Past events

Final conference of the Climate Ethics and Future Generations program, September 2023

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 22:25:00 +0200

The final conference of the Climate Ethics and Future Generations program marks the end of a six-year research project, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ). The conference aims to gather all team members from across the globe to present and discuss some of the many research results of these six years. The conference takes place at Långholmen, a small island in central Stockholm. It begins with lunch on Wednesday 6th of September, and goes on until it closes by afternoon on Friday 8th of September. It will be packed with 14 presentations from all three research themes of the program, mixed with events for social interactions.

Dates: 6–8 September 2023

Venue: Långholmen Wärdshus Hotel & Conference, Stockholm

Konference room: Tingssalen, at 3rd floor

The conference is free to attend, but we ask all participants to register by sending an email to . The event will not be streamed online.

Workshop: Geoengineering, 21 Sep 2022

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 11:35:00 +0200

Mini-workshop with Stephen Gardiner, organized by H. Orri Stefánsson

Mini-workshop on ethical and political issues raised by geoengineering at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) in Stockholm (hybrid event). The event is part of the Climate Ethics and Future Generations program.

Program

13:30-14:30 Catriona McKinnon

14:45-15:45 Karim Jebari

15:45-16:15 Coffee

16:15-17:15 Orri Stefansson

The workshop will be hybrid. Please contact H. Orri Stefánsson () if you wish to participate in person.

No registration is needed if you wish to participate online. In that case, use the following Starleaf link: https://meet.starleaf.com/4421477104/app. Meeting ID: 442 147 7104. (Download the StarLeaf app)

During the morning on September 21st, 10:00–11:45, Stephen Gardiner will be giving an open research seminar at IFFS where he too will be discussing geoengineering. But the seminar is not formally part of the workshop and requires separate registration (see https://www.iffs.se/en/calendar/research-seminar-with-stephen-gardiner-tba/).

Workshop: "Risk, Death and Well-Being: The Ethical Foundations of Fatality Risk Regulation" by Matt Adler, 18 October 2022 (prelimenary)

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 16:10:00 +0200

On October 18th, the Institute for Futures Studies is organizing a workshop on Matt Adler’s book manuscript Risk, Death and Well-Being: The Ethical Foundations of Fatality Risk Regulation.

Program

13.30-13.50: Greg Bognar on ”Lifetime welfarism”

13.50-14.20: discussion

14.20-14.35: break

14.35-14.55: Tim Campbell on “The badness of death”

14.55-15.25: discussion

15.25-15.40: break

15.40-16.00: Orri Stefansson on “Evaluating risk policies”

16.00-16.30: discussion

For mor information, please contact .

Workshop in collaboration with Sustaianble Population in the Time of Climate Change, 9-10 March 2022

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 08:55:00 +0100

A joint workshop for the “Climate ethics and Future Generations“ program and the project “Sustainable Population in the Time of Climate Change”. We will present ongoing research at IFFS that is relevant to both teams, with a focus on population growth and sustainability. This is an informal and internal workshop. Work in progress is welcome.

Organisers: Karim Jebari and Mats Ingelström

Schedule

Wednesday:
11:30 Lunch
12:30 Coffee & welcome
13:00 Malcolm Fairbrother: How Should We Save the Earth? Europeans' Attitudes towards Climate Policies, and their Foundations
13:40 Martin Kolk & Emma Engström: Projections of carbon and biodiversity impacts
14:20 Break
14:30 Karim Jebari & Emma Engström: Backcasting the future of agriculture
15:10 Orri Stefansson & Dean Spears: Critical level utilitarianism
15:50 Break
16:00 Olle Torpman & Elin Röös: Arguments for Livestock Farming
16:40 Break
17:00-18.45 Mike Otsuka: How to pool risks across generations
19:00 Dinner

Thursday:
09:30 Coffee & welcome
10:00 Joe Roussos: Does risk aversion threaten objectivity?
10:40 Johan Gustafsson & Petra Kosonen: Prudential Longtermism
11:20 Break
11:30 Timothy Campbell: Climate Change and Antinatalist Arguments
12:10 Lunch

Workshop: Applied questions regarding incommensurability

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 13:40:00 +0100

The conference takes place at Rutgers University and is organised by the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) and Rutgers.

Program (all times in EST):

May 17th

10.00-10.45: Session 1: Introduction
Anders Herlitz: Incommensurability and population-level bioethics

10.45-11.00: Break

11.00-12.30: Session 2: Evaluating health states
Dan Hausman: The healthier-than relation and incommensurability
Krister Bykvist: Can we compare health states when our standards change

12.30-13.30: Lunch

13.30-15.00: Session 3: Decision methods
Walter Bossert: Incommensurability and consistency
Susuma Cato: The sufficientarian principle and incommensurability

15.00-15.15: Break

15.15-17.00: Session 6: Disability
Frances Kamm: Parity and disability
David Wasserman: Incommensurability in Healthcare Priority Setting: Can Parity Meet the Challenge of Constraining (Pure) Procedural Justice?
Michael Rabenberg: Comments

May 18th

10.00-12.30 Session 5: Valuing health benefits to future people
Melinda Roberts: Incommensurability, population and intuition
Wlodek Rabinowicz: Personalized neutral-range utilitarianism with incommensurable lives
Gustaf Arrhenius: Incommensurability and population ethics paradoxes

12.30-14.00: Lunch

14.00-15.30: Session 6: Uncertainty and incommensurability in public policy
Chrisoula Andreou: Incommensurability, difficult decision making, and public policy
Orri Stefansson: Precaution, lexical utilities and vagueness
Adam Elga: Comments

15.30-15.45: Break

15.45-16.45: Future directions

- adjourn -

If you want to attend on Zoom, please register here: https://rutgers.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJModO6rrz8iGtUSBNs2mfrb2XxKjxqN-E-L

For more information, contact Anders Herlitz ()

Non-Welfarist Approaches to Population Ethics - Workshop 2022

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 09:25:00 +0100

Most work in population ethics is based on a welfarist assumption, according to which the fundamental value is the welfare of individual people. As is well-known, population ethics has encountered a number of paradoxes. One important question is whether we could avoid them by abandoning the welfarist assumption in favor of non-welfarism. According to non-welfarism, the welfare of individual people is not the only – or perhaps not even any – fundamental value. Examples of non-welfarist determinants of value are fulfillment of virtue, flourishing, needs, rights, capabilities, desert, autonomy, knowledge, cultural diversity, beauty, biodiversity, or even the genesis of a population – which are then supposed to be valuable independently of their contribution to welfare. Hence, on non-welfarism, one population can be overall better than another even if its level of wellbeing is lower, given that it contains enough of these other values. The overall question is, however, whether a move to non-welfarism could help us formulate a viable theory of population ethics that avoids the paradoxes and can be fruitfully applied to actual policy cases. The aim of this workshop is to explore the scopes and limits of non-welfarist population ethics.

Workshop on Political Philosophy and Ethics in Climate Change, Fall 2022

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 09:30:00 +0100

Democracy and Values in Science

Political philosophy meets philosophy of science

Philosophers of science have long discussed whether the core activities of science can be free from non-epistemic values (this term is used broadly to include social, political, ethical, and personal values that are not indicators of the truth of scientific claims). There are two broad threads to this discussion: conceptual value-freedom and methodological value-freedom. In the debate about concepts, philosophers contest whether the fact/value distinction can be maintained, and whether key scientific concepts can be rendered free from any value-commitments. In the debate about methodology, philosophers examine core scientific activities such as hypothesis formulation, data gathering and analysis, and inference. The question here is whether it is possible and desirable to do science without (non-epistemic) values.

There is an emerging consensus among philosophers of science that non-epistemic values have a permissible role to play in many core aspects of science.

There are several places where this discussion could benefit from engagement with political philosophy. We propose to start with these two:

1. How can democratic institutions be designed to handle value-laden science?

2. How can science be organised to handle values in a way that is compatible with democracy?

The first covers the role of experts in a democracy and traditional questions about technocracy. The difference is that we propose to engage with recent work on the impossibility of value-free scientific information to challenge various traditional solutions which attempt to circumscribe and insulate a particular fact-oriented role for expertise.

The second runs in the other direction. It might be true that values are inextricable from science, but not all methods/behaviours are equally good. If democracy works best with something akin to value-freedom, how should scientists select and manage values to best approximate the democratic ideal? The nascent discussion on this question makes clear use of ideas from political theory, or ideas which re-occur in political theory, such as transparency, neutrality, deliberative democracy, and a focus on procedure rather than outcome.

The workshop aims to bring together political theorists and philosophers of science to discuss work at the intersection of these two areas. Expect talks on Covid-19 and climate change, covering topics such as the role of experts in policymaking, how institutions should be designed to work with value-laden science, and how scientists should incorporate values into their science advising.

Program

Schedule	Thursday 20 October	Friday 21 October
10:00-10:30	Welcome, fika	Welcome, fika
10:30-11:30	Joe Roussos	Marion Boulicault
11:30-11:40	Break	Break
11:40-12:40	Alfred Moore	Greg Lusk
12:40-14:00	Lunch	Lunch
14:00-15:00	Karoliina Pulkinnen	Cristian Larroulet Philippi
15:00-15:10	Break	Break
15:10-16:10	Zina Ward	S. Andrew Schroeder
16:10-16:40	Fika	Fika
16:40-17:40	Heather Douglas (online)	Eric Winsberg (online)
19:00	Workshop dinner

The workshop will take place at IFFS in Stockholm, but will be a hybrid event with online participation from both speakers and audience members.

To participate in person, contact .

Organised by Joe Roussos.

Climate Ethics and Emissions Accounting - Workshop 2022

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 14:50:00 +0100

In order to answer questions about how to distribute the remaining carbon budget and the costs of climate change mitigation and adaptation, we typically need to know who has emitted how much. In this regard, we need a method to attribute greenhouse gas emissions to various actors. The debates on this subject matter centers around mainly two views: production-based emissions accounting (according to which emissions are counted at their geographical source or, alternatively, attributed to the producing actor), and consumption-based emissions accounting (according to which emissions are counted at the point of final consumption). However, the debate over the emissions accounting methods raises several questions: What is the relevance of emissions accountings in the overall framework of climate ethics? What role do they play? Are there alternatives to the abovementioned emissions accounting methods? What are the standards by which we could evaluate and compare emissions accounting methods, and which method should we prefer? What are their practical implications? Which emissions are mine? How should the emissions of a state be divided between its citizens? Should we count emissions over a lifetime or some other discrete unit of time? The present workshop brings together current research on these (and related) issues, with the aim of contributing to the further progress in the research field of emissions accountings within climate ethics.

The workshop takes place on December 6–7, at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as online. If you wish to participate, please contact one of the organizers Olle Torpman () or Göran Duus-Otterström ().

Program

Tuesday December 6

09:30–09:55 Coffee

09:55–10:00 Welcome

10:00–10:50 Christian Barry & Garrett Cullity: "Which emissions belong to us?" (online)

11:00–11:50 Karim Jebari: "Proactive futility: Why most people don't have a carbon footprint"

12:00–13:30 Lunch

13:30–14:20 Olle Torpman: "Inducement-Based Emissions Accounting"

14:30–15:00 Coffee

15:00–15:50 Göran Duus-Otterström: "Emissions Sufficientarianism"

16:00-16:50: Pierre André: "Who Are the Big Corporate Polluters? Responsibility, Solidarity, and the Need to Go Beyond Emissions Accounting"

Wednesday December 7

10:00–11:45: Säde Hormio: "Individual emissions, equality and the state"

12:00 Lunch

12:30–14:00 (optional lunch seminar with Gustaf and Lea)

14:00–14:50 Simon Caney: "Agency and Responsibility in the Just Transition to a Sustainable World" (online)

14:50–15:20 Coffee

15:20–16:10 Megan Blomfield: "How do emissions count morally?" (online)

Workshop: Contractualism and future generations, December 2021

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 14:40:00 +0200

Organised by the Institute for futures studies (IFFS)

How to account for duties to future persons sets perhaps impossible tests not only for theories of justice (as Rawls noted) but perhaps to any moral theory. This workshop investigates how contractualist accounts of morality or justice can survive such a test. Contractualist accounts have arguably undergone something of a renaissance, with Scanlonian approaches now being developed in addition to the several strands of Rawlsianism. In terms of applied ethics, there is growing concern about intergenerational ethics and justice raised by climate change and other environmental issues. Additionally, there are reports that many younger people in wealthier countries will be poorer than their parents or grandparents.

In this workshop we aim to further explore contractualism as an approach to intergenerational ethics, by considering both foundational and applied issues such as:

Whether, and how, contractualism can handle such fundamental problems as the non-identity problem and the repugnant conclusion.
If, and if so how, contractualism can handle the question of human extinction.
Whether our duties towards future generations are primarily duties of justice, or moral duties of some other kind.
How to determine the proper balance between global justice and intergenerational justice.
The implications of contractualism regarding problems such as climate change, resource rights, and the proper account of intergenerational distributive justice.

If you have any questions about the workshop or would like to propose an abstract for inclusion, please email the organisers:

Emil Andersson ()

Elizabeth Finneron-Burns ()

Clare Heyward ()

Workshop: Awareness, 18-19 October 2021

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 13:35:00 +0200

18-19 October, IFFS Stockholm and online

In many everyday situations we confront new possibilities. These are either radically new—events we have never before entertained, or propositions involving new concepts—or merely new in the sense that they had not thus far featured in our deliberations. In such cases, we are in a situation of unawareness, and when we encounter the new possibilities our awareness grows. Are there rationality constraints that are specific to unaware agents? Does being aware of one’s unawareness have implications for decision-making? How should one update one’s beliefs when encountering new possibilities? These questions are of crucial importance when reasoning about rapidly evolving crises like the Covid-19 pandemic or long-term challenges like climate change and existential risk. They are also poorly answered by orthodox theories of decision and belief revision.

Join us for a workshop on these topics on 18-19 October. The workshop brings together philosophers and economists working on unawareness and awareness growth from a variety of perspectives.

Schedule, title and abstracts available here

Registration:

If you would like to attend in person at IFFS, please email

If you would like to attend online, please fill in the registration form

Speakers:

Catrin Campbell-Moore (Bristol)
Chloé de Canson (Groningen)
Franz Dietrich (PSE / CNRS)
Ed Elliott (Leeds)
Evan Piermont (Royal Holloway)
Marcus Pivato (CYU)
Joe Roussos (IFFS)
Katie Steele (ANU) & H. Orri Stefánsson (Stockholm)
Aron Vallinder (Forethought Foundation)
Marie-Louise Vierø (Aarhus)

The workshop is co-organised by two projects at IFFS: Climate Ethics and Future Generations and Rational Foundations of Longtermism.

Claims, distributive justice and future generations,
16-18 June, 2021

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 09:55:00 +0100

Organised by the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS)

The literature on distributive justice has in the recent years incorporated the use of claims such that references to individuals’ claims are made to justify certain distributions of benefits and/or burdens. The idea is that actions and outcomes should be evaluated in terms of how well they satisfy different people’s valid claims. There are many reasons to invoke claims in this way in order to evaluate different distributions: individuals have claims and fairness concerns relations between persons (as Broome puts it), focusing on individuals’ claims fit the person-centeredness interpretation of ethics (Darwall), and it provides a way of taking the separateness of persons seriously (Adler). However, the use of claims also raises a series of very consequential questions.

In this workshop, we aim at exploring the following dimensions of claims:

Claims & their relevance: How do claims determine what one ought to do? Should only the strongest claim(s) have implications for what we ought to do, do all claims always have implications for what we ought to do, or is it some subset of the full set of claims that has implications for what we ought to do?

Their ground: Are claims grounded such that the strength of a claim can be determined by looking at some possible outcomes in isolation, by looking at sets of possible outcomes, or by comparing possible outcomes to the status quo?

Population ethics & future generations: Do claims from people who are to be caused to exist matter and how do they compare to claims from people who already exist?

Speakers:

Shlomi Segall (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Fiona Woollard (Southampton)

Richard Arneson (UC San Diego)

Matthew Adler (Duke University)

Johan Gustafsson (IFFS, Gothenburg & University of York)

Anders Herlitz (IFFS)

Daniel Ramöller (IFFS & Stockholm)

Michael Otsuka (London School of Economics)

Melinda Roberts (The College of New Jersey)

Schedule

Download: Workshop schedule (pdf)

For further information, please contact organisers or

Workshop: Values in science, May 2021

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 23:45:00 +0100

Organisers: Timothy Campbell and Joe Roussos, Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS)

The topic of the workshop is values in science and will focus mainly on the role that epistemic and non-epistemic values play in climate science. Sub-topics in this area include:

how values enter into the construction of global climate models,
how uncertainty should be taken into account in modelling the climate, as well as in making policy decisions to curb climate change,
how to determine what counts as a “worst-case scenario” of climate change, and
the proper role of the scientist in public debates where science is an important factor.

Schedule, speakers, and abstract (pdf)

Monday, May 17th

11.00 – 11.15 Introduction
11.15 – 12.15 Katie Steele (ANU)
12.15 – 13.15 Lunch
13.15 – 14.15 Joe Roussos (IFFS) and Julie Jebeile (Bern)
14.15 – 14.30 Break
14.30 – 15.30 Per Wikman Svahn (KTH)
15.30 – 15.45 Break
15.45 – 16.45 Sabine Undorf (SU)

Tuesday, May 18th

13.00 – 14.00 Marina Baldissera Pacchetti (Leeds)
14.00 – 14.15 Break
14.15 – 15:15 Karoliina Pulkkinen (KTH)
15.15 – 15:30 Break
15.30 – 16.30 Henrik Thorén (Lund)

For more information, contact

Workshop: Green growth, 26-28 April 2021

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 20:55:00 +0100

Welcome to a workshop at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) and remote

Organizers: Paul Bowman (IFFS) and Malcolm Fairbrother (Umeå University)

According to the IPCC, unless the world’s countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero within the next several decades, the impacts of climate change will likely be severe. Whether countries will be willing to eliminate their emissions within this timeframe depends, in large part, on the achievability of so-called “green growth”--roughly, economic growth that is promoted, or is at least not substantially hindered, by efforts to increase environmental sustainability, like efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This workshop invites both theoretical and empirical perspectives on green growth (and related ideas, like environmental sustainability), particularly as it relates to climate change. Among the questions that might be addressed include:

Are all kinds or instances of natural capital substitutable, or are there some kinds or instances of natural capital whose depletion can be offset with the accumulation of manufactured capital?
Should certain environmental goods be attributed infinite value?
At what stage of economic development, if any, can economic growth be decoupled from negative environmental impacts, particularly greenhouse gas emissions?
What are the central political, economic, or technological drivers of, or barriers to, green growth?

Green Growth Workshop Schedule (pdf)

Speakers

Malcolm Fairbrother, Umeå University and IFFS
Pernilla Hagbert, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Taylor Davis, Purdue University
Kimberly Nicholas, Lund University
Säde Hormio, University of Helsinki
C. Tyler DesRoches, Arizona State University
Julia Steinberger, University of Leeds
Eric Brandstedt, Lund University
Katya Rhodes, University of Victoria

For more information, contact .

Book symposium on Moral Uncertainty (MacAskill, Bykvist, Ord), 4 February 2021

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 09:11:59 +0100

Jointly organised by the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) and the Australian National University (ANU)

How should we make decisions when we’re uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do?

Very often we are uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do. We do not know how to weigh the interests of animals against humans, how strong our duties are to improve the lives of distant strangers, or how to think about the ethics of bringing new people into existence. But we still need to act. Though economists and philosophers have extensively studied the issue of decision-making in the face of uncertainty about matters of fact, the question of decision-making given fundamental moral uncertainty has been neglected.

In Moral Uncertainty (Oxford University Press 2020) philosophers William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord try to fill this gap. They argue that there are rules that govern how one ought to make decisions under moral uncertainty. But which rule one should use depends on the content of one's moral hypotheses.

Join us for a symposium on the book on 4 February. The symposium will be held online.

To register, [please click on this link] - PAST EVENT, link is not active.

The book is available to download for free, through this link: Download Moral Uncertainty

Schedule

Each speaker will offer a comment on the book (30 mins), which will be responded to by the authors (10 mins) and followed by a discussion (20 mins).

Thursday 4 February, all times CET (Stockholm)

9:15 Introduction

9:30 – 10:30 Christian Barry (ANU)

10:30 – 10:45 break

10:45 – 11:45 Katie Steele (ANU), Pamela Robinson (ANU)

11:45 – 15:00 Lunch and on-line mingle time

15:05 – 16:05 Christian Tarsney (GPI, Oxford)

16:05 – 16:30 break

16:30 – 17:30 Jeff Russell (USC)

Workshop: Climate Change and Non-Human Animals, 3-4 December 2020

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 15:56:55 +0100

Welcome to a workshop on Climate Change and Non-Human Animals at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) in Stockholm 3-4 December

The workshop was to be held 23-24 March 2020 but due to concerns over the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19 it has been rescheduled for 3-4 December 2020.

The workshop will be mixed, with participation both online and in-person.

Speakers:
• Chris Armstrong, University of Southampton
• Simon Beard, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)
• Mark Budolfson, University of Vermont
• Paula Casal, University Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
• Tim Campbell, Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS)
• Oscar Horta, University of Santiago de Compostela (USC)
• Linda Keeling, Department of Animal Environment and Health, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Uppsala
• Jeff McMahan, University of Oxford
• Julia Mosquera, Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS)
• Jeff Sebo, New York University (NYU)
• Tatjana Visak, University of Mannheim

Abstracts can be found here.

This workshop is organized by Julia Mosquera. For queries, please email julia.mosquera [AT] iffs.se

Workshop: Democracy and Future Generations 16-17 November 2020

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 15:51:42 +0100

Welcome to a workshop on democracy and future generations at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) in Stockholm 16-17 November

It is often assumed that future generations have has no direct bearing on democratic decisions, since democracy, both in theory and in current practice, can be said to be biased in favour of the present: it only takes into account presently existing people’s preferences. Yet, future people will be affected by our policies, especially our environmental and energy policies. Indeed, most of the people affected by a democratic decision taken today might be future people who didn’t have a say in the decision. This seems problematic from a democratic perspective. Should we include future people in present democratic decision making via proxy representation? If so, through which institutional mechanism or political body? The ambition of the workshop is to shed light on these questions. It invites papers that help us think about whether, and if so how, democratic decision making should be made more sensitive to the political preferences of future people. The participants are a mix of researchers on the project and external people.

This workshop is organized by Göran Duus-Otterström and Joe Roussos. The workshop will run as a hybrid between online and on-site participation. To attend in person, registration is mandatory. Contact goran.duus-otterstrom@iffs.se.

Speakers and schedule

Climate Ethics and Future Generations Annual Conference

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 15:35:00 +0100

Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm

Annual Conference for project researchers. More information to come.

Workshop: Tipping Point 5-6 November 2020

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 15:28:52 +0100

Welcome to a digital workshop at the Institute for Futures Studies!

This workshop is primarily for project researchers

The 5th and 6th November artist-duo Bigert & Bergström, together with Krister Bykvist, Kirsti Jylhä and Malcolm Fairbrother, will discuss the performative sculpture Tipping Point. The sculpture is the product of an artistic research project, funded by Formas, and connected to the Climate ethics and future generations programme, which is aimed at communicating central questions of climate, ethics, and responsibility in new and creative ways.

Reaching ten meters high and 18 metes wide, the sculpture has four arms that hold one or two platforms. Each platform displays a scene that represents states of nature or human expressions of culture, science, and technology. The platforms all interact with each other, affecting the balance of the whole structure. This fragile act of balance visualizes the complex interactions between our decisions today, climate change, and living conditions in the future.

During this workhop the researchers, together with Bigert & Bergström, will discuss different scenarios for the platforms of the sculpture. In relation to their own research they will discuss what the scenes mean to them, and how we ought to understand the problems they represent. This workshop will show how science and art together can help us understand the most pressing existential problems of our time.

Participation will be online only. For registration contact cecilia.bystrom [at] iffs.se

Schedule

5 nov

10:00 – 10:30 Gustaf Arrhenius opens

10:30 – 12:00 Krister Bykvist
To be or not to be - that is the question. But what is the answer?

Lunch, 12-13

14:00 – 15:30 Kirsti Jylhä
Psychological barriers to climate action: (how) can we overcome them?

15:30 – 16:00 C losing discussion day 1

6 nov

10:00 – 12:00 Malcolm Fairbrother
Why Don’t People Want to Save the Earth?

Krister Bykvist, Professor, Practical Philosophy
To be or not to be - that is the question. But what is the answer?

Climate change threatens the future existence of humanity. This raises the question about the value of future human lives. How valuable is it that there are human lives in the future? Unfortunately, we do not know the answer for certain. But we need to act now before the polar ice sheets melt and the sea level increases, before the forests burn down and deserts take over. We need to act now without knowing for certain the value of future lives. This does not have to paralyze decision-making, however, for we can make use of the methods that guide us in making decisions under risk when we lack knowledge about facts.

Kirsti Jylhä, PhD, Psychology
Psychological barriers to climate action: (how) can we overcome them?

Why is the world failing to meet the international climate goals? In many ways, this is puzzling. Anthropogenic climate change is virtually undisputed among climate researchers, almost all nations have signed and ratified the Paris Agreement, and a clear majority of people are convinced that climate change needs to be taken seriously. However, there is still some uncertainty – and outright denial – among policy makers and the public on different aspects of climate change. Even when met with concern, climate change competes with other concerns in individuals’ lives and is not necessarily considered in elections or making individual lifestyle choices. Also, some of the most important measures of decreasing personal greenhouse emission (e.g., decreasing meat consumption) are met with controversy and resistance. In this presentation, I will summarize and discuss research results that could explain the persistent delay in effective climate change mitigation.

Malcolm Fairbrother, Professor, Sociology
Why Don’t People Want to Save the Earth?

One major reason for humanity's failure to address the crisis in planetary health is a lack of trust. People around the world are broadly convinced about environmental problems, including climate change. But they are sceptical of many public policies that could be employed to respond to those problems. Believing in policies requires confidence in political and administrative institutions, but many people possess little such confidence. For advocates of better policies for planetary health, this fact presents a dilemma: how to convey to the public that inadequate governance has led to a serious global ecological crisis, but we will have to trust in governance if we are to solve that crisis?

Workshop: Modelling

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 15:29:11 +0200

Welcome to a workshop on the “use and usefulness of simulation models for policymaking” at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) in Stockholm
10 September 2020

This workshop was partly prompted by what some in the public sphere have seen as a regrettable lack of critical discussion in Sweden about the government’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to facilitate a discussion of one crucial aspect in that debate: the role of models.

It will be a small expert workshop, running all day from 9-17 on 10 September. The speakers are from different fields and institutions, covering epidemiology, climate science, economics and philosophy. Given our interest in climate change, one focus will be on similarities and differences between the case of COVID and climate science.

Participants:

Lisa Brouwers, Head of Analysis, Folkhälsomyndigheten
Tom Britton, Professor of Mathematical Statistics, SU
Reto Knutti, Professor of Climate Physics, ETH Zurich
Alec Waterhouse, Head of Modelling Climate Change, UK Gov Dept of BEIS
Jonna Olsson, Lecturer in Economics, Edinburgh
Philip Gerlee, Associate Professor, Mathematical Statistics, Chalmers
Olof Johansson-Stenman, Professor of Economics, Gothenburg
Karolina Ekholm, Professor of Economics, SU and former Deputy Governor of the Riksbank
Alkistis Elliott-Graves, Researcher, TINT and U Helsinki
Wendy Parker, Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Tech

We invited the speakers to contribute to these broad themes:

The role of models in policymaking. Should they be used at all? If so, how should they be used, and how should they not be used? If we do not use models, what are the alternatives?
Managing model uncertainty. How can we quantify the uncertainty in our models? What is the threshold for using a model? (When does it shift from being unhelpful to being helpful?) How do we communicate about uncertainty with policymakers, and do we expect them to do with this information?
Making decisions with models. What do policymakers need to know from modellers? How can models be used to support decision-making?

This workshop is organized by Joe Roussos, joe.roussos@iffs.se and Folke Tersman.

Virtual workshop: Climate Ethics Meets Covid-19,
29 May 2020

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 11:04:08 +0200

Organised by Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS)

This is a closed event for researchers in the Climate ethics and future generations programme.

Schedule

09.00-09.35: “Some Possible Implications of the Corona Crisis for the Climate Crisis”, Gustaf Arrhenius (Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm)

09.35-09.50: Break

09.50-10.25: “Covid-19 and climate crisis and Intergenerational burden-sharing”, Julia Mosquera (Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm)

10.25-10.40: Break

10.40-11.15: “Covid-19, Climate Change, and Coercion”, Tim Campbell (Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm)

11.15-11.30: Break

11.30-12.05: “Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?”, Joe Roussos (Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm)

12.05-14.00: Lunch Break

14.00-14.50: “Carbon Pricing During and After the Pandemic”, Kian Mintz-Woo (Princeton University)

14.50-15.00: Break

15.00-15.50: “How to Respond to the Tragedy of Our Time: Hope and the Virtue of Creative Resolve”, Nicole Hassoun (Binghamton University)

15.50-16.00: Break

16.00-16.50: “Allocating Scarce Vaccines”, Paul Bowman and Anders Herlitz (Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm)

Note that all times are in local Stockholm time (GMT +1)

If you have any questions, please contact organizer .

Virtual Event: Climate Ethics Workshop, 30 April 2020

Mon, 25 May 2020 22:31:58 +0200

Organised by Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS).

We at IFFS would like to invite the researchers in the Climate Ethics project to participate in a one-day climate ethics workshop held online 30 April 2020. The workshop will focus on our researchers' current work related to the Climate Ethics project.

You may find the schedule here.

If you have any questions, please contact organizer .

We look forward to seeing you all in virtual,

Tim Campbell (on behalf of Gustaf Arrhenius, Krister Bykvist, and Göran Duus-Otterström)

Workshop: The Non-Identity Problem and Population Ethics
10-11 February 2020

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 16:00:16 +0100

Welcome to a workshop on the non-identity problem and population ethics at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm 10-11 February 2020

The workshop will focus on the evaluative and moral significance of acts that determine not only how well off individuals are but also which individuals exist.

The workshop is organised by Timothy Campbell. Attendance is free of charge but please send an email to timothy.campbell@iffs.se no later than 18 January to let us know you are coming.

For more information, here is the link to the schedule with abstracts.

Workshop: Incommensurability: Vagueness, Parity and other Non-Conventional Comparative Relations

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 14:56:53 +0100

Welcome to a workshop on incommensurability at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm 6-7 December 2019

The workshop will focus on how one can account for value incommensurability, its implications for ethical theory and decision theory.

The workshop is organised by Anders Herlitz and Henrik Andersson. Attendance is free of charge but please send an email to no later than 8 of November to let us know you're coming.

The following presentations will be given:

6 December

9.00 Registration and coffee
9.20 Welcome
9.30 John Broome: Incommensurability is vagueness
10.45 Chrisoula Andreou: Parity without imprecise equality
12.00 Lunch
13.15 Anders Herlitz: Nondeterminacy and reasonable choice
14.30 Krister Bykvist: Cross-categorical value comparisons
15.45 Coffee
16.15 Luke Elson: Indeterminacy and agency
18.30 Dinner for the speakers

7 December

9.00 Coffee and tea
9.30 Mozaffar Qizilbash: Incommensurability, 'Rough Comparability' and Vagueness: On Value Relations and Populations Ethics
10.45 Ruth Chang: Defusing Continua Arguments
12.00 Lunch
13.15 Gustaf Arrhenius: Population ethics and conflict of value imprecision
14.30 Wlodek Rabinowicz: Are Probabilities Values?
15.45 Coffee
16.15 Miriam Schoenfield: Contracting and Dilating with Imprecise Probabilites
18.30 Dinner for the speakers

2019 Annual Conference of the research program Climate Ethics and Future Generations

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 15:00:00 +0200

26-28 September 2019, Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm.

Organizers: Paul Bowman, Katharina Berndt Rasmussen.

Preliminary agenda:

Thursday, September 26th

9.30-10.00 Morning Coffee

10.00-10.15 Introductory Remarks

10.15-11.00 Gustaf Arrhenius, TBA

11.00-11.45 Hilary Greaves, “Distributional weights in cost-benefit analysis: The relevance of labour-supply responses”

11.45-12.00 Julia Mosquera, TBA

12.00-12.15 Krister Bykvist, “Why care about impossibility theorems in population ethics?”

12.30-14.00 Lunch

14.00-14.45 Malcolm Fairbrother, "Valuing Future Lives and Policies for Improving Them: Views of the Public in Four Countries"

14.45-15.30 Guilia Andrighetto, “Norm Emergence and Change in a Climate Change Experiment”

15.30-16.00 Coffee Break

16.00-16.45 Tim Campbell, "What's Wrong with Offsetting?"

16.45-17.30 Göran Duus-Otterström, "Liability for emissions in the absence of laws or political agreements"

19.00 Dinner

Friday, September 27th

9.30-10.00 Morning Coffee

10.00-10.45 Karin Bäckstrand, TBA

10.45-11.30 Joe Roussos, "The Role of Values in Aggregating Expert Opinions"

11.30-11.45 Katharina Berndt Rasmussen, ”Some Thoughts On the Ethics of Doing Climate Ethics”

12.00-13.30 Lunch

13.30-15.00 Global Climate Strike Break

15.00-15.30 Coffee Break

15.30-16.15 Anders Herlitz, "Equity within and across Space and Time"

16.15-17.00 Roundtable discussion

19.00 Dinner

Saturday, September 28th

9.30-10.00 Morning Coffee

10.00-10.45 Lukas Meyers, "How to Understand Intergenerational Justice? Sufficientarianism and Basic Needs"

10.45-11.30 Emilie Prattico, "What Does Corporate Climate Leadership Look Like in 2019?"

11.30-11.45 Paul Bowman, “Corrective Justice and Borrowing from the Future”

12.00-13.30 Lunch

13.30-14.15 Clare Heyward, "Secondary Climate Injustices"

14.15-15.00 Martin Kolk, "Government Transfers from Nonparents to Parents and Population Policy in a Global Perspective: An Economic Demographic Approach"

Please note that the conference is not a public event.

Workshop: Ethical Perspectives on Population and the Sustainable Development Goals

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 18:00:00 +0200

25 September 2019, Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm.

Organizers: Eric Brandstedt, Olle Torpman and Henrik Andersson.

Agenda (for abstracts, see below):

09:00–09:30 Coffee

09:30–09:40 Welcome and introduction by project group

09:40–10:30 Dean Spears (Rice): ‘Population Momentum, Population Ethics, and the Prospects for Fertility Policy as Climate Mitigation Policy’

10:30–10:50 Coffee

10:50–11:40 Philippe van Basshuysen (Hannover): ‘Who’s Afraid of the Repugnant Conclusion?’

11:40–12:30 Simon Caney (Warwick): ‘Ecological Liberalism and Sustainable Development’

12:30–14:00 Lunch

14:00–14:50 Hilary Greaves (Oxford): ‘Some Contrarian Perspectives on the Population Debate’

14:50–15:40 Kimberly Nicholas (Lund): ‘Population, Environment, and Human Development in Science and Popular Media’

15:40–16:00 Coffee

16:00–16:50 Kalle Grill (Umeå): ‘Procreation and Consumption: Six Moral Differences’

16:50–18:00 General discussion and planning session

18:30– Dinner

Attendance is free of charge and everyone is welcome, but please send an email to Eric.Brandstedt@fil.lu.se to let us know you're coming.

About the workshop:

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set an ambitious new development agenda for the world. If realised, there will be no more poverty or hunger, and people around the world will enjoy higher levels of health, less inequality, and a safer climate. However, various obstacles stand in the way of such a future world. Most often recognised are barriers such as inadequate institutions, corruption, and autocratic leaders. This workshop will address another hindrance, which, although it affects the possibilities of meeting most of the SDGs, is rarely discussed: population growth.

Broadly speaking, population growth can obstruct the goals of sustainable development in two ways: first, a larger population increases the demand for scarce resources; secondly, the ensuing increase in consumption produces more pollution. However, it is arguably also a good thing that potentially happy people are added to the world: it increases its overall welfare. Furthermore, procreational freedom is an essential personal liberty.

This workshop aims to lay the ground for a future research project on an ethically informed treatment of population on the development agenda. The preliminary aim of the future project is to develop a normative framework for assessing population policies as a means to meet the sustainable development goals.

Abstracts:

Dean Spears (Rice Institute): “Population Momentum, Population Ethics, and the Prospects for Fertility Policy as Climate Mitigation Policy”

Population policy and climate policy may interact in several ways. Here we separate four possible mechanisms and focus on the empirical prospects for one mechanism: reducing the size of the population as a climate mitigation policy to reduce carbon emissions. Prospects for such a policy are limited by population momentum, a demographic factor that limits possible variation in population growth over coming decades, even if fertility rates change very quickly. In particular, a hypothetical policy that instantaneously changed fertility and mortality rates to replacement levels would nevertheless result in a population of over 9 billion people in 2060. We compute consequences in a leading climate-economy model. As a standalone mitigation policy, such a hypothetical change in the size of the future population – much too large to be implementable by any foreseeable government program – would reduce peak temperature change only to 6.4°C, relative to 7.1°C under the most likely population path. Also important is that high achieved fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa are correlated with high intended fertility. Human development policies that reduce intended fertility may increase average well-being while reducing climate mitigation costs, but fertility reduction is unlikely to be a sufficient core approach to climate mitigation.

Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford): “Some Contrarian Perspectives on the Population Debate”

A popular and influential current of thought considers it obvious that a smaller global population size and/or (of course relatedly) lower fertility rates, now and over the course of the next century or so, would be better than the expected status quo. Drawing on existing work on population issues in moral philosophy and (to a lesser extent) economics and climate science, I will outline several lines of argument that each run somewhat counter to this current. In particular, I will present arguments (based on my existing published work) for the claims that

1. It is at best very unclear whether reducing near-term population size would help to mitigate climate change, in any ultimately relevant sense of the latter. The usual arguments that reducing population size would help to mitigate climate change crucially misunderstand the relevant climate science.

2. More broadly, when all relevant factors are taken into account, it is very unclear whether either the current global human population size, or the population sizes that are expected over the next 50-100 years, are above, below or roughly at the optimum. There are competing factors pointing in both directions, and it is very unclear what is the net result of appropriately weighing these factors against one another.

3. Very plausibly, the best moral theory has it that additional happy lives have intrinsic value, over and above the effect (whether net positive or net negative) that bringing additional people into existence has on the welfare of people who would exist either way. If so, this element of intrinsic value tends to increase the optimum population size, compared to a moral theory according to which additional happy lives are intrinsically neutral. Many arguments for the claim that smaller population sizes would be better hinge essentially on ignoring this contributor.

Philippe van Basshuysen (Leibniz Universität Hannover): “Who’s Afraid of the Repugnant Conclusion?”

‘Total utilitarianism implies the repugnant conclusion’ is a universally acknowledged claim in population ethics, and it is usually interpreted as an important argument against total utilitarianism. Against this received view, I argue that total utilitarians may deny that the repugnant conclusion follows from their theory. Assuming that the average well-being of a population depends functionally on the size of that population, I show that total utilitarianism implies the repugnant conclusion only under stringent conditions on this function. These conditions might constitute what Parfit called a ‘deep impossibility’, which gives reason to abstain from interpreting the repugnant conclusion as a decisive argument against total utilitarianism. A possible response is to deny that well-being is a function of population size, but I argue that this is not a plausible view on population axiology.

Kimberly Nicholas (Lund University): “Population, Environment, and Human Development in Science and Popular Media”

How has the scientific discourse on population evolved over the last 50 years? What does the current social discourse around population indicate for an evolving concept of sustainability? In this talk, I will share both ongoing research and an informal analysis of media and social media to illustrate how population issues are raised in science and policy and how they capture the public imagination, and explore implications for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and climate stabilization.

Kalle Grill (Umeå University): “Procreation and consumption: Six moral differences”

Thomas Young has claimed that overconsumption is morally equivalent to procreation, given the same environmental impact. Lately, several philosophers and other scholars have assumed this same moral equivalence when arguing that individuals have moral reason to abstain from or limit their procreation. I deny this equivalence, based on six independent considerations, some of which are relevant only for individual morality and some of which are relevant also for social policy.

First, the instrumental value of new lives is often great and different from that of consumption. Second, new lives are widely held to have non-instrumental value, unlike most consumption. Even those who deny that future individual lives have value should accept that the future of humanity is important in some collective sense. Third, the consumption of our children (and later descendants) is the result of their voluntary actions and so not relevantly ascribable to us, even if we are responsible for the minimal consumption required for a decent life. Fourth, the environmental impact of procreation is delayed in time in ways not applicable to consumption. Fifth, the environmental harm from the consumption of our descendants is conditional on the future actions of others, making it less attributable to us. Sixth, our procreative choices affect the procreative choices of others in ways our consumption choices do not.

Simon Caney (University of Warwick): “Ecological Liberalism and Sustainable Development”

Population size is widely agreed to be one of the drivers of environmental sustainability. Many have argued that, given this, there should be concerted efforts to limit global population growth or even global population size. A variety of different proposals have been defended. Sarah Conly (2016) argues that each couple is entitled to one child; Christine Overall (2012) proposes one child per person. Others do not prescribe specific quotas but argue for policies designed to discourage or disincentivise procreation (Cafaro 2012; Cripps 2015; Hickey, Rieder & Earl 2016; Rieder 2016).

In this paper I defend an alternative approach – what I term Ecological Liberalism. This is built around five key values – Equality, Liberty, Responsibility, Subsidiarity and Democracy. Drawing on the first three values it argues that individuals should each live within certain ecological limits (limits that reflect an Egalitarian theory of justice), that each can choose how to live within those limits (reflecting the value of Liberty) and that persons should bear the costs of their own decisions (reflecting the value of Responsibility). This approach needs, however, to be supplemented. An individual's ecological footprint is often profoundly shaped by factors beyond their control – the nature of the built environment, the design of buildings, the structure of towns and cities, the energy system, and so on. These factors are routinely ignored in philosophical debates about environmental sustainability, but they have momentous impacts on the volume of people's emissions. Given this, we need to go beyond a purely individualistic approach. My proposal is that there where people's ecological footprint is profoundly shaped by collective factors (say a city's layout) those affected should have democratic control over the nature of these factors (Democracy) and can be held accountable for their decisions (Responsibility). In line with a principle of Subsidiarity, these decisions should be taken at as local a level as is possible compatible with honouring principles of ecological sustainability. I argue that this approach is not only the fairest and most liberty-respecting way of ensuring that individuals. and societies live within their ecological limits. It also encourages experimentation and social learning, and is the most politically feasible approach.

The point then is that individuals and societies are subject to responsibilities to limit their ecological footprint, but they can choose *how* they discharge their responsibility. Each must live within limits, but it is not for others to prescribe specifically how they do it. Many factors determine individuals' and societies' ecological footprint - procreative choices, levels of investment in technology, afforestation programmes, building design, infrastructure, the layout of towns and cities, diet, travel, lifestyle choices, how much people work, and so on. It is misplaced, I argue, to propose any environmentally-motivated principle for procreative limits in isolation of the other determinants. Having set out and defended this approach I respond to four objections.

Past events

Final conference of the Climate Ethics and Future Generations program, September 2023

Workshop: Geoengineering, 21 Sep 2022

Mini-workshop with Stephen Gardiner, organized by H. Orri Stefánsson

Program

Workshop: "Risk, Death and Well-Being: The Ethical Foundations of Fatality Risk Regulation" by Matt Adler, 18 October 2022 (prelimenary)

Workshop in collaboration with Sustaianble Population in the Time of Climate Change, 9-10 March 2022

Workshop: Applied questions regarding incommensurability

Non-Welfarist Approaches to Population Ethics - Workshop 2022

Workshop on Political Philosophy and Ethics in Climate Change, Fall 2022

Democracy and Values in Science

Political philosophy meets philosophy of science

Program

Climate Ethics and Emissions Accounting - Workshop 2022

Program

Workshop: Contractualism and future generations, December 2021

Workshop: Awareness, 18-19 October 2021

Claims, distributive justice and future generations, 16-18 June, 2021

Speakers:

Schedule

Workshop: Values in science, May 2021

Monday, May 17th

Tuesday, May 18th

Workshop: Green growth, 26-28 April 2021

Welcome to a workshop at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) and remote

Book symposium on Moral Uncertainty (MacAskill, Bykvist, Ord), 4 February 2021

Schedule

Workshop: Climate Change and Non-Human Animals, 3-4 December 2020

Welcome to a workshop on Climate Change and Non-Human Animals at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) in Stockholm 3-4 December

Workshop: Democracy and Future Generations 16-17 November 2020

Welcome to a workshop on democracy and future generations at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) in Stockholm 16-17 November

Climate Ethics and Future Generations Annual Conference

Workshop: Tipping Point 5-6 November 2020

Workshop: Modelling

Welcome to a workshop on the “use and usefulness of simulation models for policymaking” at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) in Stockholm10 September 2020

Virtual workshop: Climate Ethics Meets Covid-19, 29 May 2020

Virtual Event: Climate Ethics Workshop, 30 April 2020

Workshop: The Non-Identity Problem and Population Ethics10-11 February 2020

Workshop: Incommensurability: Vagueness, Parity and other Non-Conventional Comparative Relations

Welcome to a workshop on incommensurability at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm 6-7 December 2019

2019 Annual Conference of the research program Climate Ethics and Future Generations

Workshop: Ethical Perspectives on Population and the Sustainable Development Goals

Claims, distributive justice and future generations,
16-18 June, 2021

Welcome to a workshop on the “use and usefulness of simulation models for policymaking” at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) in Stockholm
10 September 2020

Virtual workshop: Climate Ethics Meets Covid-19,
29 May 2020

Workshop: The Non-Identity Problem and Population Ethics
10-11 February 2020