Is Driving Fossil-Fuelled Cars Immoral?

Rufus Duits asks when we can justify driving our carbon contributors.

- Rufus Duits

In this article I want to suggest that much of the use we make of fossil-fuelled cars might be morally wrong, or at the very least ought to be subject to serious moral assessment. Rather than adopting just one kind of ethical framework, though, I will try to show that the non-essential driving of fossil-fuelled cars is morally questionable according to reasonable interpretations of four major contemporary approaches in moral philosophy: the doctrine of double effect, utilitarianism, contractualism, and virtue ethics.

Double Effect Driving

Driving a fossil-fuelled car (or even just turning on the engine) causes harms of many different kinds. It pollutes the air, exacerbating symptoms of cardiovascular diseases and releasing carcinogens; it intensifies greenhouse effects, such as climate change; it increases the risk of killing, injuring, and maiming people; it reduces the public space available for other uses; it generates noise pollution and stress; it maintains sedentary lifestyles; and so on.

I take it that, all other things being equal, causing harm is morally wrong. There is no plausible ethical framework that suggests that we ought to cause harm without further justification. But causing harm can nevertheless be justified within different ethical frameworks in different ways. We will look at four ways in which the harm-caused by driving fossil-fuelled cars might be justified.

Consider, for a baseline moral assessment, idling, where a car has its engine running without the car moving. It is illegal in the UK and elsewhere to idle your engine unnecessarily.