This chapter provides a short introduction to climate change in the planetary boundaries framework.

Since the 1972 Stockholm Conference, many global environmental agreements have been struck for climate, biodiversity, and sustainable development goals. Still, the planets environment has continued to decline, including on the ocean. One result has been ocean acidification, caused by the uptake of 30–40 per cent of all carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. On its face, this ocean CO2 uptake sounds positive. However, with a continuous increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, this also means an increase in the ocean, which alters its chemistry in ways that may disrupt oceanic biodiversity through making waters more acidic. When coupling this with other major global crisis, we see that we have only adopted global environmental agreements that protect humans from our own nature-induced change – and not ensured that we take our ethical obligation to nature itself by protecting it from human use. This chapter looks at the risk perception literature and considers how the science–policy interface can be exploited to convey the importance of ocean acidification, and whether the anthropogenic lens is what will always be necessary to ensure action to protect something from ourselves.

Atmospheric aerosol loading is a key planetary variable. As climate change has accelerated, debates over using atmospheric aerosols to reflect solar radiation (a form of geoengineering) have gained pace. This chapter begins by considering how early ethical debates often turned on considerations of risk and moral hazards associated with geoengineering technologies. The chapter’s core focus, however, is on the response of geoengineering proponents to those critiques. Those responses are increasingly consolidating around the idea that experiments with geoengineering ought to take place because, without them, there is no clear basis for gauging risks of technological interventions versus those of climate change. I argue, however, that this response turns on treating experimentation as a site of ethical adjudication. That, however, is itself an ethical decision about how to organize and examine matters of moral concern. I conclude by arguing that efforts to justify solar geoengineering experiments require sound moral arguments that have yet to be made.

The planetary boundary ‘Novel Entities’ (NE) is one of the nine planetary boundaries within the PB approach. While we welcome the PB approach in principle, we consider the specific planetary boundary ‘Novel Entities’ to be problematic from an ethical perspective. In our opinion, it does not fit into the overall concept and runs the risk of initiating substitute discussions that distract from the actual problems. Furthermore, we believe that the implicit and explicit normative aspects of the PB approach have not yet been satisfactorily integrated into the approach. This is an avoidable weakness to which the proponents of the PB approach should devote more attention.

This chapter uses a variety of original quantitative and qualitative data to document and describe how commitment facilitates local community protection. The authors define commitment as a normative disposition to mobilize in the public sphere on matters of universal, as opposed to narrow or sectarian, concern. Focusing primarily on local Catholic priests, commitment is rooted in recent trends in Catholic social thought, with concepts such as human dignity and solidarity giving clear theological motive to interventions. The chapter traces levels of commitment to early-career training (the “formation” of priests), emphasizing not only Catholic social thought but also extended immersion in marginalized communities. Priests with high levels of commitment are more willing to assume the substantial risks of Drug War intervention, both to their personal safety and institutional interests. They also drew on theological commitments for the content a moral counter-narrative to populist dehumanization.

Chapter 1 attends to the historical context of British bomb testing through an exploration of contrasting accounts of nuclear risk. It juxtaposes archival and official narratives of military risk management with test veterans’ own memories of hazardous events. This reveals the jarring mismatch that test veterans experienced when encountering official records detailing moments their younger selves experienced first-hand. I explore how radiation measurement technologies, material infrastructures, and a military culture of hierarchical trust negated the perception of risk, yet still left room for servicemen to experience doubt and fear. This chapter also places the harms to service personnel in the wider colonial context of racial hierarchies and the theft of lands, revealing how stories of Indigenous injury became uncertain undercurrents within test veterans’ own narratives.

This chapter investigates why people join pro-oil campaigns. Attending to the case study of Canada’s Energy Citizens (CEC), the chapter argues that the campaign’s early stages relied on personal connections between members as much as fealty to a political cause. The fledgling campaign mobilized staff’s friends and coworkers, who joined as a show of collegial support. These bonds were solidified by shared feelings of precarity, with members believing that their own livelihoods and communities were dependent on the largesse of oil companies. It was the threat of losing their way of life – or more exactly, the perception that their way of life was under attack from environmentalists and legislators –that kept pro-oil campaigners mobilized. Joiners’ enthusiasm for supporting industry was often tempered by feelings of risk, however, as they worried about how becoming the face of Big Oil might affect their employability or personal relationships. Joiners also critiqued CEC’s focus on civility, which they believed undercut the effectiveness of the campaign.

While it has been argued that relational egalitarianism can capture the vulnerability to inequalities of people’s self-respect, the relationship between vulnerability and relational equality remains largely underexplored. In this chapter, I embark on this project, with a particular focus on risk. I argue that both risk and vulnerability capture situations in which there is a possibility of harm, but harm has not yet materialised and I claim that a number of situations in which one’s interests are at risk of harm matter for relational egalitarians. Sometimes risks and vulnerabilities amount to relationships of domination, in other cases exposure to risk, especially when unequal, signals a failure of the state to treat citizens as equals. Bringing together the literature on vulnerability and risk, which are rarely put in dialogue, is key in reflecting on the terms on which people are able to relate to each other as equals: this ex-ante outlook brings to the forefront the different ways in which risk and vulnerability not only can amount to objectionable forms of inequality but can also endanger equality. This, I argue, should lead relational egalitarians to regard the commitment to the robust protection of people’s equal status as central to their theory.

This chapter explores two kinds of vulnerability which appear to cause a problem for neo-republicanism as a form of relational egalitarianism: the vulnerabilities involved in intimate and caring relationships, and those generated by complex economic and social processes like the global financial system. I argue that the standard neo-republican strategy of constraining arbitrary power can successfully account for the former; the value of the vulnerabilities involved in intimate relations depends on the presence of constraints which prevent power being exercised in ways which do not track relevant interests. But this approach is less successful in dealing with the latter kind of vulnerability, which generates cases in which agents can be subject to domination without suffering the loss of status, and accompanying inequality, usually characteristic of domination. I argue that while these cases count as exceptions to the standard relationship between non-domination and egalitarianism, neo-republicanism remains a form of relational egalitarianism.

Mothers who kill their own children are unusual women whose offences often elicit fear, horror and condemnation in others. Psychiatrists may be asked to assess such women to explore the relationship between the offence and maternal mental illness, and the potential risk to other children. In this chapter, I discuss some available data on mothers who kill, in terms of criminal justice statistics, and review accounts of motives for such killings. I briefly discuss the legal processes that mother who kill must face, and the role of the psychiatrist. I then discuss some recent research about the role of maternal attachment security in relation to attitudes towards children and the transition to motherhood and the potential for psychological disorder that arise during that transition. I also comment on social factors, such as the role of partners and fathers. I conclude with some discussion about the management of cases where mental illness is a risk factor for filicide, and the associated child protection issues that may arise in such cases.

Under the extremes of Indian socialism, the financial system was a handmaiden for state control of the economy, directing resources according to the wishes of the government. State control was achieved through government ownership. A great deal has changed, with a first (1947–1992) and second (1992–2016) phase of central planning where there were conflicting themes of liberalization and enhanced state control. In many areas, private financial firms are now important. The full ecosystem of modern finance, with information processing and risk taking by private persons, blossomed in the equity market. For two decades there was a remarkable policy process that yielded gains in fields such as the equity market, pension reforms, bankruptcy code and so on. But alongside this there was the expansion of the ‘administrative state’ in the form of financial regulators. Regulators engage in micro-management of products and processes. While there is isomorphic mimicry with many things that look like a financial system, officials retain substantial control over how finance works. In a functional perspective, Indian finance today resembles the environment of the 1980s more than meets the eye.

Several themes shape the historiography of economics in western India in colonial times, including the history of ryotwari land tenure, international factors like the growing engagement of agriculture with the world markets via cotton exports, dependence on monsoon agriculture and the outbreak of famines and epidemics, and the industrialization of Bombay and Ahmedabad. Although these processes may seem disparate, there were also deep connections between them. The chapter offers an economic history integrating these processes, and shows how western India in the colonial period saw significant innovation and entrepreneurship in industry, in the broader context of an economy that remained largely agricultural, with low productivity and high risk.