“Does the climate crisis violate the rights of those yet to be born?” asks Astra Taylor in the Guardian.
She seems to think the answer is “yes”, but fails to make much of a case. The article is full of non-sequiturs like grumbling that the fact that “high-frequency trading means stocks are bought and sold within nanoseconds” somehow means that capitalism “lacks the attention span required for survival.”
However the purpose of this post was not to complain about Astra Taylor complaining that computers work fast. My far more urgent task in making this post was to make the obvious snarky point before someone at the Guardian notices and changes that headline. I think I’m just in time:
If capitalistic inattention to the climate crisis violates the rights of the unborn, does being aborted not violate their rights even more?
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I had some rather more considered thoughts about what obligation, if any, people have to sacrifice their own interests in deference to those of others in this post from a few years ago, “Thinking aloud on a mountainside”. The second half discusses abortion.
