In light of the changes we can expect to see as a result of climate change, there is a need, recognizable in recent work in policy, law, and ethics, to reconsider both the ethical norms relevant to our changing world and the forms of justification provided for those norms. The Buffalo workshop on Ethics and Adaptation will provide a venue for beginning to address this need. This workshop will bring together philosophers, policy scholars, and others working on issues related to ethics, adaptation, and sustainability in light of a rapidly changing environment.

That we now face a new set of theoretical and practical challenges in ethics, policy, and law is clear. While historically, political change and increased scientific understanding led to significant transformation of our ethical viewpoints, these changes took place within the fairly stable Holocene epoch. If, as many argue, we are now in a less stable, human generated era, the “anthropocene” epoch as some have called it, we have no precedent for understanding how to modify our practical and evaluative standards. What sort of ethical adaptation should we, or must we, make in an anthropocene epoch? How should this lack of precedent influence our ethical norms and values as we adapt to our changing world? While answers to these questions will surely involve profound changes in our current policy, they may also involve the nature of our moral concepts, the purported universality or objectivity of ethical claims, the structure of practical and political reasoning, or the very idea of flourishing and the good.