Global Ethics, Structural Injustice, and Environmental Responsibility Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards grounded in the study material covering global ethics, structural injustice models, and environmental ethical responsibilities.

Global Ethics

A field of study and discourse of knowledge that addresses the theory and practice of ethics in pressing international issues, taking the globe as its ethical locus without promoting a single uniform ethic.

Ethical Toolbox

The collection of main moral and political theories that provide the theoretical foundation necessary to analyze and approach global ethical dilemmas.

Hans Küng's Global Ethic

A 1993 declaration proposing a minimal fundamental consensus concerning binding values, irrevocable standards, and fundamental moral attitudes shared across all religions.

Global Frame

A methodological feature of global ethics where the globe constitutes the locus of concern, requiring that the needs, rights, and perspectives of all global actors be factored into ethical analysis.

Cosmopolitanism

A moral and political theory that views all people in some sense as citizens of the world and considers the globe as the proper unit of ethical concern.

Liability Model

A legal and moral framework of responsibility that seeks to isolate specific agents causally connected to a harm to assign fault, blame, or liability for backward-looking redress.

Social Connection Model

An alternative conception of responsibility proposed by Iris Marion Young holding that all who contribute by their actions to structural processes with unjust outcomes share a forward-looking responsibility to transform those processes through collective action.

Culpable Negligence

A legal and moral concept where an agent is held blameworthy for a harm due to a failure to act according to legitimate expectations tied to a specific role or position.

Strict Liability

A tort law concept under which an agent is held liable for a harm even if the agent was not the cause, did not intend the outcome, or was unable to control it.

Unstructured Collective Harms

A term used by Christopher Kutz to describe harms produced by the aggregate effects of uncoordinated individual actions without a shared collective project or participatory intent.

Participatory Intent

The condition in organized collective action where each agent intends the joint goal of the group as the end of their own individual action.

Shared Responsibility

A personal, distributed responsibility borne with the awareness that others share it, arising from participation in ongoing institutional processes that produce structural injustice.

Spirit of Resentment (Ressentiment)

A psychological dialectic of morality, analyzed by Nietzsche, where a sufferer turns hurt outward to find a guilty agent to punish, which Young argues is unproductive in political discourse on structural injustice.

Solidarity

A relationship among separate and dissimilar actors who decide to stand together to transform social structures and fulfill shared political responsibility for justice.

Speciesism

A concept emphasized by Peter Singer referring to prejudice or discrimination against non-human animals purely on the basis of species membership.

Montreal Protocol

A 1987 international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out ozone-depleting substances, specifically chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Kigali Amendment

A 2016 amendment to the Montreal Protocol aimed at phasing down hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are potent greenhouse gases.

School Strike for Climate

A global social movement initiated by Greta Thunberg in 2018 in which students engage in political action by withdrawing labor/school attendance to demand environmental action.

An Inconvenient Truth

A 2006 documentary film and presentation by Al Gore that brought climate change science to a mass audience by framing climate change fundamentally as a moral issue.