather, ever more impoverished biodiversity, ever more virulent disease, ever more extreme heat and drought – or not living at all.

It might be objected that I am taking Rawls too literally and not appreciating the force of the hypotheticality of his original-position/veil-of-ignorance philosophical trope. But my point can be made by reference to the actual past as well as to the imagined future. The Great Depression of the 1930s caused great suffering. It might have been foreseen, by economic policy makers in the 1920s, and thus averted with the implementation of more conservative fiscal and monetary policies. But if it had been averted I would not exist. My parents postponed marriage and child bearing because they were jobless and poor during the Depression. Thus, I find it hard to regret the occurrence of the Great Depression of the 1930s, even with all the suffering it caused. Lest you think I am being unconscionably selfish – condoning pandemic economic suffering just so I can exist – probably half my generational cohort would not exist had the Great Depression not unfolded as it actually did. Nor would any of our children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren – those for whom we so dearly care and those for whom we are willing to take pains now so that their world will remain habitable.

An enormous philosophical literature has been generated by the Parfit paradox, much of it devoted to avoiding the ‘repugnant conclusion’ to which Parfit himself was led by it. An equally enormous philosophical literature has been generated by Rawls's notion of the ‘original position’. I do not pretend to contribute to those literatures by fusing these two famous philosophical tropes. Rather the Rawls-Parfit paradox, as I have here sketched it, exposes the bizarre quandaries to which we moral philosophers are led by cleaving to a hyper-individualistic moral ontology. It does not demonstrate that which is introspectively false: that we cannot or should not be concerned about distant future generations or that we cannot and should not imagine that we have moral obligations to distant future generations. What it demonstrates, as it seems to me, is that we are concerned about future generations in general, collectively, not the particular persons who will compose future generations severally and individually.

Now, let us consider the full temporal scale of global climate change. Currently (June, 2011), carbon dioxide constitutes 389 parts per million of the molecules composing Earth's atmosphere and is increasing by 2 parts per million every year.Footnote ⁹ In fifteen years CO₂ concentrations will rise to 400–410 parts per million. No one knows if after that emissions will continue to rise, stabilize, or fall, but the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report predicts that average global temperature will rise at century's end by 1.5–6.5 degrees Celsius and sea levels will rise from a quarter to half a meter.Footnote ¹⁰ Four years later, the IPCC report seems quaint because polar ice has since been observed to be melting faster than anyone then thought possible.Footnote ¹¹ If we make no radical changes in energy policy, Earth's sea level and climate may be radically altered by the end of the twenty-first century. Positive feedback loops may result in even more carbon dioxide and methane, an even stronger greenhouse gas, released from melting arctic tundra.Footnote ¹² Ever soaring levels of greenhouse gases, decade after decade, century after century, in Earth's atmosphere could result in a total meltdown of continental ice sheets and thus ever greater elevation of the ocean, swamping oceanic islands and shrinking the continents. Further, the oceans may so acidify with dissolved carbon that the formation of the silica frustules of the diatoms at the base of the marine food chain is inhibited by carbonic acid, resulting in a total collapse of marine ecosystems.Footnote ¹³

At the millennial temporal scale the rationalism of the classical moral paradigm becomes problematic. A pillar of the classical paradigm is the axiom that equal interests should be treated equally. The principle of equality is based on the rational law of self-consistency or non-contradiction. To treat equal interests unequally is inconsistent and therefore irrational.Footnote ¹⁴

As before indicated, the individualistic moral ontology of the prevailing moral philosophy can be made to undergird global climate justice, in theory, by the collectivization of the world's Jacks and Jills through government-to-government transfers of wealth followed by its just distribution of penalties and damages payouts. But the Jamieson Ditty 4 spatial variation of the Jamieson Ditty 1 paradigm case of an ethically reprehensible action of agent Jack on patient Jill stretches the credulity of the rational principle of equality. A person who actually treated equally the equal interests of a total stranger on another continent with the equal interests of a proximate relative or friend would, by the tribunal of moral common sense, be judged to be daft. My son had an interest in a college education. Was I ethically remiss to pay for his college education rather than that of a young man, randomly selected from a pool of young men equally interested in a college education, living in Delhi or Bangkok? Notoriously, Peter Singer violated the consistency axiom of his own utilitarianism by lavishing expensive medical care on his mother in her latter stages of Alzheimer's.Footnote ¹⁵ Despite recklessly philosophizing that such non-persons, in a vegetative state incapable of suffering, should be euthanized – apparently so long as they were someone else's kith and kin – he acted as he should have done, by the tribunal of moral common sense, when the chips were down. Did Singer fail in his duty to be consistently impartial? Hardly; for there really is no such duty. Rather, he exposed the pernicious silliness of the classical moral paradigm.

The rationalism of the prevailing paradigms in moral philosophy – utilitarianism and deontology, originating, respectively, with Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century – is closely connected to the individualistic ontology of those paradigms. If we conceive of persons as externally related social atoms then of course the equal interests of each individual social atom appear to every other social atom to be of equal weight and thus to demand equal consideration and equal treatment. But human beings are not externally related social atoms. We are rather internally related to one another in many ways. We are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, lovers, friends, colleagues, fellow citizens. These relationships engender different duties and obligations. It seems inhuman to suppose that, in the name of ethics, I should consider the equal interests a stranger half a world away to demand equal regard with those of my son, my grandson, my partner, my friends, and my colleagues. Only if we believe that we are externally related social atoms, not internally related social beings, could we also believe that it is only consistent, only rational, to treat equal interests equally irrespective of the particularity – and partiality – of relationships.

Certainly, the rational principle of equality – the principle that one treat equal interests equally on pain of inconsistency – seems to be utterly preposterous when we vary the temporal dimension and go from Jamieson Ditty 4 to Jamieson Ditty 6, the allegory of global climate change. The rational principle of equality would require us to regard the interests of people living everywhere on Earth hundreds of years in the future as equal to our own and to those of our proximate contemporaries. As we try to expand our thoughts to embrace the billions of individuals that now exist on Earth and the billions more that will exist over the next several thousand years – but whose identities and thus whose interests are presently indeterminate – how we might begin even coherently to apply the principle of equality is literally mind boggling, literally unthinkable. In the face of the colossal moral problem posed by global climate change, the classic ethical paradigm, exemplified by Jamieson Ditty 1, is bankrupt. The colossal moral problem posed by global climate change mandates a fundamental paradigm shift in ethics.

Homo ethicus and Homo economicus are two sides of the same individualistic and rationalistic coin. Homo economicus is rational only when he deploys his resources to serve his and only his own interests. Homo ethicus is rational only when he deploys his resources to serve the equal interests of all persons equally including his own. Homo economicus has been roundly criticized as an inhuman invention of the dismal science. I suggest it is time we commit Homo ethicus to the dustbin of the noble, but equally inhuman, Enlightenment science of moral philosophy.

In my opinion, David Hume correctly identified the wellspring of ethics not in reason and its most fundamental law of non-contradiction or self-consistency but in the other-oriented moral sentiments. And the other-oriented moral sentiments are many, nuanced, and selective in their proper objects. Love is strongly felt and powerfully motivating, but a moral sentiment that is narrowly bestowed. I paid for my son's college education motivated principally by love not a coldly rational duty. Sympathy is a less strongly felt and moderately motivating moral sentiment that may be widely bestowed, even to sentient animals, but seems to require the proximity of its proper objects to be fully engaged. To arouse sympathy for distant persons or animals it seems that they must be drawn near and made present through images of their suffering. Benevolence, as a general affective posture toward the world, seems to be broad in scope, but a weak motivator for specific actions on behalf of its beneficiaries. A benevolent person may be universally well wishing, but largely unmoved to do much of anything to actually benefit others.

Some of the moral sentiments seem to be stimulated by and are directed toward collective, not individual social entities. Patriotism is often a strongly felt and powerfully motivating moral sentiment stimulated by and directed toward a nation state. Lack of patriotism is counted a moral defect and unpatriotic is a condemnatory epithet. Worse, the betrayal of patriotism is strongly condemned with such expressions as turncoat and traitor, and sometimes severely punished by imprisonment or even death. Loyalty seems only a little less strongly felt and powerfully motivating and is stimulated by and directed toward other social wholes or collectives. Rather trivially, many people feel intense loyalty to a football team, such as Manchester United or the Dallas Cowboys. Fair weather fan is a phrase reeking of moral censure, however inconsequential. We often experience loyalty to institutions, such as universities, as well as to persons functioning in such institutions.

A diehard reductionist might contend that patriotism and loyalty can be reduced to moral sentiments directed to the individuals composing such collectives. Love of a particular country would, accordingly, be just fraternal love of the individual citizens of that country. In the case of American patriots, at least, that is manifestly not the case. The most ardent patriots in the US often have strongly antipathetic feelings toward the great majority of their fellow Americans if you aggregate African Americans, Mexican Americans, and gay and lesbian, politically liberal, and hippie Americans of all ethnicities. As to loyalty, sports fans remain loyal to their favorite team even as the players shuffle in and out; and should a star player join a rival team, once adored, he or she is immediately loathed – loathed indeed as the sporting equivalent of a traitor by the same fans.

What then is the fitting object and what is the fitting moral sentiment toward that object commensurate with the spatial and temporal scales of global climate change? Life on Earth is in no danger. In its 3.5 billion year biography, life has endured through many cataclysms, including devastating meteor strikes, near total glaciation, periodic fluctuations in Earth's orbit and axis of rotation. Some of these cataclysmic events have entrained mass extinctions, only for life on Earth to speciate more prolifically. Homo sapiens, the species, is probably not at risk of total extinction. If post-apocalyptic fiction is at all prescient, humans will survive a climate apocalypse no less than a nuclear apocalypse – but likely in a barbaric state of existence. Hobbes wonders if the state of nature ever actually existed universally in the past; we may wonder if it lies not in the past but in the future. What does seem to be at risk, then, is not the human species, but human civilization. And the moral sentiment that the fair prospect of human civilization stimulates is pride and a kind of fiduciary sense of care.

Aldo Leopold's ‘The Land Ethic’ begins with these oft-quoted words: ‘When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy… ’Footnote ¹⁶ Leopold deliberately takes his reader back in imagination to the earliest extant literature in Western civilization, and thus to the dawn of that civilization, and specifies its temporal scale: ‘During the three thousand years which have since elapsed …’Footnote ¹⁷ If Western civilization has endured for three thousand years, surely it does not stretch credulity to think that it might well endure for another three thousand years. Leopold may not have intended to distract his audience with feelings of wonder and pride over the magnitude and duration of that cultural enterprise – traceable back to Homer, if not to Odysseus himself. But surely such feelings of wonder and pride must well up in us as we contemplate the achievements of Western civilization – in every domain of culture, high and low: in the graphic and plastic arts, in music, theater, literature, philosophy, science, architecture, engineering.

If Western civilization goes back three thousand years, other of the world's civilizations go back even farther in time. The Greeks of Plato's day acknowledged the Egyptian civilization, which began some five thousand years ago, as more venerable than their own. Contemporary Indians can trace the origins of their civilization almost as far back in time to cities in the Indus Valley. Contemporary Chinese and Mexicans can trace the origins of their civilizations back some four thousand years – to the Xia and Maya, respectively. Iranians have perhaps inherited the current cultural legacy of the oldest extant civilization in the world, going back some six thousand years. Thanks to globalization these various streams of regional civilizations have merged to form a single mighty river of a global human civilization. We are the current custodians of that civilization. If it is difficult to muster up concern for the indeterminate interests of the indeterminate billions of human individuals who will exist over the next five thousand years, it seems equally difficult to avoid feeling concern about the very real prospect of the imminent collapse of human civilization.

The temporal scale of this proposed moral ontology – moral considerability for human civilization per se – is proportionate to the spatial and temporal scales of global climate change. Global human civilization thus appears to be the appropriate moral patient for global-climate-change ethics. What about the appropriate moral agent? Global climate change moralists often end their sermons with a list of things that each Jack and Jill of us can individually and voluntarily do to shrink our individual carbon footprints: replace halogen with compact fluorescent light bulbs, drive less, bike more, insulate, turn down the thermostat in winter and turn it up in summer … The Jack-and-Jill ethical paradigm is so ingrained in our thinking that we seem to suppose that duty-driven voluntary change in individual behavior is all that global-climate-change ethics is about. If so, catastrophic global climate change and the likely demise of human civilization is all but inevitable, due to the familiar free-rider problem. If there is a chance at averting climate catastrophe it lies in scaling up the moral agent as well as the moral patient.

The identity of that moral agent is no mystery: the world's several governments acting in concert to create policy and law that will effectively drive changes in individual behavior. The manufacture of halogen light bulbs might be discontinued through international agreement. A steep excise tax on gas-guzzling SUVs might be globally imposed. A transnational carbon tax might be imposed or an international cap-and-trade market might be instituted. Research on alternative fuels might be lavishly subsidized. And so on and so forth. My purpose here is not to provide an inventory of actions that governments can take, but to identify the effective moral agent for an ethics of global climate change.

Nor do I mean to reject altogether out of hand the efficacy of voluntary individual effort to stem the tide of global climate change. When one see others undertake lifestyle changes, especially if such changes, as they often do, entrain other personal benefits – such as better fitness attendant upon biking, better nutrition attendant upon the consumption of local foods, the economic savings of lower domestic energy consumption – there is a contagious effect. That, in turn, leads to self-organizing communities to promote such things as car pools, urban gardens, and reforestation projects, not to mention organizing for greener policies and laws. After all, in a democracy, change in policy and law must have some degree of support by individual citizens in order to be enacted. And once enacted into law, the ethical status of the newly mandated behavioral changes is reinforced. Now that it is against the law, submitting others to second-hand smoke or endangering infants by not restraining them in rear-facing car seats, is considered to be quite wrong and irresponsible as well as illegal.

Unfortunately, there is a limit to this contagious effect. Environmentalism has created a backlash among certain segments of society who feel that their lifestyles are threatened – the mechanized recreationalist, for example. Even more unfortunately, environmentalism has become entangled in partisan politics, associated in the US with ‘liberal’ as opposed to ‘conservative’ political allegiance. Thus in the end, whether we would wish it or not, achieving the changes in human behavior and lifestyle necessary to meet the challenge of global climate change will require changes in policy and law, because a significant sector of society is likely to resist such changes as one dimension of a complex political struggle sometimes characterized as ‘the culture war’.

I now conclude. This essay has not been about practical ethics, but about ethical theory. Or to say the same thing in different words, it has been about moral philosophy, not normative morality. We most certainly have moral obligations to distant future generations. However, we cannot – for the reasons I have given here – conceive of those obligations as obligations to future individuals particularly and severally. Rather, we must conceive of those obligations as obligations to future generations collectively. In short, the hyper-individualism that has characterized the ethical theory dominating Jack-and-Jill moral philosophy for more than two centuries now becomes incoherent when we contemplate our obligations to future generations on the temporal scale – calibrated in centuries and millennia, not years and decades – of global climate change. Implied by the abandonment of an individualistic ontology for an ethics of global climate change is the abandonment of ethical rationalism. Both Kantian deontology and utilitarianism derive our moral obligations from the most fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction or self-consistency. Both the spatial and temporal scales of global climate change and the billions of individuals, who have intrinsic value and/or equal interests with our own, swamp our capacity to treat all individual persons, living now and in the future, as ends in themselves, and/or our capacity to give equal weight to their equal interests. More deeply, shifting from an individualistic to a holistic moral ontology, persons are not conceived as externally related social atoms. Our internal relationships – the relationships that make us the persons that we are – are multiple and various, each kind of which plays differently on our finely tuned moral sentiments. Thus we may be passionately concerned for the global climate of the near future because our loved ones, for whom we passionately care, will have to live in it. We may be passionately concerned about the global climate of the far-flung future because the now contingent and thus indeterminate individual members of distant future generations will be heirs and custodians of human civilization, for which we passionately care. Moreover, we cannot effectively act, as individual moral agents, in such a way as to significantly benefit or harm near-term future generations or to conserve human civilization in the long term. The colossal moral problem presented by the prospect of global climate change demands a shift from ethical individualism to ethical holism in regard to moral agency as well as to patiency. The only moral agents commensurate with the spatial and temporal scales of global climate change are national governments and for them to be effective in mitigating global climate change, they must act in concert.