Effective Climate Communication

To begin, I was a little confused what the speaker, Kari Norgaard,  was going to be talking about. It turns out it was my favorite speaker that I have attended all year, mainly because I could easily understand all of her points and I really enjoyed all of the points she made and agreed with them. She is a professor at Orgeon University for sociology and environmental studies. I liked how she combined the two studies, because I believe there is a certain way that climate change should be discussed, and the way most people talk about it today is ineffective. She talked about how to effectively and appropriately talk about climate change in the hopes of gaining more people who are willing to aid in the fight against climate change.

Norgaard's first point was to talk about climate change skeptics. The way she described it made me think how ridiculous it is that people don't believe in what is happening to our world and its atmosphere. Then I thought about it more deeply, and realized I'm one of those people. It's not that I don't believe that we are polluting our world, but I do turn away from it and tend to push people away who talk to me about it. She then explained why there are so many people like me, and it relates to cultural relativism. Our culture tends to be lazy and gives up on hope easily. We are resistant to change, and don't like things that threaten our way of life now. It's hard work to make our planet safer environmentally, and we don't like that we have to change the way we even throw away our trash just to fix it.

My favorite point that she brought up was the innappropriate timing of many climate change discussions. When we're in a relaxed setting, closed off from the pressures of the outside world, we don't like to talk about such heavy topics. We want to be able to forget that in 50 years we may not be able to even live on Earth anymore, and forget the struggles of everyday life. That's why when people bring up climate change at a bar, or somewhere relaxed people tend to dismiss the severity of it. I know that when people talk to me about it on a Saturday night out at a frat, I actually walk away from them. So if we change the way we talk about it, more people will join the cause.

Nihilism, Objectivism, Relativism...Which Way Are You Leaning?

In class today, we left off at the start of a very interesting discussion. After reading the arguments for and against each philosophical view, we were asked where we saw our own views falling into place. There didn't seem to be any one theory that had overwhelming support behind it, nor one theory in which the entire class had completely dismissed.

At the start of this class, I was more of a subjectivist. For me, morality was all relative and no one person's moral principles could be superior to another's. In this belief I was grounded-- that is-- until we studied Shafer-Landau's chapter on "Ethical Relativism". Unable to refute the arguments raised by the author to my views, I turned to outside literature, but still was unable to come up with anything that could hold up against these objections. Now, however, I feel that my personal views may lie closer to those posed within nilhilism's error theory. The fact-value distinction in which Shafer-Landau notes drew me into nihilism (306). Also, since I agree that moral claims are "truth apt" yet all false because of the nonexistence of moral truths, error theory was more appealing than expressivism.

Can Ethics Be Objective? Analysis of Ethical Relativism

Can ethics be objective?  Russ Shafer-Landau analyzes this question, in The Fundamental Of Ethics, by critiquing the arguments of ethical relativism.   Ethical relativism is divided into two subtypes; cultural relativism and ethical subjectivism.  The cultural relativists argue that correct moral standards are decided by each culture or society (291).  In contrast, ethical subjectivists claim that each individual decides which moral standards are correct (291).  Landau tests each claim made by these theories through a series of logical tests. Although I will focus only on cultural relativism, the critiques of both groups' claims illustrate that their skepticism towards ethical objectivity is not plausible.