Swiss ‘Climate Ethicist’: Flying’s OK if Mom’s Dying or for Jetting to Climate Summits

Today we bring you the climate wackiness of the week:

At Swiss SRF public broadcasting, Yves Bossart recently interviewed philosopher and ethicist Dominic Roser of the Institute for Ethics and Human Rights of the University of Fribourg. Roser is also the author of the book “Ethics of Climate Change.”

In the interview, Roser tells the SRF that whenever people fly, they are in fact “killing humans of the future,” and thus there is a moral obligation to abstain from flying.

He says:

A single holiday flight can warm up the climate more than driving a car and heating a home with heating oil for an entire year.”

When asked if he himself flies, Roser says he does all he can to avoid taking holiday trips, because he is aware that “flying kills.”

When asked to explain what he means by that, he tells the SRF, citing an estimate from John Nolt:

People of the future generations die through our flights. To put it bluntly, the jetliner in which I sit is like a rocket that is aimed at future humans.”

Yet, Roser does admit that flying is sometimes unavoidable and morally permissible in some special cases:

But sometimes one has to fly, for example, if your mother is dying far away, or when I as a politician have to go to a climate conference.”

But luckily for such cases, Roser says, there’s the opportunity to offset the carbon emissions. He then pointedly rejects the notion suggested by the SRF that this is the “sale of indulgences.”

Globalism is the solution!

Later in the interview, Roser comes out in support of a CO2 tax for flights, and then states that the only hope to solve the “huge challenges of climate change” is “to elect politicians who look beyond borders and think globally.”

So if you now think academia is really in dire need of reform, then put your mind at ease because you are not alone. Many will agree that there is certainly better thinking and intellect available out there than what Swiss universities are offering for our tax money today.

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