Climate Finance As Moral Infrastructure: Cultural Values, Intergenerational Justice, And The Ethics Of Sustainable Capital

Abstract

The proposed paper understands climate finance as morally framing an economic and policy-making mechanism, instead of viewing it as an economic and policy-making mechanism, the paper presents climate finance as a moral infrastructure a normative system that codifies cultural values, redistributes ecological responsibility between generations, and justifies capital allocation by ethical claims of justice. Based on environmental ethics, sustainable finance theory, and intergenerational justice approaches, the paper proposes that climate finance tools (green bonds, ESG-linked capital, climate adaptation funds, carbon markets) are never neutral financial instruments, but value-laden cultural architectures that can be used to operationalise moral responsibilities in terms of pricing, investment narratives and institutional design. Cultural belief systems influence the ways societies define climate damage, economic duty, and responsibility in the future, as well as, preference to pay in mitigation, promotion of transition capital, and resisting high-risk extractive funding. The article entrenches the concept of intergenerational justice as a quantifiable moral agreement in climate capital that present inability to finance it is due to the lack of alignment between capital velocity and moral responsibility. It plots moral finance stress in three dimensions: (1) the cultural legitimacy of climate capital, (2) generational ecological debt distributions, and (3) the moral sustainability of sustainable investment discourses. The study employs a conceptual, normative research approach of secondary insight based on literature-based ethical validation, moral-economic logic structuring and policy-ethics mapping over equation-intensive modelling. The paper is a contribution to a new finance-ethics interface, suggesting that climate finance needs to be analysed not just in terms of returns, but in terms of moral carrying capacity its capacity to entrench justice without disrupting social equity, ecological integrity or future access to capital.