History Repeats Itself. Next Time as Tragedy: The Ethics of Climate Adaptation for the Overshoot Generation (article / 2025)

 

In spite of the widespread recognition that effective climate policies require both mitigation and adaptation, the history of the climate ethics debate shows that the balance between adaptation and mitigation policies has been anything but stable. Although some researchers did indeed support a well-balanced mix of mitigation and adaptation strategies in the Villach (1985) and Toronto (1988) conferences, throughout the 1980s most people favoured adaptation over mitigation. This contrasts with preference for mitigation over adaptation in the 1990s and early 2000s, almost to the point of entirely discrediting the relevance of climate adaptation policies. It was not until the early 2010s that adaptation and mitigation came to be seen as equally important to address climate change. 

We argue that by mid-century – if not earlier – adaptation policies are likely to be seen, again, as more urgent than mitigation. The reason for this is that most mitigation pathways to the achievement of the Paris Agreement goals involve a temperature overshoot, which will constrain the generation living under the overshoot period – the ‘overshoot generation’ – to prioritize adaptation policies as a matter of survival. Even on the assumption that the overshoot generation will emit less than the current and the past generations have emitted, the overshoot generation will have to deploy massively as-yet unproven carbon removal technologies in order to mitigate the unmitigated emissions of the past. We call this process ‘retroactive mitigation’. 

This raises pressing issues of transgenerational justice. We conclude the paper with four policy recommendations for the benefit of the overshoot generation.

[ PDF ]

© Como citar este artigo:

Araujo, M. and Fior, Pedro. (2025) "History repeats itself. Next time as tragedy: The ethics of climate adaptation for the Overshoot Generation", Ethics, Policy & Environment, pp. 1–24. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2025.2574258.

Defining Research Priorities on Climate-Sensitive Infectious Disease Justice for South America (capítulo / 2025)

 

Abstract: Setting research priorities helps to optimise responses to climate-sensitive infectious diseases. When it comes to infectious disease justice, it is essential to identify the just paths for building resilience. This is particularly challenging in the area of climate-sensitive infectious diseases, in which available adaptation paths differ depending on epidemic evolution and future mitigation scenarios. Moreover, due to the communicable nature of infectious diseases and poorly controlled borders, transformative changes are necessary for controlling climate-sensitive infectious diseases in regions such as South America (SA). Attributable to the particularities of this continent, some containment measures, such as lockdowns or school closures, can create unjust burdens, as the case of the COVID-19 pandemic has shown. This study shows the outcome of a philosophical conversation aimed to identify the regional background conditions that make climate-sensitive infectious disease justice in SA necessary and possible.

© Como citar este capítulo:

Rekers, Romina, Marcelo De Araujo, Timothy Daly, Pedro Fior, et al. "Defining research priorities on climate-sensitive infectious disease justice for South America" In Climate Change and Health: Perspectives from Developing Countries, edited by Walter Leal Filho and Franziska Wolf. Climate Change Management. Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-93177-2_13.

Tribunal da ONU declara que mudanças climáticas ameaçam a humanidade (entrevista / 2025)

 

Contribuição para reportagem da TV Brasil sobre mudanças climáticas. A entrevista começa em 1:45.   

Trecho da redação:

"O Tribunal Internacional da Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU) declarou, pela primeira vez, que as mudanças climáticas são uma ameaça real à humanidade. E um outro organismo alerta que o planeta atinge, nesta quinta-feira (24), a sobrecarga do consumo de recursos naturais. É como se, a partir de amanhã, o planeta precisasse usar o cartão de crédito para bancar o consumo até o fim do ano. 

A decisão da mais alta Corte das Nações Unidas pode dar base jurídica para a responsabilização de estados em ações relacionadas a questões relacionadas à emergência climática como poluição, desmatamento e emissões de gases de efeito estufa. 

O parecer da Corte Internacional de Justiça, com sede em Haia, na Holanda, foi aprovado por unanimidade pelos 15 juízes do tribunal. O documento sustenta que os estados têm obrigação legal de proteger o sistema climático e de cumprir os acordos internacionais."

© Como citar este artigo:
Araujo, Marcelo de (2025) "Tribunal da ONU declara que mudanças climáticas ameaçam a humanidade". Entrevista à TV Brasil, EBC (Empresa Brasileira de Comunicação), 24 de julho de 2025. https://tvbrasil.ebc.com.br/reporter-brasil-tarde/2025/07/tribunal-da-onu-declara-que-mudancas-climaticas-ameacam-humanidade

Apresentação do "Dossiê Ética da Inteligência Artificial" (artigo / 2024)

 

"A tecnologia orientada por Inteligência Artificial (IA), entendida como a capacidade de um sistema – como um software ou incorporada em um aparelho – para executar tarefas comumente associadas a seres inteligentes, já é uma constante em nossas vidas, seja pelas recorrentes recomendações de filmes que recebemos pelos serviços de streaming, tal como Netflix e Amazon Prime, seja pelos filtros de e-mails que usamos, ou pela utilização de algum aplicativo de navegação por GPS, como o Waze, e ela não parece problemática em muitas áreas. Ao contrário, ela parece facilitar nossa vida. 

Entretanto, esta tecnologia está se estendendo progressivamente para certos domínios nos quais, provavelmente, terá um impacto maior, assim como decidir em circunstâncias de risco, estabelecer prioridades entre pessoas e fazer julgamentos complexos e, portanto, terá que tomar decisões que já se enquadram no domínio moral. Por isso, parece importante pensar sobre os algoritmos que alimentam esses produtos. Os carros autônomos, por exemplo, precisarão tomar decisões sobre como distribuir o risco entre os passageiros, pedestres e ciclistas, isto é, entre os que utilizam as vias públicas. As armas autônomas letais, terão que identificar e selecionar os alvos humanos que serão eliminados. Por sua vez, algoritmos que já estão em uso no sistema de saúde e judiciário em alguns países, estabelecem a prioridade de quem receberá um transplante de órgão, bem como aconselham os juízes sobre quem deve obter liberdade condicional ou uma sentença maior de prisão."

[ PDF ]

© Como citar este artigo:
Coitinho, Denis; Araujo, Marcelo de. 2024. "Apresentação do Dossiê Ética da Inteligência Artificial". Filosofia Unisinos 25 (1): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.4013/fsu.2024.251.ia.

LLM (Large Language Models) as surrogate for multi-voice groups: from epistemic reliability to political legitimacy (Book Chapter / 2025)

 

The urgent need to understand the inner workings of LLMs and other machine learning algorithms has given rise to the emergence of a burgeoning field of research known as a “eXplainable AI (XAI)”, sometimes also known as “Interpretable AI”. In this article we intend examine a different methodological strategy to address the alignment problem, one that does not involve the development of new architectures, explanations, or training techniques. Our intention is, firstly, to examine the attempt to tackle the alignment problem with the methods of psychology, which seeks to understand an even more complicated black box, namely: the human brain or, as the case may be, the human mind. 

If a person is asked how their brain interprets visual input, or to rate their own ability to offer accurate explanations of how ordinary objects such as bikes or zippers work, they will probably be unable to provide a cogent explanation. Over the last decades, researchers in the field of empirical psychology have advanced a variety of methodological strategies to understand the human black box without having to rely too heavily on what people say (supposing they would have anything to say) about their own mental states or brain processes. The attempt to address the alignment problem by applying the methods of psychology to LLMs has recently led one author to coin the expression machine psychology.  We are particularly interested in the attempt to use the methods commonly applied in social psychology studies as a promising strategy to address the alignment problem.

[ PDF ]

© Como citar este artigo:
Araujo, Marcelo de; Nunes, José Luiz; Almeida, Guilherme de. 2024. "LLM (Large Language Models) as surrogate for multi-voice groups: from epistemic reliability to political legitimacy". In: Oliveira, Nythamar; Tauchen, Jair. (ed.). Recasting Bioethics, Neuroethics, and AI Ethics. 1ed.Porto Alegre: Fênix, 2024, vol. 1, p. 159–181. https://doi.org/10.36592/9786554602006 

Are Large Language Models Moral Hypocrites? A Study Based on Moral Foundations (artigo / 2024)

 

Large language models (LLMs) have taken centre stage in debates on Artificial Intelligence. Yet there remains a gap in how to assess LLMs' conformity to important human values. In this paper, we investigate whether state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4 and Claude 2.1 (Gemini Pro and LLAMA 2 did not generate valid results) are moral hypocrites. We employ two research instruments based on the Moral Foundations Theory: (i) the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), which investigates which values are considered morally relevant in abstract moral judgements; and (ii) the Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFVs), which evaluate moral cognition in concrete scenarios related to each moral foundation. 

We characterise conflicts in values between these different abstractions of moral evaluation as hypocrisy. We found that both models displayed reasonable consistency within each instrument compared to humans, but they displayed contradictory and hypocritical behaviour when we compared the abstract values present in the MFQ to the evaluation of concrete moral violations of the MFV.

[ PDF ]

© Como citar este artigo:

Nunes, J. L., Almeida, G. F. C. F., Araujo, M. de, & Barbosa, S. D. J. (2024). Are Large Language Models Moral Hypocrites? A Study Based on Moral Foundations. Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 7(1), 1074-1087. https://doi.org/10.1609/aies.v7i1.31704 

Crise climática já condena uma geração inteira a nascer e viver sob condições de calor sem precedentes (artigo / 2025)

 

Artigo para The Conversation Brasil. 

Trechos:

"Em um cenário otimista, se as metas do Acordo de Paris forem cumpridas, a crise climática terá sido resolvida ao final do século 21. Até lá, porém, a crise deve se agravar em meados deste século, quando muito provavelmente ocorrerá um período de “overshoot” (do inglês, ultrapassar). Durante esse período, a temperatura média do planeta deverá estar acima da meta proposta pelo Acordo." 

"Após este período de overshoot - que pode durar de uma a várias décadas -, a temperatura começará a cair até se estabilizar em 1,5°C na virada do século 21 para o século 22."

"A geração que fatalmente viverá suas vidas inteiras dentro dentro deste período de calor sem precedentes na história da humanidade já tem nome: “Geração Overshoot”.

[ artigo completo ]

© Como citar este artigo: 

Araujo, Marcelo de; Fior, Pedro. 2024. "Crise climática já condena uma geração inteira a nascer e viver sob condições de calor sem precedentes". In: The Conversation, 15 de janeiro de 2025. https://theconversation.com/crise-climatica-ja-condena-uma-geracao-inteira-a-nascer-e-viver-sob-condicoes-de-calor-sem-precedentes-247432 

Republicado por:

VEJA

Superinteressante

O Globo

Folha do Norte

Olhar Digital

Ten Years After the Paris Agreement: The Tragedy of the Overshoot Generation (artigo / 2025)

 

The Paris Agreement will be ten years old in 2025. It is a good opportunity, then, to reassess the feasibility of its long-term goals and understand what they mean for the current and for the next generations. 

In a very optimistic scenario, if the goals of the Paris Agreement are achieved, the climate crisis will have been solved by the end of the 21st century. In the meantime, though, the crisis will worsen, as temperature overshoot is very likely to occur by the middle of the century. During the overshoot period, our planet’s average temperature exceeds 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, which is the threshold proposed by the Paris Agreement. At the end of the overshoot period, which could last from one to several decades, the temperature will begin to fall until it eventually stabilises at 1.5°C at the turn of the century. 

Conflicting interests of three different generations are at stake here, namely: (1) the interests of the current generation, (2) those of the overshoot generation, and (3) the interests of the post-overshoot generation. Given the unequal distribution of power across generations, it is likely that the current generation will tend to further their own interest to the detriment of the overshoot generation, even if, in the end, the climate policies enforced by the current generation do indeed fulfil the interests of the post-overshoot generation. The implications for international relations are momentous, as we intend to show in this article.

[ PDF ]

© Como citar este artigo:
Araujo, Marcelo de; Fior, Pedro. 2025. "Ten Years After the Paris Agreement: The Tragedy of the Overshoot Generation". In e-International Relations, 7 Janeiro 2025. https://www.e-ir.info/2025/01/07/ten-years-after-the-paris-agreement-the-tragedy-of-the-overshoot-generation/ 

Futuro e desigualdade: O que é geoengenharia do clima e como ela pode influir na chamada justiça intergeracional (artigo / 2024)

 

Artigo para The Conversation Brasil.

Trechos:

"A catástrofe climática que atingiu o Rio Grande do Sul, entre abril e junho de 2024, precipitou um intenso debate sobre as consequências das mudanças climáticas no Brasil. Muito se fala agora sobre o modo desigual como as mudanças climáticas atingem populações mais vulneráveis."

"Grupos sociais que já eram vítimas de injustiças sociais por conta de graves desigualdades econômicas se veem agora ainda mais fragilizados diante de desastres climáticos. Sem políticas climáticas específicas, problemas de injustiça social tendem a se agravar no Brasil." 

"O que fazer? Que políticas para a promoção da justiça social são necessárias, isso ninguém negaria. O que nem todo mundo percebe, porém, é que desigualdades sociais e econômicas constituem apenas um aspecto das questões de justiça que emergem em decorrência das mudanças climáticas." 

"Desigualdades de poder na relação entre gerações são igualmente importantes. No entanto, pouca atenção tem sido dada a questões de justiça intergeracional nos debates sobre mudanças climáticas no Brasil. Isso é estranho, pois a injustiça intergeracional é tão preocupante quanto a injustiça social."

[ artigo completo ]

© Como citar este artigo: 

Araujo, Marcelo de; Fior, Pedro; Menezes, Pedro. 2024. "Futuro e desigualdade: o que é geoengenharia do clima e como ela pode influir na chamada justiça intergeracional". In The Conversation Brasil, 23 de agosto de 2024. https://theconversation.com/futuro-e-desigualdade-o-que-e-geoengenharia-do-clima-e-como-ela-pode-influir-na-chamada-justica-intergeracional-237119

Republicado por:

Globo. Um Só Planeta

Bios. Ética & Ciência a Serviço da Vida, v.2, n. 11

History repeats itself. Next time as tragedy: The ethics of climate adaptation for the overshoot generation (pre-print article / 2024)

In spite of the widespread recognition that effective climate policies require both mitigation and adaptation, the history of the climate ethics debate shows that the balance between adaptation and mitigation policies has been anything but stable. Although some researchers did indeed support a well-balanced mix of mitigation and adaptation strategies in the Villach (1985) and Toronto (1988) conferences, throughout the 1980s most people favoured adaptation over mitigation. This contrasts with preference for mitigation over adaptation in the 1990s and early 2000s, almost to the point of entirely discrediting the relevance of climate adaptation policies. It was not until the early 2010s that adaptation and mitigation came to be seen as equally important to address climate change. 

In this paper, we argue that by mid-century adaptation policies are likely to be seen, again, as more urgent than mitigation. The reason for this is that most mitigation pathways to the Paris Agreement involve a temperature overshoot, which will constrain the generation living under the overshoot period – the “overshoot generation” – to prioritize adaptation policies as a matter of survival. Even on the assumption that the overshoot generation will emit less than the current and the past generations have emitted, the overshoot generation will have to deploy massively as-yet unproven carbon removal technologies in order to mitigate the unmitigated emissions of the past. We call this process “retroactive mitigation”. We conclude the paper with four policy recommendations for the benefit of the overshoot generation.

[ PDF ]

© Como citar este artigo:
Araujo, Marcelo de and Fior Mota de Andrade, Pedro, "History repeats itself. Next time as tragedy: The ethics of climate adaptation for the overshoot generation" (June 11, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4862217 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4862217.

Are Large Language Models moral hypocrites? A study based on Moral Foundations (pre-print article / 2024)

Large language models (LLMs) have taken centre stage in debates on Artificial Intelligence. Yet there remains a gap in how to assess LLMs' conformity to important human values. In this paper, we investigate whether state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4 and Claude 2.1 (Gemini Pro and LLAMA 2 did not generate valid results) are moral hypocrites. We employ two research instruments based on the Moral Foundations Theory: (i) the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), which investigates which values are considered morally relevant in abstract moral judgements; and (ii) the Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFVs), which evaluate moral cognition in concrete scenarios related to each moral foundation. 

We characterise conflicts in values between these different abstractions of moral evaluation as hypocrisy. We found that both models displayed reasonable consistency within each instrument compared to humans, but they displayed contradictory and hypocritical behaviour when we compared the abstract values 
present in the MFQ to the evaluation of concrete moral violations of the MFV.

[ PDF ]

© Como citar este artigo:
Nunes, José Luiz; Guilherme Almeida; Marcelo de Araujo; Simone D. J. Barbosa. 2024. "Are large language models moral hypocrites? A study based on moral foundations". arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2405.11100.

Exploring the psychology of LLMs’ moral and legal reasoning (article / 2024)

 

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit expert-level performance in tasks across a wide range of different domains. Ethical issues raised by LLMs and the need to align future versions makes it important to know how state of the art models reason about moral and legal issues. In this paper, we employ the methods of experimental psychology to probe into this question. We replicate eight studies from the experimental literature with instances of Google's Gemini Pro, Anthropic's Claude 2.1, OpenAI's GPT-4, and Meta's Llama 2 Chat 70b. 

We find that alignment with human responses shifts from one experiment to another, and that models differ amongst themselves as to their overall alignment, with GPT-4 taking a clear lead over all other models we tested. Nonetheless, even when LLM-generated responses are highly correlated to human responses, there are still systematic differences, with a tendency for models to exaggerate effects that are present among humans, in part by reducing variance. This recommends caution with regards to proposals of replacing human participants with current state-of-the-art LLMs in psychological research and highlights the need for further research about the distinctive aspects of machine psychology.

[ PDF ]

© Como citar este artigo:

Almeida, Guilherme F.C.F., José Luiz Nunes, Neele Engelmann, Alex Wiegmann, and Marcelo de Araujo. 2024. "Exploring the psychology of LLMs’ moral and legal reasoning". Artificial Intelligence 333 (August):104145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2024.104145.

Epistemology goes AI: A study of GPT-3’s capacity to generate consistent and coherent ordered sets of propositions on a Single-Input-Multiple-Outputs Basis (artigo / 2024))

 

The more we rely on digital assistants, online search engines, and AI systems to revise our system of beliefs and increase our body of knowledge, the less we are able to resort to some independent criterion, unrelated to further digital tools, in order to asses the epistemic reliability of the outputs delivered by them. This raises some important questions to epistemology in general and pressing questions to applied to epistemology in particular. 

In this paper, we propose an experimental method for the assessment of GPT-3’s capacity to generate consistent and coherent sets of outputs. When several outputs to one and the same input are very repetitive they tend to be consistent with each other, that is they do not contradict each other. But consistency does not make the set of outputs as a whole more informative than the outputs considered individually. We argue that the less informative a set of outputs is, the less coherent it is. We establish a conceptual distinction between consistency and coherence in the light of what some epistemologists refer to as a coherence theories of truth and justification. 

While much attention has been given to GPT-3’s capacity to produce internally coherent individual outputs, we argue, instead, that more attention should be given to its capacity to produce consistent and coherent outputs generated on a single-input-multiple-outputs basis.

[ PDF ]

© Como citar este artigo:

de Araujo, M., de Almeida, G. & Nunes, J.L. (2024) "Epistemology goes AI: A study of GPT-3’s capacity to generate consistent and coherent ordered sets of propositions on a single-input-multiple-outputs basis". Minds & Machines 34, 2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-024-09660-6 

Promoting science communication for the purpose of pandemic preparedness and response: An assessment of the relevance of pre-COVID pandemic “early warnings” (artigo / 2024)

Given the abrupt global disruption caused by SARS-CoV-2, one might think that the COVID pandemic was an unpredictable event. But in the years leading up to the emergence of the COVID pandemic, several documents had already been warning of the increasing occurrences of new disease outbreaks with pandemic potential and lack of corresponding policies to promote pandemic preparedness and response. 

In this article, we call these documents “early warnings”. We argue that a survey of early warnings can help science communicators to promote the public understanding of evidence-based pandemic preparedness and response policies at local or international level. Our proposal differs from other approaches to pandemic preparedness and response in that it highlights the relevance of documents published before the COVID outbreak. We show that the early warnings did not become outdated after the COVID outbreak, but, rather, that they are even more pressing now.

© Como citar este artigo:

Araujo, Marcelo de and Costa, Daniel de Vasconcelos. "Promoting Science Communication for the Purpose of Pandemic Preparedness and Response: An Assessment of the Relevance of Pre-COVID Pandemic early warnings" Human Affairs, vol. 34, no. 2, 2024, pp. 269-294. https://doi.org/10.1515/humaff-2023-0083

Urgentes e necessárias, políticas de adaptação climática enfrentam dilemas éticos no Brasil e no mundo (artigo / 2024)

 

Artigo para The Conversation Brasil.

Trechos:

"A solução para se conter o aquecimento global é a mesma para todos os países: reduzir as emissões de gases de efeito estufa (GEE), especialmente o dióxido de carbono (CO2). Esta é uma medida de mitigação. Mas ainda que todos os países resolvessem implementar imediatamente políticas de mitigação radicais, a crise climática não seria resolvida de um dia para o outro. Para se lidar com as mudanças climáticas são necessárias também políticas de adaptação." 

"Diferentemente das políticas para mitigação, as estratégias de adaptação devem ser específicas para cada cenário regional. Isto significa que diferentes países e regiões exigirão políticas de adaptação distintas. Por exemplo, no contexto brasileiro, a escassez de água na Região Nordeste pode contrastar diretamente com o excesso de chuvas na Serra Fluminense, resultando na necessidade de ações adaptativas específicas para cada realidade." 

"Da interação entre políticas de adaptação e políticas de mitigação surgem dilemas éticos que ainda não foram devidamente discutidos no Brasil."

[ artigo ]

© Como citar este artigo:
Araujo, Marcelo de; Fior, Pedro. 2024. "Urgentes e necessárias, políticas de adaptação climática enfrentam dilemas éticos no Brasil e no mundo". In The Conversation Brasil, 5 de fevereiro de 2024. https://theconversation.com/urgentes-e-necessarias-politicas-de-adaptacao-climatica-enfrentam-dilemas-eticos-no-brasil-e-no-mundo-222130