Climate Change: A Moral Dilemma

Written: 08.15.2026

Climate change isn’t slowed or amplified by belief or disbelief alone. It’s funny that we talk about climate change like it’s some sort of celestial being, like it requires child-like faith in order to acknowledge its existence. The beauty of science is that it can tell us what the evidence supports; no amount of denial changes the data. Yet, all we, the ones who believe in it, seem to do about it is continue to flash the evidence in the face of the non-believers. Obviously, that’s not working. So maybe it’s time to look at why people don’t believe. 

Climate change poses the perfect moral storm. It is a tragedy of the commons after all: a type of conflict between individual, short-term rationality versus collective, long-term rationality. To put it simply, it’s the complex conflict of me driving my own personal vehicle to work instead of riding a bike. When I drive my car to work, I am polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to its concentration in the atmosphere, thus causing the atmosphere to absorb more of the heat reflected off the earth, leaving it trapped in said atmosphere, warming our planet day by day, bit by bit. All because it meant I could leave my house at 7:30 instead of 7:15. Now, is this dramatic? Perhaps. I’d be inclined to say yes if this series of events only occurred every once in a while. But it doesn’t. I do it every day. So does my neighbor. I’d imagine your neighbor does, too. All of a sudden, it’s not so dramatic, it’s an unequal distribution of harms and benefits. I make the choice every day to contribute to climate change, and yet I don’t feel the impacts. At least not really. Sure, maybe my summers are hotter, the rainstorms are stronger, but I don’t wonder where my next meal is coming from. Many people living in the developing world do, though. And they aren’t even the ones who drive a car every day. They did very little, if any, of the polluting, but feel the greatest effects. Thus, we end up here. I still drove to work this morning. 

I’m not going to pretend to know why people don’t believe in something that so clearly stares them in the face, but humor me, as I can hypothesize. Maybe people deny climate change because of the deep institutional inadequacy we are seeing in the face of a climate change era. If you look at the established systems, organizations, and frameworks in the United States, especially right now, they’re not meeting the needs of the populations they serve when it comes to a changing climate. And if our government isn’t doing something to fix it, then perhaps it’s easy for people to not believe in the problem. Still, I think it’s worth noting that constant inaction at both a local and federal level may cause us to not feel the urgency of a matter. 

But here, I think, is the greatest reason people don’t believe in climate change: it is a highly complex scientific and ethical situation. It is more than science and data, it is a question of who is responsible for mending what is broken. It takes energy to comprehend, it takes patience to understand, and it takes time (that we really don’t have) to think up reasonable solutions that fit into our mass-consumerism society. Do we take accountability in the here and now, or do we leave it to future generations to clean up the mess because they’re the ones who will feel the impacts more and more each day? 

Now, to introduce the non-identity problem. In the face of climate change, there are two possible futures: a climate-change future, where we do nothing to mitigate the current climate crisis, and the climate-stable future, where we are able to significantly mitigate the effects of climate change. As you can imagine, these futures look vastly different; governments, societies, lifestyles, policies, even trends steer in opposite directions in the two posed futures. So, it’s safe to say that by 2100, the individuals who live in the climate-change future are living very different lives, and are therefore very different people, than those living in the climate-stable future. If we were to mitigate the problem of climate change in the present moment, driving us toward the reality of the climate-stable future rather than the climate-change future, we are depriving the climate-change population of life. Essentially, the choices we make today impact the conditions of the future, which shape different people altogether. In this case, we cannot apply the same concept to the climate-stable future because at this current moment, it is not a realistic future. Then we can apply the plausible moral principle: if there is harm done, that harm is done to someone or something. Suppose we use a utilitarian perspective to examine the lives of individuals living in the climate-change future. Their lives, on balance, are likely still net positive, making them worth living. We can assume this given that prehistoric times dealt with things like natural disasters and scarcity and were still worth living. If their lives are still worth living, then the non-identity problem makes it difficult to say that they have been harmed by climate change, because the alternative would have been a different future population altogether. They may instead simply be living at a lower quality of life than the hypothetical climate-stable population, but they are still living lives worth living. So perhaps by that logic we, as a society, have no obligation to mitigate climate change. 

However, we may have, not one, but two solutions to this non-identity problem. First is derived from the impersonal moral theory, which rejects the premise that for something to be bad, it has to be bad for some existing or future person. Meaning that just because we can assume the net positive lives of the climate-change population by our existing standard of life doesn’t mean that the conditions they are living in are not bad. All that to say, morally we should be acting in such a way that the standard of living for future generations is above a certain threshold. In my personal opinion, that threshold should be better than how the current generation is living, with the understanding that “better” is subjective. 

The second solution to this problem is the rights-based response. The rights-based response essentially says that people have a right to not be brought into a flawed existence, even if that existence is still, on balance, good. Now, all existence is going to be flawed; we are imperfect individuals living in imperfect societies. Nonetheless, you could easily say that still we have a moral obligation to mitigate those flaws as best we can, and in this specific instance, that flaw is climate change. 

As I previously stated: this is by no means a simple issue. Not even the science is simple, it grabs from numerous fields and disciplines. But it tells us what is true. There is no framework that tells us what is morally right, what is ethically true. It is up to us as a society to determine what is right when it comes to climate change, and perhaps the most uncomfortable part of climate change is that we already know enough to begin answering that question. I don't think individual action can solve climate change, but I do think individuals have an obligation to participate in its mitigation.