< The Morality of the Electric Car

~pink2ds

There are two kinds of these moral tightropes and I see them as fundamentally different from each other.

One is where you are trying to thread the needle between two wrongs. For example, walking a tightrope between cultural imperialism vs cultural appropriation. It'd be much easier to avoid one of them if the other was allowed and vice versa; trying to avoid both becomes more difficult. It's possible but a challenge.

The other is where these two things are true:

The less you do of it, the better, but

you need to do a non-zero amount of it or you'll die.

Impacting the environment negatively is in that latter category. Being mammals, even every breath we take impacts the environment a little bit.

It's not that net zero emissions environments/​networks aren't possible, they are, but most of us aren't in one.

We can try to compensate by effecting reductions in other people's behaviors, by influencing markets or political policy. For example, someone who over their lifetime has a certain amount of negative impact on the environment while overall directly causing the rest of the population to decrease their impact by more than that amount has been a net force of good.

We can also try to do it less. Yeah, I don't have a car either.

Cut down everything that's not needed.

Eating plants is probably the biggest and most obvious change you can do.

People who need cars (I have a difficult time imagine what kind of circumstances would mean that you absolutely need a car—you're an ambulance driver maybe?) then electric cars are the least-bad by a pretty significant margin. They're also less-bad than hydrogen cell cars to my current understanding.

So the point is that while the first kind of moral tightrope requires a multifaceted, nuanced navigation because you need to keep two dangers in mind—Scylla vs Charybdis from the Odyssey being a classic example of this—the second at least is slightly easier because there's a checklist you can use:

Do I need it? y/n

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