What Should Individuals Do about Climate Change? A Debate (with Marion Hourdequin, Routledge, 2025)
Available in paperback, eBook, and Kindle editions.
From the publisher’s website:
Climate change is a pressing problem. Does each of us have a moral responsibility to help tackle it? In this volume, Marion Hourdequin and Dan Shahar debate the timely issue of individual behavior and climate change, examining what it takes to live morally in a warming world.
Hourdequin argues there are important reasons for people to translate their concerns about climate change into actions in their personal lives. This includes attending to the many ways a single individual can help catalyze systemic change through choices about voting and political participation, food and clothing, energy use, travel, and so on. Shahar disagrees because he endorses moral specialization and division of labor in a world filled with many problems. He argues we should not expect everyone to take action on every serious issue: rather, it is acceptable and even desirable for people to focus on certain issues and decline to act on others – including climate change. The two authors take turns responding to each other and then defending their ultimate conclusions. This volume is sure to draw attention to the question of “individual choice” in climate change debates and to help clarify some of the best thinking on this issue.
Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works, 4th Edition (co-edited with David Schmidtz, Oxford University Press, 2024)
Available for purchase or rental in eBook format.
Why It’s OK to Eat Meat (Routledge, 2022)
Available in paperback, eBook, Kindle, and audiobook editions.
From the publisher’s website:
Vegetarians have argued at great length that meat-eating is wrong. Even so, the vast majority of people continue to eat meat, and even most vegetarians eventually give up on their diets. Does this prove these people must be morally corrupt?
In Why It’s OK to Eat Meat, Dan C. Shahar argues the answer is no: it’s entirely possible to be an ethical person while continuing to eat meat—and not just the “fancy” offerings from the farmers’ market but also the regular meat we find at most supermarkets and restaurants. Shahar’s examination forcefully echoes vegetarians’ concerns about the meat industry’s impacts on animals, workers, the environment, and public health. However, he shows that the most influential ethical arguments for avoiding meat on the basis of these considerations are ultimately unpersuasive. Instead of insisting we all become vegetarians, Shahar argues each of us has broad latitude to choose which of the world’s problems to tackle, in what ways, and to what extents, and hence people can decline to take up this particular form of activism without doing anything wrong.
Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works, 3rd Edition (co-edited with David Schmidtz, Oxford University Press, 2018)
Available for purchase or rental in paperback or eBook formats.
Dan C. Shahar 