Climate change is shaping up to be a global catastrophe. I don’t think this is controversial. There will be food and water shortages, millions of people will be displaced due to rising sea levels, and this will unequally affect the poor and marginalized. As the degradation of the planet leads to worse health outcomes (to put it lightly), bioethicists have noted this relationship, calling for more sustainable practices in healthcare and health research (e.g., Samuel and Richie 2023, Ray and Cooper 2025, Salloch 2026).
Yet despite the knowledge of how catastrophic climate change could be, many of the responses to the aforementioned papers contain a common theme. That is, “Yes climate change is a problem, and we should protect the environment, but…” And in many of these responses, what follows the “but” is a sort of fear of the impractical. I’ll argue that this fear highlights a flawed conception of responsibility both in bioethics and more broadly.
Out of the papers previously mentioned, the responses to Sabine Salloch’s article, “Planetary Health Research Ethics: Sounding out the Dimensions,” most reflect this fear of impracticality. In this article Salloch calls for a reassessment of research ethics in an effort to protect the planet. She offers several concrete suggestions for how this could be accomplished, such as having research ethics committees evaluate study protocols based on their impact on the environment, or by watching for potentially wasteful/repetitive studies.
Following the “Yes, but…” formula, David Resnik argues that Salloch’s proposal could serve to overburden IRBs and research ethics committees, which typically don’t possess the required expertise. In another response, Rieder, Earl, and Hickey argue that stakeholders do not have the resources to assess ecological concerns, and imposing such requirements would waste time and could even cost people their health or lives. Both papers echo the idea that the potential harms to the environment created by health research—which although relatively minor compared to other industries, are not insignificant—are far outweighed by the value created by such research.
Similar arguments have been central to environmental ethics for a long time. For instance, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s influential article, “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations,” argues that taking one’s gas guzzling truck for a joy ride isn’t morally impermissible—yes it isn’t necessarily a good thing for the environment, but in the grand scheme of things the emissions are so minimal that they can’t be traced to any harms.
Outside of academia, the argument that 100 corporations contribute to 70% of global emissions is often brought up as a way to minimize individual responsibility. It’s hard to be convinced that using a paper straw will help the environment, as some billionaire takes a flight on his private jet to his third superyacht so he can work on plans to put another AI data center right in the middle of a marginalized community.
I’m sympathetic to both arguments, especially the latter. If we really want to protect the planet, the best way is most likely to stop the capitalist death machine from plundering our planet for all that it’s worth with no regard for human or non-human life. Earl, Rieder, and Hickey even point out in their article that there are better areas to target before healthcare. But this misses the point. Regardless of the social value, no one wants their specific industry to be subject to restrictions for the sake of the environment. Restrictions are impractical and this stands against the values of capitalism.
The tone of both Resnik and Earl, Rieder, and Hickey’s arguments reflects this fear of impracticality. It would be impractical to give more duties to research ethics committees. It would be impractical to add someone to these committees with environmental expertise. It would be impractical to allocate resources towards ecological concerns in health research. However, these are poor arguments—even from a lens of practicality. I’m confident that letting our planet succumb to the effects of climate change will be much more consumptive of time and resources, especially in healthcare. And I’m positive that such effects will cost more people their health or lives than stopping or modifying a wasteful or repetitive study.
Moreover, now is not the time to worry about practicality. The health and well-being of billions of people are at risk if we continue to let the health of our planet be ravaged. Regardless of who is to blame for the catastrophe we find ourselves facing, the mantra of “it’s not my fault” shouldn’t be reflective of how we respond. Bioethicists should be setting the tone for cultural shifts away from a hyper-fixation on efficiency, practicality, and maximizing shareholder profits, especially when they’re contributing to significant harms. Rather, we should be willing to take the extra step, make the sacrifice, and be altogether impractical in the pursuit of a better and healthier world for all.
I’ll end with one more point about impracticality. It seems to me that a large part of bioethics’ history is founded on an effort to go against the practical method in favor of a more critical, ethical, and potentially impractical one. It was much more practical to not cure the men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Why lose all those perfectly good subjects? It was very practical to use the Willowbrook Institute to study the transfer of Hepatitis. Where else would one find a perfect testing ground for the spread of disease like that?
These studies were efficient, no doubt. They likely avoided the “administrative delays” and “bureaucratic wrangling” that Earl, Rieder, and Hickey fear might slow down the progress of valuable studies if we ask researchers and research ethics committees to consider the environmental impacts of health research.
Luckily, there were bold whistleblowers for both Tuskegee and Willowbrook who decided the lives of these subjects were more important than the results of the study. I can only hope we make the same decision about the health of our planet before it’s too late.
Seamus Donahue, MA, is the Program Manager for the Indiana University Center for Bioethics