Ethics Untangled
Ethics Untangled is a series of conversations about the ethical issues that affect all of us, with academics who have spent some time thinking about them. It is brought to you by the IDEA Centre, a specialist unit for teaching, research, training and consultancy in Applied Ethics at the University of Leeds.
Find out more about IDEA, including our Masters programmes in Healthcare Ethics and Applied and Professional Ethics, our PhDs and our consultancy services, here:
ahc.leeds.ac.uk/ethics
Ethics Untangled is edited by Mark Smith at Leeds Media Services.
Music is by Kate Wood.
Ethics Untangled
13. Could Rationing Help to Mitigate Climate Change? With Rob Lawlor
Rob Lawlor, a philosopher at the IDEA Centre, has been involved in an inter-disciplinary collaboration looking at one possible response to climate change, which is the introduction of rationing. With Nathan Wood and Josie Freear, he's been looking at the history of rationing as well as the ethics. So - not just whether rationing would be morally permissible, but also how it might be received by the public. And what we can learn about this from public attitudes to rationing of food during and after the second world war. When it was first published, the paper got an unusual amount of attention in the media for an academic paper, including lots of positive coverage, but also some disparagement from the likes of Nigel Farage and Richard Littlejohn. As well as discussing the content of the paper, we talked about what that reaction has been like and I gave Rob a chance to respond to some of the ways the paper has been discussed in the media.
Here's Rob, Josie and Nathan's paper:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21550085.2023.2166342
A short paper on a similar topic by Mark Roodhouse:
https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/rationing-returns-a-solution-to-global-warming
In the interview, Rob mentions he thought the best of the news articles about the paper was in the New Republic. Here it is:
https://newrepublic.com/article/170914/climate-case-rationing
And finally, here's what Nigel Farage thought of it:
https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1627606639711817728
Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Twitter: @EthicsUntangled
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/