The Ethical Analysis On Low Carbon Consumption Concept

With the rapid development of economy and society, consumption has become an important force promoting economic development, and it directly affects the direction, degree and level of a nation’s and a region’s development. One can safely conclude that there is no consumption, there is no economic development. In the past hundred years, because of the influence of industrial civilization, people had advocated such consumption concept as high pollution, high emission and high consumption, which had not only led to global warming, excessive energy consumption, energy crisis, etc., but also caused ethnical problem, the intra-generational and intergenerational unfairness. Then the relationship between man and nature was severely damaged. Especially the fourth assessment report on global climate change research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests:besides natural factors, global warming is mainly due to human activities, especially closely related to the degree of carbon dioxide emission by human activities. Facing the challenges of global warming, the major developed countries and regions in the world had reached an agreement on low carbon economy developing:with economic development mode transforming from "High Carbon" to "Low Carbon" as an opportunity, these countries began to develop a Low Carbon economy and implement Low Carbon consumption concept. China is a responsible country, so we should also do that.Consumption is not only an economic problem, but also an important ethical issue. This article will analyze Low Carbon Consuption Concept from the ethical perspective. Firstly, it explores the theoretical and practical background, connotation and essence of Low Carbon Consumption Concept, and then it introduces the six characteristics of Low Carbon consumption concept:sustainability, harmony, responsibility, rationality, saving and moderation. Secondly, it gives a moral evaluation of Low Carbon consumption concept from the angels of obligation theory, the purpose theory and the moral theory respectively, which shows the Low Carbon consumption concept is ethical and the most appropriate for current human. But there are moral dilemmas between ethics and benefits, others and oneself, human and nature during the implementation of Low Carbon consumption concept. Lastly, according to the moral dilemmas, this article puts forward ethical countermeasures of implementing Low Carbon consumption concept—to establish a "harmonious coexistence" environmental ethics by creating a good public atmosphere and giving full play to the government’s guiding role, to form the moral behavior of "contracted" consumption by carrying forward Chinese traditional virtue of diligence and learning from westerners’ reasonal consumption, to regulate people’s consumption behavior by establishing such ethnical standards as "intra-generational consumption justice","intergenerational consumption justice","the harmonious development between man and nature".This article tries to make beneficial positive contribution to the ethnical research of Low Carbon consumption idea by researching, analyzing, synthesizing and summarizing.