Catastrophe Ethics

How can our individual actions move the needle on a massive, complex, and systemic problem like climate change? How should we act in order to make the necessary impact? How *must* we act? What is our personal obligation to maximize the extent to which we're part of the solution, and minimize the extent to which we're part of the problem? How do we determine that obligation? Is it really an obligation, or is it something else, something softer and harder to define? Catastrophe Ethics, by Travis Rieder, isn't a book of answers. It's not even specifically a book about climate change, although the climate crisis is used as the canonical example of something he refers to as The Problem: the challenges that each of us experience in our daily lives as we try to get our arms around our personal responsibility for systemic and societal-level issues. Rieder explores The Problem through the lens of a number of different moral, philosophical, and ethical frameworks and perspectives. Although he…