Review of 'Catastrophe Ethics' (2025) by Travis Rieder

Ethicist Travis Rieder writes about what he calls ‘the Puzzle’: everything we do seems to matter in worsening climate change, but at the same time, nothing we do seems to matter because our contributions are so small. Humanity is very far from reaching the goal of not letting the planet warm up more than 1,5 degrees Celsius, or even 2 degrees—with which must devastation and suffering come—, and every individual action seems to have repercussions in terms of pain to others. But at the same time, individual emissions do not directly cause harm. Focusing excessively on the individual might do more harm than good, says Rieder, because it can lead us to forget the importance of the corporations, which are the key emitters, and politicians, who powerfully shape the structure in which we live. Still, our moral responsibility may seem to command us to lower our contributions to harm. The ‘Puzzle’ thus appears: the challenge of climate change is so big that it makes individual action negligible, yet important.

            Rieder warns that most moral reactions—our sense of what is good and what is wrong—follow ‘moral dumbfounding’: following our gut, inherited beliefs, and dogma instead of using reason to assess moral issues in all their complexity, ambiguity, and nuance. The tools most people use as moral guides fail when confronted with the Puzzle. Some use God and religion as their guide, but in a constantly changing and complex world, moral questions cannot be solved with the absolutism proclaimed by religion. Morals are not fully relative either because they do not depend on culture and mannerisms, and some acts cannot be justified by appeal to cultural constructs. The three main moral strains in philosophical theory—consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics—struggle as well. Consequentialism indicates that the morality of an action depends on how much suffering it produces. Deontology lists a set of principles that must be followed at all times. Virtue ethics asks not ‘what should one do’ but ‘who should one be’. These three ethical strands derive moral rules from big principles, but are divisive and struggle when confronted with the complexity of life. Consequentialism struggles to show causality in environmental behaviours regarding giant problems. Deontology fails because many acts that contribute to climate change don’t seem wrong in themselves. Virtue ethics would also allow acts that overburden the planet. Similarly, these philosophies might lead to an ethic of purity, in which one saves oneself from moral stains but fails to try to save the planet and others from their demise. In sum, not everything in the moral world is total, not everything is relative, not everything can be induced, and not everything can be deduced. Traditional tools cannot solve the puzzle.        

Rieder offers guidance for ‘how to live a moral life amidst all that confusion.’ He argues that humans need not classical moral philosophy to deal with the challenge of climate change and planetary breakdowns, but a new moral philosophy he calls catastrophe ethics. A potential solution comes from acknowledging that not every action comes from duty—and most actions amidst the Puzzle are not matters of duty, but that there is a spectrum of moral reasons for what should be done. Participatory ethics, or how we should take part in collective efforts, provides guidance. Duty is the strongest command, but lower on the spectrum are peremptory reasons which require justification for contradicting. Countervailing reasons allow us not to follow some moral reasons. A moral way of living depends on moral reasons but also on real conditions. To generate heuristics, or rules of thumb, Rieder suggests computing purity (individual) reasons, or the invitation to not participate in harmful dynamics, social reasons, about how to relate to a particular group, and structural reasons, about transforming social institutions and structures. At all these levels, some reasons are peremptory, but other reasons are more modest. The participatory ethics is then not only about withdrawing our support from harmful systems, but also about proactive actions.

Rieder offers an individual approach for ‘lay people.’ The reasoning is solid, but the problem is that it ends up being a useful defence for continuing to behave almost the same in a system that has created so much harm. It offers tools to justify all their actions by saying they had ‘countervailing reasons’ to do or not to do certain things. ‘I flew three times to the other side of the Atlantic because my aunt missed me.’ The book neglects that the personal and the political are intrinsically linked. It also ends up arguing that we have no duty to save the planet.

[i] All the ideas in this section come from Rieder, T. (2025). Catastrophe Etics. How to be Good in a World Gone Bad. Richmond: Duckworth.