Utilitarians believe that a morally right action at any given moment is the action that will have the greatest net increase in happiness of all other possible actions. They believe this principle to apply to all sentient beings or in other words beings that feel emotion or sensation. With this being said, a utilitarian would find that taking a long fight across the United States would be immoral because it would decrease the happiness within the community or population, this applies to non-human animals as well. In the New York Times article it states that an average American generates 19 tons of carbon dioxide per year with much of that amount coming from airline flights (Rosenthal). These carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming. Also with this amount of carbon emissions, it also causes extreme weather changes in the environment as well as potentially harmful or hazardous health effects for people (Discovery). As for the effect this will have on non-human animals, these large amounts of carbon emissions contribute greatly to the lose of many ecosystems. A utilitarian would look at this situation and see that this would not increase the happiness of human and nonhuman animals. Thus a moral action would be to not travel by air but rather take other methods that would produce the least amount of carbon emissions, for example carpooling, though still produces carbon emissions it is less than the amount produced by air travel thus affecting the environment less and producing a greater net increase in happiness.
A Kantian would find this situation immoral because carbon emissions affect humans directly as well as indirectly and they believe that human beings are valuable and occupy a special place in creation (Rachels 136). As for non human animals a kantian would not find the effect of the large amounts of carbon emissions to be immoral because to them