Susan Spierre

An Experiential, Game-Theoretic Pedagogy for Sustainability Ethics

The wicked problems that constitute sustainability require students to learn a different set of ethical skills than is ordinarily required by professional ethics. The focus for sustainability ethics must be redirected towards: (1) reasoning rather than rules, and (2) groups rather than individuals. This need for a different skill set presents several pedagogical challenges to traditional programs of ethics education that emphasize abstraction and reflection at the expense of experimentation and experience. This paper describes a novel pedagogy of sustainability ethics that is based on noncooperative, game-theoretic problems that cause students to confront two salient questions: “What are my obligations to others?” and “What am I willing to risk in my own well-being to meet those obligations?” In comparison to traditional professional ethics education, the game-based pedagogy moves the learning experience from: passive to active, apathetic to emotionally invested, narratively closed to experimentally open, and from predictable to surprising. In the context of game play, where players must make decisions that can adversely impact classmates, students typically discover a significant gap between their moral aspirations and their moral actions. When the games are delivered sequentially as part of a full course in Sustainability Ethics, students may experience a moral identity crisis as they reflect upon the incongruity of their self-understanding and their behavior. Repeated play allows students to reconcile this discrepancy through group deliberation that coordinates individual decisions to achieve collective outcomes. It is our experience that students gradually progress through increased levels of group tacit knowledge as they encounter increasingly complex game situations.

Determining Moral Responsibility for CO2 Emissions: A Reply to Nolt

We take no issue with John Nolt’s calculations in ‘How harmful are the average American’s greenhouse gas emissions?’ (Nolt, 2011). That is, we accept that over the course of a typical American lifetime, the greenhouse gas emissions related to the activities of a single individual will cause harm to future people. In fact, the World Health Organization reports that about 150,000 deaths now occur in low-income countries each year due to crop failure and malnutrition, diarrheal disease, malaria and other insect-borne diseases, and flooding associated with climate change (WHO, 2009). There are also a myriad of other environmentally relevant activities that result in harmful emissions. For example, several studies link pollution from coal-fired power plants to health damages (National Research Council, 2009; Schwartz, 2000; Wilson & Spengler, 1996), including an estimated annual 30,000 premature deaths, as well as hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks, cardiac problems and respiratory damage (Clean the Air, 2000). Following Nolt’s calculations, we could sum together the reported annual mortality attributed to coal combustion, multiply by an average American lifespan of 80 years, and divide that by the current US population to reveal that the harm caused by an average individual’s lifetime coalfired electricity consumption is the death or injury of about 0.2 people. In that context, it seems reasonable to accept that climate-related deaths attributable to the average individual could be one or two—exactly as Nolt estimates them. However, these calculations by themselves fail to resolve the question of whether this level of emissions should be considered negligible. In this regard, Nolt fails in two respects. The first of these is context. That is, Nolt provides no basis for comparison by which we should come to understand the severity of his estimate relative to other statistical or aggregated measures of harm, or relative to the tens of billions of people that will likely be alive during the period under Nolt’s consideration. The second

Intergroup Cooperation in Common Pool Resource Dilemmas

Fundamental problems of environmental sustainability, including climate change and fisheries management, require collective action on a scale that transcends the political and cultural boundaries of the nation-state. Rational, self-interested neoclassical economic theories of human behavior predict tragedy in the absence of third party enforcement of agreements and practical difficulties that prevent privatization. Evolutionary biology offers a theory of cooperation, but more often than not in a context of discrimination against other groups. That is, in-group boundaries are necessarily defined by those excluded as members of out-groups. However, in some settings human’s exhibit behavior that is inconsistent with both rational economic and group driven cooperation of evolutionary biological theory. This paper reports the results of a non-cooperative game-theoretic exercise that models a tragedy of the commons problem in which groups of players may advance their own positions only at the expense of other groups. Students enrolled from multiple universities and assigned to different multi-university identity groups participated in experiments that repeatedly resulted in cooperative outcomes despite intergroup conflicts and expressions of group identity. We offer three possible explanations: (1) students were cooperative because they were in an academic setting; (2) students may have viewed their instructors as the out-group; or (3) the emergence of a small number of influential, ethical leaders is sufficient to ensure cooperation amongst the larger groups. From our data and analysis, we draw out lessons that may help to inform approaches for institutional design and policy negotiations, particularly in climate change management.

Using non-cooperative games to simulate ethical tensions in climate policy negotiations

Successfully implementing a system of global compliance to mitigate climate change requires collective, social decision making that is unprecedented among people with radically different values and radically different needs. Our novel pedagogy in sustainability ethics teaches future professionals about complex moral problems in a way that leverages their interests in experiment and experience through the use of non-cooperative game theory. This approach emphasizes active, participatory, and experiential learning that is intended to more deeply immerse students in questions of fairness, justice, and equity in the context of sustainability. Through testing the games and preparing complimentary educational material, we have found that the developed non-cooperative games are particularly effective at replicating the ethical tensions surrounding the issue of climate change. This method of teaching ethics may prime students to participate in more effective group deliberation in real-world policy negotiations.

Debunking the fallacy of the individual decision-maker: An experiential pedagogy for sustainability ethics

Existing pedagogical approaches to ethics education in engineering and science reinforce what this paper terms “the fallacy of the individual decision-maker” by suggesting an oversimplified, individualistic model of ethical decision-making, rather than recognizing the organizational, cultural, or group deliberative context of an ethical dilemma. Consequently, students fail to develop the group deliberative and ethical reasoning skills necessary to properly recognize and resolve ethical questions. This paper critiques existing approaches and presents an alternative pedagogy that emphasizes active, participatory, and experiential learning that is intended to more deeply immerse students in questions of fairness, justice, and equity in the context of sustainability by playing the Externalities Game. Preliminary testing supports the hypotheses that game play results in deeper consideration of ethical issues, more emotionally engaged students, fosters greater deliberative discourse, and encourages experimentation with different ethical strategies. The Externalities Game may be an appropriate piece of a larger course in sustainability ethics when combined with traditional reading and pedagogical strategies.

Determining an equitable allocation Of global carbon dioxide emissions

Finding an equitable mitigation policy to combat global climate change is a major problem facing society today. Successful mitigation of climate change will require a decrease in global CO2 emissions and economic costs associated with reduced production of consumer goods. A critical consideration is the existence of an uneven distribution of benefits and damages associated with climate change, stressing the need for an equitable way to reduce CO2 emissions. Literature in philosophy provides an outline of carbon allocation methods that advocate the use of ethical and moral reasoning behind international climate policy. However, evidence from recent economic and behavioral studies may be developed into a more equitable method of allocation by taking a capabilities approach, rather than consumption- or income-based measures of human welfare. Using the Human Development Index as a proxy for human welfare and a climate damage function representing the cost of lost ecosystem services, we determine a more equitable global allocation of CO2 emissions. The implication is that developed countries that emit more CO2, may be able to reduce their consumption without necessarily reducing their quality of life. Also, less developed nations, that emit less, have an incentive to focus development efforts on improving the lives of its citizens, rather than increasing consumption of material goods.