2025-26 Kim Ethics Institute Annual Theme Pilot: Heat

Extreme heat: an ethical problem for our time

The climate crisis is an existential threat that demands technical, political, financial, legal, and cultural responses. Hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts capture media and popular attention, and heatwaves occasionally make the headlines–particularly when they turn deadly. But framing heat waves as events, as an episodic rather than chronic threat, misses the relentlessness with which heat impacts physical and mental health, learning and cognition, productivity, public safety, social cohesion, energy consumption, and infrastructure. The lived experience of heat is highly stratified: the poor feel its effects most acutely. Heat disproportionately affects workers in agriculture, construction, waste management, and other low-wage outdoor jobs as well as transit-dependent households, children in schools without air conditioning, impoverished and isolated elders, people with disabilities, and people experiencing homelessness. The burden of extreme heat reflects economic and political injustices that, in the words of social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger, “structure chances” for surviving and thriving, for social and financial mobility, and for engaged citizenship and political participation.

Making sense of extreme heat–its uneven effects and the activities that contribute to global warming–requires explicit ethical frameworks to motivate and guide institutional, individual, collective, and civic action. Critically, heat raises ethical questions around resource allocation. However, these questions do not address the full range of the emerging, intensifying ethical challenges. Humans will be forced to reckon on multiple scales with how to build communities that shield those most vulnerable from the suffering and potential death associated with heat. Political philosophers, environmental ethicists, and critical scholars of public health have long understood marginalized communities’ experiences as harbingers of generalized threats to human futures. Guided by Walter Rodney’s practice of “grounding,” we seek to listen, learn, and work in solidarity with precarious neighbors toward the elaboration of frameworks for the difficult policy choices and actions necessary to secure our collective flourishing.

Framing questions

What can local government, civil society, private sector actors, and communities do to mitigate the effects of warming? Beyond efforts to decrease carbon emissions, what steps can be taken to reduce heat’s impacts on our livelihoods and life expectancies, including actions beyond scientific innovation that focus on a positive collective future?
What ethical imperatives and values should guide our actions? How are these ethical imperatives shaped by specific historical-political settings?
How do we come to see our daily response to the heat-related distress around us as essential to our conception of ethics?
How can we connect quantitative climate science and the lived experience of extreme heat to characterize and communicate about extreme heat as an ethical imperative in ways that lead to action?
How can collaborative work with heat-impacted communities contribute to the articulation of ethical principles and guidelines for policy making, institutional action, and individual moral commitments to address heat?

Activities

A year-long focus on heat will engage diverse stakeholders in sustained conversation about broader ethical concerns surrounding climate change by focusing attention on one of its most pernicious and least-understood dimensions. Programming comprising speakers, workshops, internships, a community-engaged course, and field-based experiences will explore why and how we must confront the problem of rising temperatures and extreme heat events on multiple scales. Partners in this conversation include academics, public scholars, policy-makers, planners, artists, activists, designers, workers, managers, organizers, and businesses. Conversations and activities will build on existing partnerships in Philadelphia, nurture new collaborative efforts with institutions and community organizations, and create opportunities to compare practices and ethical frameworks both nationally and transnationally.