This PhD project investigates how the energy transition is shaped by decisions that involve unavoidable trade-offs — what engineers often describe as burden shifts and what philosophers call moral dilemmas. For example, one solution may reduce greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously creating new problems for biodiversity, public health, or social rights. Such trade-offs can hinder progress toward technological and policy solutions, as they generate uncertainty, confusion, and controversy about which collective path to take.
The need for critical minerals illustrates this clearly. Minerals such as cobalt, lithium, rare earths, and others are essential for producing batteries, wind turbines, and solar cells. Yet their extraction often entails severe environmental and social consequences. The ongoing debate about deep-sea mining is a particularly striking and controversial example: should society open up a new resource frontier in previously untouched ecosystems, or continue importing minerals from terrestrial mines that often involve major harm to people and the environment? Either choice involves values that cannot easily be compared or weighed against one another.
The project starts from the idea that many of these conflicts arise from a mix of empirical questions (what do we know about the actual consequences?) and normative questions (which values should weigh more heavily?). To manage the complexity and incomparability it combines tools from systems analysis — such as material flow analysis, scenario modeling, and causal mapping — with perspectives from moral philosophy on incommensurability, moral dilemmas, and theories of justice. The aim is to develop a systems-oriented approach to ethical analysis: a framework that makes trade-offs more transparent, and clarifies whether disagreements stem primarily from differences in factual understanding or in value prioritization.
In this way, the project seeks to contribute to:
- Stronger dialogue across disciplines, by bridging technical assessments and ethical reasoning.
- More constructive engagement between policymakers, industry, and civil society.
- A clearer link between ethical theory and real-world consequences in the energy transition.
- A useful methdology for moving forward debates about the ethical aspects of critical minerals
Ultimately, the project aims to support more responsible and effective decision-making in a time when the urgency of action must be balanced against the protection of nature, society, and future generations.
