Happy Earth Day!

From its inception, Earth Day has been a political event, designed to "raise awareness" about environmental issues and encourage us to be more responsible stewards of our planet. A lot of libertarians bristle at this sort of thing, and perhaps understandably so -- after all, most of the environmentalist rhetoric out there comes tied to demands for increasingly centralized "social" control of the natural resources we need to lead our lives. As many have pointed out, freedom in the absence of the freedom to make use of material goods is not freedom in any effective sense. And it is freedom that allows us to prosper and flourish, not simply existence in a rich natural environment. Jan Narveson put it well in his essay, "Collective Responsibility":

...the idea of collective ownership of the earth is, really, a myth, a dish of romantic political nonsense. And like almost all romantic myths when they are politicized, the results of taking it seriously are inevitably evil. Some general story of the Lockean stripe is all there is, because it is all there can be. Individual people pick fruit from individual trees, dig up particular patches of soil, kill particular deer, grow particular pigs, and the rest of it – up to and including inventing the digital computer and putting on productions of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs. That is how mankind is fed, and clothed, and entertained, because there is no other way. To "collectivize" agriculture is not, because it cannot be, to cause the plants to grow in some other way; it is, instead, to force people to work differently: to work under the direction of others who need pay no attention to the worker’s interests, and to disconnect those workers from the incentives and disincentives that have always impelled people to work. It is not surprising that it does not work very well, but it is important to appreciate what it is and that it cannot be what it appears to pretend to be.

But in this post, I want to briefly consider another side of the issue, which some libertarians seem to overlook in their antipathy towards collectivist environmentalist propaganda. Just as we need freedom in order to plan and lead our separate lives, and just as this freedom is essential to our wellbeing so that taking it away for the sake of the natural world would be a worrisome proposition, so too do we depend on the natural world to make our lives rich and worthwhile. If the freedom to use resources is essential for our effective liberty, it's because resources are such critical elements in the production of our material lives.

David Schmidtz writes, in his essay "On the Institution of Property":

Original appropriation diminishes the stock of what can be originally appropriated, at least in the case of land, but that is not the same thing as diminishing the stock of what can be owned. On the contrary, in taking control of resources and thereby removing those particular resources from the stock of goods that can be acquired by original appropriation, people typically generate massive increases in the stock of goods that can be acquired by trade. The lesson is that appropriation typically is not a zero-sum game. It normally is a positive sum game. As Locke himself stressed, it creates the possibility of mutual benefit on a massive scale. It creates the possibility of society as a cooperative venture.

And Dr. Schmidtz is absolutely right. But so too can we waste resources unnecessarily, and this impoverishes us all. The view that celebrates humanity's capacity to transform the natural environment in awe-inspiringly productive ways must be understood against the backdrop of an appreciation for the role that the environment plays in all of our lives. And it's that backdrop that seems to be missing from so many libertarians' worldviews. (Of course, I don't mean that Dr. Schmidtz is guilty of this, for obvious reasons.)

Another troubling phenomenon that I've observed is a seeming lack of appreciation from libertarians for the value of the natural environment itself as a beautiful and enriching thing in itself. This vulgar-Randian "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline"-times-one hundred attitude is embodied in George Reisman's (I think incorrect) intepretation of Menger in his essay, "Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises":

The goods-character of natural resources, according to Menger, is created by man, when he discovers the properties they possess that render them capable of satisfying human needs and when he gains command over them sufficient to direct them to the satisfaction of human needs.

He continues:

...what nature has provided is matter and energy--matter in the form of all the chemical elements both known and as yet unknown, and energy, in all its various forms. I call this contribution of nature "the natural resources provided by nature.

Consider this in light of a different view from Aldo Leopold:

Only those able to see the pageant of evolution can be expected to value its theater, the wilderness, or its outstanding achievement, the grizzly. But if education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking.

This, I think, is absolutely right. Our natural world is not just matter and energy; it is a beautiful and astonishing treasure that we must treat with the care that it deserves. And if libertarians forget this, then it's everyone's loss. So on this Earth Day, let's forget for a moment about the vulgar collectivism that so often comes from the environmentalist movement, and instead take the day to look around and appreciate the incredible gift that has been our birthright: the Earth and its natural environment, in all of its diversity and elegance. We can be libertarians and environmentalists at the same time -- and to be honest, I think we should be.

Left-Libertarianism Is Not Communism: A Reply to Joel Davis

It appears that over at Reddit.com, a fellow going by sblinn decided to share one of my previous posts on resource-egalitarian left-libertarianism with the rest of the Reddit community.  So a big thank you goes out to sblinn for checking out my work and posting it over there!  I received some criticism, though, in the comments section of the listing by someone named Joel Davis, who appears to be a communist [edit: later in the comments thread, Joel claims not to be one, so I'm not entirely sure what to make of the fact that he defends points he calls communist throughout his reply...].  Joel clearly put a lot of time and effort into his comments, and so I wanted to try to think about some of his points here.

First, Joel wonders:

Isn't "property" itself a system? Can't we solve this "problem" by just choosing not to enforce property, thus securing egalitarian conditions through a net decrease in coercive authority?

I do agree that property -- or more specifically, any society's set of conventions for recognizing claims to possessions and adjudicating disputes arising over those claims -- is a system of social organization, and that such a system could be dispensed with if a society so chose.   And I can see why Joel would conceive of such a move as involving a net decrease in coercive authority.  After all, by abandoning a set of social conventions for dealing with property claims, we would seem to dissolve the mechanisms by which those conventions were enforced, and also the mechanisms by which those kinds of conventions were formed in the first place.  And that seems like a curtailment of a certain kind of authority.

But it's less clear to me why Joel thinks that such a move would bring us closer to egalitarian ideals.  It seems like in the absence of a property system, there would either arise a set of social relationships that were substantially similar to a sort of property system, except without any unifying set of conventions (since that would seem to be a property system itself), or else there would be a system in which claims over possessions were not widely recognized and protected.  

In the former case, we seem to wind up right where we started.  I don't see why having a pluralistic system of property rights would militate against inequality any more than a more universal system of property rights would.  To defend this, one would only need to point out that whatever possession-respecting manner in which some members of a pluralistic society related to each other with egalitarian results could simply be practiced on a society-wide scale.  And by doing so, we could coherently claim to have instituted a sort of property system, though it would likely need to be different than the sort of property system we generally see in practice today.

In the latter case, where there is no generally accepted set of cultural institutions regarding possessions, and where individuals have not created a similar -- though pluralistic -- system to put in the place of one, it would seem like the only remaining alternative would be to not recognize claims to property at all (since doing so would seem to involve one of the two possibilities already discussed).  But such a system would be anarchy in the pejorative sense of the word.  People would simply do whatever they wanted with other people's property -- remember, if they restrained themselves from this, we would be dealing of an example of the sort discussed in the previous paragraph.  If this would bring about egalitarian consequences, it would only be in the sense of mutual destruction.  But more likely, egalitarians would be angered to find that the strongest could exercise their power over the weakest, generating a different sort of inequality, but inequality nonetheless.

So I really can't see why Joel would think that the abandonment of property altogether would tend towards egalitarian goals.  It must be noted here that I have spoken of property in a broad sense, and many people have historically talked about the elimination of capitalistic standards of property as if they were talking about dispensing with property altogether.  But presumably, there would still be a desire to kick trespassers out of one's house in the communist utopia, and to have the trespasser seen as the morally faulty party in such a scenario.  And one simply can't make sense of this besides through an appeal to something like a right relating to one's own house, which would be a sort of property right.  A property right of a different kind, to be sure, than the one which enables the capitalist to bequeath access and title to the means of production to his children, but a property right nonetheless.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the latter sort of system would not be something that left-libertarians would want to endorse, at least as far as I can discern.  Most left-libertarians seem to be in favor of property rights of some kind, though they might be open to the second sort of set-up in which there is no property system as such, but rather a kind of pluralistic, decentralized approach to dealing with these rights.  And the reason it makes sense that left-libertarians favor these rights is that left-libertarians believe in self-ownership partly because they want people to have the freedom to "do what they want with their own."  Hence Peter Vallentyne began his entry on Libertarianism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy with the claim that "Libertarianism holds that agents initially fully own themselves and have moral powers to acquire property rights in external things under certain conditions." So in summary, I agree that one can abandon a property system if one wants, but I don't see why this would tend to encourage equality, and unless the alternative to a property system were substantially like a property system, I don't think a left-libertarian would want to endorse it (remember, my post was about left-libertarians, and so might not respond to other sorts of views).

Joel's next substantive point is this:

It (obviously) doesn't follow that just because there will be some inequality that we need to endorse a system of property as it exists today.

And this is undoubtedly true. I certainly didn't mean to suggest in anything that I said that the only alternative to the left-libertarian views I challenged in my other post involved a wholesale endorsement of today's property norms.  Even the most right-wing libertarian views don't entail that.  So to the extent to which my previous post suggested anything like this, I apologize for the confusion.

The point I had been trying to make starts with the claim that with an egalitarian initial allocation of resources, differences in luck, effort, and ability would eventually bring it about that some individuals would end up with more than others.  This would not be the case because of any defect in the initial distribution's fulfillment of egalitarian ideals, but rather because it would simply be impossible to engineer an egalitarian distribution such that the tendencies towards movements away from equality would be preempted indefinitely.  This is not a point that I introduced, and is accepted by both right-libertarians like Nozick and egalitarians like Cohen.  I didn't think it particularly necessary to defend it in depth because...well...very few people disagree with it.  But I again apologize if I didn't articulate the point as clearly as I might have.

This is important in the context of our discussion of left-libertarianism because the reason that the left-libertarian wants the egalitarian distribution of resources in the first place is because she wants there to be equality without the kinds of coercive redistributions that I and others have claimed would be necessary to preserve equality, even with an egalitarian initial distribution.  That the left-libertarians in question want this can be easily evidenced by Michael Otsuka's somewhat recent choice to name his excellent book Libertarianism Without Inequality, and I think you'd be rather hard pressed to find one of these people who would disagree with that characterization.  Accordingly, my argument is that if it isn't true that an egalitarian initial distribution would ensure equality over the long term, then the left-libertarian argument would essentially just be an objection to the mere fact that there was not an egalitarian intial distribution -- that is, that a society did not have the right kind of history.

Joel's next point is:

...if [by "self-ownership"] you mean control of your body, then most communists would agree with that as a human right. If you mean it (as is often the cause) already-bundled with private property, then they would disagree, but only for the propertarian aspects. If "property" isn't legitimate in the first place, then denial of it can't be an infringement on self-ownership. Just like a person who dies can't claim that the still living "stole time" from him. The time wasn't his, he has no natural or moral claim to it, and he's just being an obstinate spook.

The problem here is that what communists think is entirely beside the point.  A left-libertarian is not a communist, and vice-versa.  So it may be true that one can save self-ownership by making it purely formal, as Joel suggests, but this option is not open to the left-libertarian, and so this point is a non-sequitar.

This applies to a number of Joel's next points, which I will not address here.  The problem appears to be that Joel thinks that I was trying to engage with communists, when I simply was not.  The article was about a very particular approach to political philosophy, and I think I made that very clear.

A point that I will address, however, stemmed from my claim that there would not be any objectively acceptable way to implement the left-libertarians' principles even if we accepted them at face value.  Joel responded that all moral codes suffer from the same problem of non-objectivity.  But I think that Joel misunderstood my point.  I didn't mean that the left-libertarians' moral principles were not objectively true, and that this was a problem for them.  If I had argued this, then Joel's criticism would be a good one.  

But my argument was that even if we grant the left-libertarians their point, and accept that what one needs to do is perform an egalitarian distribution of resources that ensures that everyone gets their fair share, the left-libertarian would have no way to carry out such a plan.  It simply doesn't make sense.  Accordingly, they'd need to construct a somewhat ad hoc system to approximate their ideal.  And this would be fine except for the fact that their approach to political philosophy is a rationalist one, and not an instrumentalist one.  This, I think, creates a tension for their view, since on one hand they seem to want to set the conditions that would allow for an impartially legitimate society, but on the other hand it wouldn't be strictly possible to determine how to set those conditions.  That seems like it's a problem to me.

I guess having gone through this, all I can say is that I don't really know what Joel was trying to accomplish here.  He very rightly showed that my critique of left-libertarianism is not a very critique of communism, and basically tried to show that my points of contention with the former view can be avoided by taking a position incompatible with that view.  And in some cases, I haven't disagreed.  But I don't really 

[Hmm...I'm not sure what happened here, but it looks like the end of this post got chopped off. Oops!]

On the "Other" Kind of Left-Libertarianism

Update: See the bottom of this post for further discussion.

So earlier today I wrote a post about why consider myself a left-libertarian if I disagree with the views of some of the most prominent thinkers who call themselves left-libertarians, and a fellow named Dan Waxman asked:

I'd be interested to know your rationale for rejecting the Steiner/Otsuka/Vallentyne style left-libertarianism (i.e. self-ownership coupled with a very stringently egalitarian proviso regarding the initial acquisition of external worldly resources).

I feel as though temperamentally I am in a similar position to you - I also have a problem with oppression and mistreatment, and I think that in a libertarian society - including (especially?) the ones which reject common world ownership - these evils would be far less common. But I don't think I have worked out a satisfactory answer to my own conflicted intuitions about the initial acquisition of property, and, to be perfectly honest, I don't think it helps that the literature is notably thin on actual *arguments* either way. At most we get a bald assertion that the earth is originally unowned from Nozick and co, then we get people like Cohen and Otsuka complaining that this assertion is 'blithe,' without putting forward any argument whatsoever for their alternative! So like I said, I'd be interested to know your thoughts, especially if you've come to some kind of stable reflective equilibrium on the issue

I think that's a great question, and want to take the opportunity to post a few thoughts in rejection of the resource-egalitarian liberarian point of view (though in actuality, it is not a single point of view; these objections may variously miss the mark when applied to specific views which preempt them). I might try to flesh these objections out a little bit in a future post (or series of posts), but for now I just want to put them out there. If they don't make sense, I'll be happy to try to clarify. I'm going to put off for now the task of trying to justify a particular alternative view of property rights, and confine this post to attacking this view. Without further ado:

1) Freedom disrupts patterns. The point of an egalitarian distribution would be to secure liberty for all, but it seems clear that any kind of real, effective liberty would produce inequality. In order to maintain equality, constant coercive redistribution would be needed. If the resource-left-libertarian is truly committed to liberty and effective self-ownership, then she must countenance the inequality that would result even if there was at one point an egalitarian distribution of resources. This was Cohen's argument in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality. But if the resource-egalitarian libertarian is comfortable with this, then her position seems to reduce to some claim that the thing that's wrong with our property regime is merely that it doesn't have the right sort of history. Is this a reasonable basis for a political philosophy? Is the problem with our society really just that a hundred years ago, things weren't alotted equally? I just don't think there's anything there.

2) Society is not like a situation where everyone comes to a negotiating table to claim their fair share, or where we all move away from a starting point to pursue our individual lives. The system of resource ownership is a dynamic and evolving system, with new participants coming and going all the time and different allocations of resources every day. If we wanted to ensure that everyone got a particular share of natural resources (regardless of what rule is used to determine what kind of share it would be), and we refused to engage in coercive redistribution (as this would seem to impinge upon effective self-ownership), we would seemingly need to have coercive enforcement of use limits. But these measures would require us to make projections about the future which we simply cannot make, and to make assumptions about the availability of natural resources which can't be based on anything besides speculation. The resource-egalitarian libertarians want this to be a rationalistic framework, but there's simply no objective way to do anything like this. Do we save a bunch of the gold for future generations? How much? Are we sure that someday people won't be able to make gold out of other stuff, making our non-use unnecessary?

3) Value and wellbeing do not come from access to natural resources. The value of natural resources is subjective, changes over time with different circumstances, and is not directly related to the value of the things that are made with those resources. Treating them like a commodity with timeless value doesn't make sense. And if they lack this special kind of status, then it's not clear why we should focus our entire political theory on them as if a proper way of dealing with them would fix all of our problems.

4) The original objection to the appropriation of the natural commons was based on the idea that natural resources provided the means for production. In today's society, the means of production are increasingly detached from natural resources. The lack of access to the means of production is not a lack of access to natural resources, and most people complaining about the former would look at you pretty strangely if you "solved their problem" by dealing with the latter. If lack of access to the means of production is a problem, then the solution will not be found in an egalitarian resource distribution.

There are probably other reasons I could offer in favor of rejecting this view, but I think those four will do for now. Hopefully that helps! [Note: I apologize for the sloppiness of this post; I wrote it right after I finished work...can you tell? If something is confusing in an interesting way, please let me know.]

Update:

Please see Joel Davis' critique of this post, as well as my reply.

Why Do I Call Myself a Left-Libertarian?

I received a very fair comment on my previous post, "On Distributive Justice and the Indeterminacy of the Market Process," from an anonymous reader, asking:

Reading this post, I am quite baffled why you name your blogspot libertarian-left.blogspot.com. How can you say that you work in the Left Libertarian tradition, when in this post you completely reject the ideas of all the most famous Left-Libertarians including Henry George and Steiner and Otsuka and Vallentyne? How can you say that you "attempt to incorporate concepts such as equality, opportunity, and need into my framework", when this post seems to be arguing that they cannot be incorporated to your libertarian framework? I cannot find aything leftist about your ideas. Exactly what distinguishes your beliefs from Right-Libertarianism pure and simple?

I thought it might be worthwhile to give that question a thorough answer, since I anticipate that it may come up again, and others might find this answer interesting.

There is definitely a tension within the world of libertarian thought regarding the meaning of the term, "left-libertarianism." One school of thought identifying itself as left-libertarian describes its ideas as upholding the libertarian conception of self-ownership while insisting that a just society would distribute worldly resources according to some egalitarian principle. This is the tradition into which writers like George, Steiner, Otsuka, and Vallentyne fall. As you rightly notice, I am clearly not a part of this camp [Update: I discuss this position in this post].

The other interpretation of the term "left-libertarian" has been offered by Roderick Long, building on Rothbard's (and later Samuel Konkin's) idea that libertarianism is more naturally allied with the political left than with the right. Dr. Long gives a really good explanation of his views in this interview. And as you might have gleaned from my description of this site on the sidebar, I basically agree with his approach.

I've been very conflicted about using the term "left-libertarian" to describe myself, as it's unquestionably true that the first meaning is more widely acknowledged and used today, and I'm not a big fan of inherently confusing terminology. But I'll offer two points in my defense. The first is simply that I chose the name for my website before realizing how deeply I disagreed with the folks in the Steiner camp, and the status quo has thus become somewhat entrenched.

But secondly, and more substantively, I don't think that left-libertarianism of the Steiner mold has much to do with leftism, except to the extent that it has something to do with egalitarianism and, in some sense, it views a non-egalitarian property regime as oppressive. The bread and butter of the left, I think, has always been to root out oppression and mistreatment in society and demand its rectification. And that has been my concern as well, as I search for different ways to think about the respect to which people are due and build ideas about living together that try to embody that respect.

Now, an important part of the commenter's question was this:

How can you say that you "attempt to incorporate concepts such as equality, opportunity, and need into my framework", when this post seems to be arguing that they cannot be incorporated to your libertarian framework?

This, I think, is a somewhat unfair reading of my earlier post. In the last section of that post, I wrote:

Perhaps it is the case that, as individuals who appreciate each other's value and moral worth, we owe it to each other to lend a helping hand in times of need. And if we did not lift a finger when others were facing crisis, that we would be failing to uphold our duties as morally responsible people. To say this implies no injustice in the market system which brings about unfortunate outcomes, nor does it imply that somehow we need to find some point in the past to serve as a "source" of injustice. Rather, we can think of distributive injustice as a recognition that in a community or society where so many live free of need, there are individuals among us who struggle to survive, without so much as a helping hand from their neighbors.

Of course, the mere existence of need and want surely cannot entail the presence of injustice. The same respect for the value of life which commands us to care about our neighbors also commands us to recognize the importance of living our own lives according to our own goals and desires. Earlier, we noted an idea from F.A. Hayek that coercion is evil because it "eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another." We suggested that the tragic need which drives individuals into exploitative labor relationships is evil for this reason as well. But we must now acknowledge that the attitude which places on the successful individual the burden of caring after the world's needy is evil for exactly the same reason (I discussed this in a previous post). Addressing one evil through the introduction of another seems like a questionable way to proceed. But it does not seem that either extreme -- ignoring the suffering of others or sacrificing oneself for the good of those in need -- is the correct one. What is needed is a balance between the two.

In saying this, I had hoped to address what I felt to be some of the important and relevant concerns that people on the left might have had in response to my argument. And I certainly didn't mean to suggest that other leftist concerns (e.g., about the proper social response to inequality, oppression, lack of opportunity, etc.) "cannot be incorporated into my libertarian framework."

My point was that these concerns cannot coherently be levelled as a moral objection to the market process itself. It was my hope to convey that a just society would not simply accept the often arbitrary, sometimes lamentable, and always sub-utopian products of the market process, insensitively brushing the unpleasant bits under the rug. The market process, I think, is just, and cannot be condemned wholesale because of its inherent potential to generate undesirable outcomes for some people. But I think that there is more to living together than the market process, and that the concerns of the left are valid reasons for searching for solutions outside of the typical consumeristic market paradigm. That, I think, is where the "left" in my "left-libertarianism" comes through.

Who Said Anything About Legitimacy?: A Long-Winded Reply to Brainpolice and Michael

Over on the Polycentric Order blog, Brainpolice has written up a response to my post rejecting the simple argument that taxation is theft. In the comments section of that earlier post, a fellow identifying himself as "Michaek" (which I assume to be a typo-ed "Michael") also left some remarks in disagreement with my arguments. I wanted to offer some thoughts on what both had to say, and will do so in this post. There are a number of themes running through the commenters' responses, and I will do my best to isolate them and address them separately. They are: a) There is a double standard problem in supposing that government officials can justify doing things which no ordinary person would be justified in doing; b) My goal is to offer a blanket justification for the State; c) I do not offer a coherent account of why a government should have any claim to its territory; and d) By arguing that the government has some claim to its territory, I am presupposing that the government is a legitimate institution without offering a compelling reason for thinking this.

I. There is a double standard problem in supposing that government officials can justify doing things which no ordinary person would be justified in doing

Brainpolice started his reply with the idea that our commonsense moral beliefs would lead us to condemn many of the kinds of things done by state agents if they were done by ordinary citizens. But as collective decision making power is centralized and expanded, people come to embrace a double standard between themselves and state officials. This leads them to condone actions on the part of state officials which they would decry if performed by ordinary citizens. Brainpolice therefore explains that the libertarian position is that state officials do not gain new rights as a result of their positions, and that if these rights are to be ascribed to them, the burden of proof should be on those who are invoking new rights, and not on those who simply insist that our commonsense ethical beliefs be universally applied. He writes:

...given certain nearly universal social norms (such as the shunning of murder, theft, arson, rape and kidnapping), if one wants to be consistant with those norms then one must aknowledge the degree to which the state contradicts those norms...

Now, one possible response is discussed by Lester Hunt in his essay, "Why the State Needs to be Justified":

Of course, someone might say, there is a sense in which our intuitive, pre-theoretical use of our moral ideas clashes with our intuitive, pre-theoretical application of our political ideas. When I think about myself, my next-door neighbor, or my uncle Harry, I think that, whenever any one of us promotes his or her goals by using coercion against someone who is not bothering anybody, we are doing wrong. When I think about a tax collector or an immigration official, I think pre-reflectively that they are right to go after the tax-evader and the Mexican immigrant, even though the tax evader and the Mexican are not bothering anybody. I think of the immigration official as if they were on a different plane from me, from my neighbor, from my uncle Harry. But why isn’t each way of thinking perfectly okay, on its own plane?

Like Hunt, I do not accept this kind of argument. So up front, here it is: I acknowledge that in many instances, the agents of the state do things which are completely impermissible by any coherent moral standard. The fact that they often get a pass simply because of their position is inexcusable. I don't think anything I said in my earlier post suggests that I believe that government officials deserve different kinds of treatment, but it bears repeating that moral standards are based on treating people the way that they deserve, and they don't deserve anything less when the person on the other end is wearing a uniform.

II. My goal is to provide a blanket justification for the State

This next point appears in both commenters' counterarguments, and focuses on the idea that I'm somehow trying to offer a blanket justification for "the State" or "a State." But there's an important point to be made here: I'm not trying to "prove" that any State is legitimate. What I'm saying is that in communities where the central decision-making apparatus is widely embraced, and where libertarians have moved into those communities by their own volition, it's not clear that they have a very strong case to back up their claims that they are being robbed through taxes.

Things would be very different, I think, if the members of a community generally did not approve of its government apparatus, and wanted to dissolve it. In such a situation, I think it would be reasonable for the community to ask for separation from the overarching State system, and I think that it would be appropriate for the State to grant that separation. I think it's incompatible with the attitude of respect for others' individuality and a full recognition of the fact of reasonable pluralism to seek to control of groups of others who do not want to be associated with you. In the same way, it would be inappropriate for the State to want to follow an individual out into the forest and to demand continued participation in the face of dissent, as I suggested in my original post.

But as Brainpolice points out:

...the "love it or leave it" argument is an epic fail because it presumes the legitimacy of the territorial dominion to begin with. It does nothing to explain why the state has such an arbitrary claim and why the individual must leave the state's dominion rather than the state leaving the individual's dominion.

If I think that the State should allow communities to secede without leaving their established locations, and that the justification for this applies equally to individuals, then it would remain to be explained why I don't think that individuals should be able to secede from their communities without leaving their existing land property. And on this I concede, if an individual wanted to secede from her community, it would be inappropriate for the community to demand that she stay involved, or leave the town. However, it's important to acknowledge what this would entail. The community, I think, would be perfectly justified in insisting that their new territorial boundaries be respected, and that the seceding individual confine herself to her own property. So if someone wanted to separate from the community and to live on her own without leaving her land, the community would ostensibly be justified in confining her there. It seems much more reasonable to think that a person would be best suited by simply leaving, and trading her land to someone who would like to be a part of the community.

III. I do not offer any coherent account of why a government should have any claim to its territory

But on what basis can centrally ordered communities justify their collectivistic existences in the first place? Brainpolice argues that:

...one must put foreward at least something resembling a theory or meta-theory of property in order to examine and explain the state's territorial claim and the individual's claim, and one must put foreward a theory of how states form (and not just some mythical fantasy). How did the state really acquire all this land, or didn't it? How would and individual or group manage to acquire an entire country? Endless absurdities arise in the attempt to legitimize this territorial claim.

Is it so absurd, though, to suppose that in an incorporated town or city which was established by charter (as, it is my impression, most towns and cities are), and which is populated by people who freely acknowledge their membership in their community, that the method of governance explicitly set out in the charter by which the community was established is an acceptable way for the community to administrate its affairs? It sounds like what Brainpolice is looking for is a theory of legitimate original appropriation which would allow a town or city to be considered the just holder of its territory. But as others have pointed out, there is no bulletproof theory of legitimate original appropriation for individuals, much less groups. The specific form taken by a society's institutions ultimately must be defined by the way that people choose to live together in a given community or region. Property rights give us a tool for determining who gets the right of way with regard to the use of certain resources. They allow us to say, "This belongs to me, so leave it alone." But they also allow us to say, "This is ours, and this is how it is to be used." As David Schmidtz writes in his essay, "The Institution of Property":

Private property...is the preeminent vehicle for turning negative sum commons into positive sum property regimes. However, it is not the only way. Evidently, it is not always the best way, either. Public property is ubiquitous, and it is not only rapacious governments and mad ideologues who create it. Sometimes it evolves spontaneously as a response to real problems, enabling people to remove a resource from an unregulated commons and collectively take responsibility for its management.

It seems reasonable to me that in the case of a chartered town or city, there is a pretty clear social convention which says that when the town or city was incorporated by its original settlers, the territory on which the settlement existed was to be administered as a municipality. And that's how the people who have lived in that territory ever since have chosen to live together. Surely, as I alluded to in my earlier post, there are good reasons to question whether this is really a wise way to do things. But that doesn't eliminate the fact that it's the dominant form of social organization in our present society. And once a set of institutions becomes generally accepted as the way things are done, then that's just that. There's no mysterious "social contract," to be sure, but rather a strong and widely accepted "social convention,"established by the community's first settlers and passed down to its current constituents. It's much the same principle that says that even though in America, a lot of the land people currently live on was violently expropriated from the Native Americans, today's society is governed by a set of conventions which recognize the current holders of that land as having a rightful claim to it, and that's the end of the discussion. It's just the way things are done.

IV. By arguing that the government has some claim to its territory, I am presupposing that the government is a legitimate institution without offering a compelling reason for thinking this

It's here that Michael's main objection comes to the fore:

The way I see it, the "love it or leave it" argument is circular: if we're trying to prove the legitimacy of the State, we cannot simply assume it to be legitimate. In asserting that libertarians must leave if they don't like the government, statists are assuming that the State's claim to territory is legitimate; but this is exactly what they have to prove!

So why am I starting with the idea that governments are legitimate institutions? Precisely because most people think that they are. I ask my readers to keep in mind that I'm a libertarian, and certainly don't think that the way that most societies are run is appropriate. But a whole lot of people out there think that they live in a perfectly healthy society, and that their existing institutions are just fine. Why, then, would we want to fundamentally disturb their lives by forcing them to swallow our particular brand of freedom? Ultimately, the sense in which someone is free is at least partly impacted by what he is free to do. And for a lot of people, the best use of their freedom would be to get on with their lives and not have to deal with the radical social change that would be precipitated by the dissolution of the state. To the extent that people are generally happy with the way things are, the status quo is an acceptable way to run things.

It's when people insist that everyone live the way that they want to live that I start to object. But that goes both ways! Libertarians who insist that loyal citizens must disband their governments are in a lot of ways just as bad as the statists to whom they're responding. Statists should feel no need to control the way that libertarians want to live their lives, and so if libertarians want to go establish a community somewhere according to their own ideals, that should be totally fine -- we shouldn't have to move to Somalia to do it. But libertarians also shouldn't want to control the way that statists live their lives. If the statists want to have centrally organized communities, where rents are collected in order to sponsor public programs, they should be able to do that.

So hopefully this extremely lengthy response has been helpful and thought-provoking. If not, sorry for putting you through it. I look forward to any further comments anyone may have!

On the Plight of Polar Bears

For a moment, I'd like to take as a premise that some Taylor-esque "attitude of respect for nature" on steroids is actually the correct approach to environmental ethics, and that we therefore have an enforceable obligation to treat all teleological centers of life (including non-conscious organisms) with respect for their intrinsic value as living things, not to be interfered with or harmed without amply justificatory reasons for doing so. I don't actually believe this to be true, but I do think that if we want to discuss environmental ethics in a way that doesn't get a whole class of people up in arms right from the start, my interpretation of Taylor's system is a great departure point for two reasons. First, it deals with moral significance in a way that's immediately accessible to me -- that is, it insists that we take certain things into account, but allows that certain reasons would justify our sacrificing those things without implying that we were failing to properly take them into consideration. And second, it would satisfy a wide range of different classes of people with concern for the environment (though I will leave out the notion that ecosystems and other spontaneous orders are the proper objects of moral concern, as I see them as being morally equivalent to human economies). So for the sake of this discussion, we'll simply grant that this system is correct and move on.

In this post, I want to begin to explore an issue that I feel to be central to the issue of climate change. Much of the concern surrounding climate change is focused on the probability that a rapidly changing climate system would create conditions in which ecosystems, as they exist today, might be thrown irreparably out of balance. This is quite reasonably expected to result in a large number of species' having a harder time with life than they would if climate change had never occurred.

One clear example of this theme in public discourse today is the concern being expressed about the future of polar bears. I feel that this is noteworthy because a) No one is actually going out and killing any polar bears, and b) Each of the polar bears that are dying are living lives which not particularly unusual in the scheme of polar bear existence, though no doubt they are on the worse end of the range of typical polar bear lives. This seems especially true in light of the solitary nature of a normal polar bear's lifestyle; it's not as if close-knit polar bear communities are being torn apart or anything like that. Polar bears are living their daily lives in the way that they would under any other conditions, except they are increasingly finding themselves in environments that are not particularly well equipped to support polar bears. To be clear, this happens all the time to animals -- most notably those living on the dynamic edge of their species' natural range. It's just that in this environment, there are more polar bears living this sort of life, and in many places, no new polar bears are successfully making it into the species' active population.

So the question I want to pose here is, ought we to be concerned about this sort of thing from a moral standpoint? There are two reasons that we could answer in the affirmative, given the moral framework we've adopted. First, because these sorts of problems will make people worse off, and we care about people. As John Broome writes:

As the ice retreated at the end of the latest ice age, forests migrated northwards at perhaps 1 km per year. This appears to be about the maximum they are capable of in uncultivated country, and they will certainly not be able to manage the much faster movements required by the present global warming. Furthermore, many ecosystems have become isolated by human activities, so they will only be able to migrate much more slowly, if at all. The natural world is therefore likely to be very much impoverished. And this will impoverish humanity. One might hope that the progress of technology has made agriculture more independent of the natural world: agriculture can migrate faster than nature ecosystems, and new crops can be matched to new conditions. But it seems overoptimistic to believe that agriculture can be restructured on this scale throughout the world without major costs. And in any case, we all need the natural world around us to make our lives rich and worthwhile. Life will not be so good in a more barren world.

Though extremely important, I want to set that kind of concern aside for now in order to focus on the second reason that we might object to the impacts of global climate change: that we would be disrespecting non-human nature by allowing things like the polar bears' plight to transpire.

Now, remember that no one is doing anything to the polar bears. What is happening is that the bears are being put in a context where they will likely and predictably fail to flourish on account of the actions of people. And although the plight of the polar bears can surely be foreseen by the people causing it, it's important to acknowledge that no one is acting maliciously; the contributors to climate change are simply living their normal lives. If these people respected the polar bears, some might argue, they should not only avoid actively harming the polar bears, but also modify their lifestyles to avoid the destruction of the bears' environment.

But is this right? Does it disrespect the polar bears to bring about the destruction of their environment by pursuing our own ends? It seems to me that a decent place to start would be to think about a similar example in human affairs, to determine what we would say if the polar bears were people, and then ask whether the example really captures the situation in which the bears find themselves. In another post, I asked whether individuals like farmers and fishermen could have rights to environmental conditions. I wrote:

Many individuals, notably farmers and fishermen, may be adversely affected by the effects of shifts in their regional climates for the organisms on which they rely. So far as these individuals have a right not to be interfered with in pursuing their livelihoods and wellbeing with the aid of resources which are naturally available to them, it would seem to constitute an infringement of their rights to push their climate systems out of their previous states, bringing about environmental conditions which are injurious to their interests and livelihoods.

It may be objected that the preceding discussion assumes that individuals have a right to certain environmental conditions, where no such right exists. I believe, however, that such an argument would fail to take into account our earlier discussion of rights. Conceivably, an objector would point to the inherent instability and variability in the climate system, and argue that clearly we are not entitled to complain about such changes. But as we noted before, to have the right to something means only that we are entitled to certain things from other moral agents.

For example, no rights violation would occur if a naturally occurring shift in your regional climate were to produce temperatures too high for you to continue to grow wheat on your land. But if your neighbor installed an enormous heater on the edge of his property and blew warm air onto your property, killing your wheat crop, we might find good reason to object. And it seems that the reason that we would object would be that you have the right to certain environmental conditions, of which you were being deprived by your neighbor’s actions. I think that this objection does reflect something which we have an entitlement against being deprived of in the absence of morally significant reasons, and so far as climate change does inspire this objection, it constitutes an infringement of rights of this kind.

So if we think that the polar bears are in the same kind of situation as farmers and fishermen whose environmental conditions are being destroyed, I think we might have some reason to think that we would be disrespecting the bears to continue to destroy their habitats. But are polar bears really like farmers and fishermen? At first glance, the comparison seems sound: both groups rely on the natural environment to provide them with the things they need to survive, and both are being put in a situation where their environmental "life support systems" are being compromised because of others' actions.

One issue arises here which is pretty much endemic to any problem dealing with justice and animals: Do polar bears really have the same kind of relationship with their life support systems as humans do? Do polar bears really think of their environment as producing their livelihood? And when conditions deteriorate, do they notice that this has happened? The relevance is this: Do we mistreat polar bears when they are never aware that anything has gone awry? I think the answer may well be yes. If I push a rock down a mountain onto your house, I am not absolved of guilt if you think that the rock fell naturally.

So, then, are we committed to the position that if we accept the truth of Taylor's attitude of respect for nature, it would be wrong to cause global climate change because of what would happen to polar bears? I'm not sure. Taylor is quick to point out that there are other considerations that come into play when taking non-human animals into account which can justify sacrificing them or their interests to ours. Taylor's own account is sort of sketchy, but the point is more or less that if the reason you're doing what you're doing is sufficiently significant, then it can be permissible to sacrifice an animal's interests to your own. But would the actions which contribute to climate change satisfy this criterion? Would they justify infringing on the farmers' and fishermen's rights? I'm not entirely sure. But what I think I have done is to establish that if we adopt the attitude of respect for nature, there's at least some reason to believe that contributing to climate change is disrespectful to the polar bears, and that's sort of what I was hoping to find out.

When It Comes to the Environment, Why Discount?: A Reply to Carden

I apologize in advance for the quote-bombing in this post, but a) I find that footnotes don't mix well with blog posts; b) I wanted to make sure that the references were preserved so that people can go back later and check out some of the sources that helped guide my reasoning here; and c) I didn't feel like putting in the effort necessary to polish this into a finished piece -- it's late. Maybe I'll revise it later. But without further ado:

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In his article, "Should We Be Recycling Paper or Building Battlestar Galactica?," Art Carden asks:

If environmental stewardship obligates us to be mindful of future generations in making our day-to-day decisions, what should we do? Should we be recycling paper and preventing people from building parking lots to save trees? Or should we acknowledge that the planet will be destroyed sooner or later and try to find ways to build something like the Battlestar Galactica so the species will be preserved?

To answer this question, Carden turns to the issue of how future conditions should be compared to conditions today -- that is, how the future should be discounted against the present. He explains that "Questions about 'the world we are leaving for our children' and complaints about the alleged short-sightedness of present generations are ultimately claims that we are discounting the future inappropriately," and so the appropriate social discount rate becomes the focus of his analysis.

Carden is correct to point out that different approaches to discounting the future can have very significant consequences on the way we evaluate different sets of outcomes. In their essay, "Uncertain Discount Rates in Climate Policy Analysis," Richard Newell and William Pizer discuss a range of plausible discount rates which could be applied in forming climate change policy. They note that "Looking 400 years into the future, the plausible 2-7% range of discount rates has a corresponding difference in discounted values of 200 million-to-1. And there is little justification for narrowing our range..." Stephen Gardiner builds on this idea in his essay, "Ethics and Global Climate Change," pointing out that when the rate used to discount future events is positive, "all but the most catastrophic costs disappear after a number of decades, and even these become minimal over very long time periods." Carden himself is aware of this difficulty, acknowledging that on the other hand, using too low of a discount rate will force us to recognize that "at some point, the sun will die out and the planet we are so concerned about protecting will someday be no more, all else equal."

Further complicating this issue is the fact of radical uncertainty surrounding predictions about the future, especially when discussing people's values. In order to properly discount future events, we would need to know what those future events would be. But in their essay, "Carbon Dioxide and Intergenerational Choice," Ralph d'Arge, William Schulze, and David Brookshire suggest that even if we forget about the difficulties faced in predicting the physical outcomes of our actions:

...given changing lifestyles, substantial future shifts in technologies, and probabilities of drastic world political-social events, any quantitative measures of benefits or costs in 100 years are not subject to better than 2-4 orders of magnitude accuracy, and may even switch sign...

Thomas Schelling drives this point home in his essay, "Climate Change: The Uncertainties, the Certainties, and What They Imply About Action":

...what will the world be like in 50, 75, or 100 years when climate change may become acute? Think back seventy-five years: what was the world like, compared with now? Will the world be as different from now in seventy-five years as it is now from seventy-five years ago? How would we, seventy-five years ago, have predicted the consequences of climate change in today's world, and who are the "we" who might have predicted those consequences?

Accordingly, John Broome writes in his book, Counting the Cost of Global Warming, "Cost-benefit analysis, when faced with uncertainties as big as these, would simply be self-deception." So at this point, you might be ready to throw your hands up in frustration and demand to know why we should even bother thinking about this at all, since anything we come up with will likely be ad hoc and speculative. And that would be a good question: why should we be thinking about this in the first place?

Let's return to the point that got us started on this whole subject: Carden wrote, "Questions about 'the world we are leaving for our children' and complaints about the alleged short-sightedness of present generations are ultimately claims that we are discounting the future inappropriately." But is it true that questions about the world we leave behind ultimately reduce to questions about the appropriate way to discount the future?

Some people don't think so. In his essay, "Environmental Risk, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics," Kristian Ekeli argues that "To discount the future implies that current interests and preferences count for more than those of future generations." Accordingly, Newell and Pizer note that "Many economists...have argued that it is ethically indefensible to discount the utility (i.e., well-being) of future generations--although this does not imply a zero discount rate for their consumption..." So by asking how exactly we should discount, we seem to ignore the important idea that it might not be appropriate to even approach this question in terms of discounting. If we really care about the condition of our descendents, it seems unclear why we would think of their well-being as being inherently less important than ours. But if we do not discount the future, then are we committed, as Carden seems to suggest, to the view that we should begin preparing to save our species from the end of the world?

I say, not so fast. It will be immediately apparent upon reflection that Carden's approach to this issue is blatantly utilitarian. The idea seems to be that the appropriate task of the social critic is to evaluate a society's decisions against the benchmark of aggregate well-being in order to determine whether or not people are doing what's best for everyone. But as David Schmidtz points out in his book, Elements of Justice, sometimes we get better outcomes when we don't actively aim to engineer a utilitarian ideal. Schmidtz writes:

A reflective consequentialist morality is not about one versus five. It is not even about costs versus benefits. It is about how we need to live in order to be glad we are neighbors. It's about getting on with our lives in way [sic] that complements rather than hinders our neighbors' efforts to get on with their own.

So even if we adopt a utilitarian mindset, it is not clear that the appropriate way to approach the issue of environmental destruction is to try to calculate the costs and benefits of alternative social policies. As we noted above, we are faced with serious uncertainty at every turn -- it could even turn out that by acting to promote wellbeing by being more focused on the well-being of future people, we would actually make them worse off. For example, imagine if in the industrial revolution, people were prohibited from burning coal to avoid causing mercury pollution. Our fish would be safer to eat, our natural environment would be healthier, and many of our children would avoid being harmed by toxic exposure to the metal, but I imagine that few would argue that on the whole, the policy would have been for the best.

Perhaps, then, the best way to provide for the future would be to focus on the world we live in today. There are plenty of things that we can do to make the world a better place: search for a cure for AIDS, learn to live in peace with one another, and yes, even develop an appreciation and respect for the natural world. As Aldo Leopold wrote in his book, A Sand County Almanac:

Only those able to see the pageant of evolution can be expected to value its theater, the wilderness, or its outstanding achievement, the grizzly. But if education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking.

If we turn our focus to making our world a better place for today, the society we pass on to future generations will make for a much better place to live for our posterity as well. And I think that's something we can all agree to promote.

That being said, I have left an important issue unaddressed: Is environmental destruction unjust? An important objection to the utilitarian approach to looking at the world which we have used thus far is that it fails to take proper account of the seperateness of persons. If by acting in a particular way with respect to the non-human environment, we treat others (whether today or in the future) in a manner contrary to an attitude of appropriate respect for their value as individuals, then we must think long and hard about our actions. As Robert Nozick writes in his book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, "...there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives."

I cannot give the question of whether environmental destruction or degradation is unjust the attention that it deserves here, largely because I have not entirely settled the issue in my own mind. But I think that it will suffice for now to suggest that if we are to discuss environmental destruction and degradation from an ethical point of view, it will not do to approach the issue from the standpoint of utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. We must acknowledge that we do not always have the power to consciously shape the future in accordance with our desires, and that sometimes, the greatest successes in living together come from letting people get on with their own lives. If we are to find reason for conscious and organized action in response to environmental damage, it seems to me that an attribution of injustice would be the appropriate way forward. And so I think that while Carden's attempt to grapple with this issue was admirable, I have to conclude that he sort of missed the boat.

You Tell 'Em, Jan!

God damn. Just wanted to share with the world a little piece of Jan Narveson's mind:

…the idea of collective ownership of the earth is, really, a myth, a dish of romantic political nonsense. And like almost all romantic myths when they are politicized, the results of taking it seriously are inevitably evil. Some general story of the Lockean stripe is all there is, because it is all there can be. Individual people pick fruit from individual trees, dig up particular patches of soil, kill particular deer, grow particular pigs, and the rest of it – up to and including inventing the digital computer and putting on productions of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs. That is how mankind is fed, and clothed, and entertained, because there is no other way. To “collectivize” agriculture is not, because it cannot be, to cause the plants to grow in some other way; it is, instead, to force people to work differently: to work under the direction of others who need pay no attention to the worker’s interests, and to disconnect those workers from the incentives and disincentives that have always impelled people to work. It is not surprising that it does not work very well, but it is important to appreciate what it is and that it cannot be what it appears to pretend to be.

That, my friends, is some philosophical ass-kickery that we can believe in. Check out the rest of Narveson's excellent essay, "Collective Responsibility," in the Journal of Ethics if you have access to it. That quotation comes from pages 196-197.

Roderick Long on Property

I was reading Roderick Long's article, "Land-Locked: A Critique of Carson on Property Rights," and came across an argument that left me somewhat skeptical. I've recently become convinced that appropriation needs to be justified on the grounds of being a desirable "game," as Schmidtz argues in his essay, "The Institution of Property." But I don't want to rule out the possibility that a Lockean approach to understanding appropriation can be defended, so I figured it might be useful to spell out my confusion with Long's argument in order to see whether I (or anyone else) can make sense of any of it.

If I understood correctly, Long claimed that property rights arise from self-ownership essentially because "By transforming external objects so as to incorporate them into my ongoing projects, I make them an extension of myself, in a manner analogous to the way that food becomes part of my body through digestion" (91). But I feel like a number of questions need to be addressed in order to make this a complete theory.

First, what does it mean to "transform" something? I can incorporate all sorts of objects into my projects without physically transforming them at all, and I think that it makes a lot of sense to think that a homesteading principle might still want to cite me as their owner. For example, I might build a fence around a plot of unowned land, and claim it for my yard. Surely someone who believes in homesteading as a source of property rights would think that I owned the fence itself, and the land on which the fence was built. But it seems like I would also have a pretty reasonable claim for thinking that the land surrounded by the fence was also mine. Does surrounding something with a fence constitute a transformation?

If so, it seems like the transformation would have to be something purely subjective. But this seems like it would open the theory up to accusations of over-breadth. For example, if I build my house in a secluded area with a view of a previously undiscovered beach, do I own the beach? If I discover a new planet, and construct a telescope that allows me to gaze at it whenever it's over my house, do I own the planet? I don't think the answers are obviously "yes."

Further, I wonder why incorporation into one's projects should have anything to do with ownership. After all, I can incorporate things into my projects without owning them at all. My neighbor's house, for example, might produce a shady patch on my yard in the afternoon, allowing me to plant certain shrubs which would not have survived if they were exposed to direct sunlight all day long. Surely I don't need to own my neighbor's house in order to do this, and while it would certainly entail a frustration of my plans if my neighbor decided to knock his house down, it doesn't seem like this involves any violation of my self-ownership.

Approaching the issue from another direction: given the subjective nature of the transformation which confers ownership, it seems like we can frustrate the projects of a property owner without ever physically transforming an object, by changing the way that the owner views the object, or how others view the object. Generally, these sorts of things are not considered violations of property rights. But if property rights can be understood in the way that Long discussed, why would this be the case?

Also, the idea that property rights can be understood in terms of the relationship between an object and a valuer's ends, it seems like we would be led to an easement-based theory of ownership. But this is not the generally accepted view of property. Does this mean that we need to abandon that view?

I'm open to answers; I don't want to be unfair to this idea, largely because I once accepted it as correct, so any input would be great.

Climate Change and Market Definition of Property Rights

A fellow named Gregory responded to my post, "Can the Free Market Solve the Problems Posed by Climate Change?" with an argument which I think deserves to be discussed in some depth. Gregory wrote:

If the market has not arrived at an efficient means regulating itself (compensating those damaged) then a government certainly will not be able to affect such a regulation efficiently. The cost of the regulation must be weighed against the benefit it provides. If economic growth is retarded by inefficient regulations, do we not harm future generations more than by waiting for the market to develop a mechanism to efficiently distribute justice?

Gregory highlights the fact that the market has not yet developed an efficient way to enforce the property rights involved in discussions of climate change. I agree that on some level, to indict the free market for this fact would be problematic. In his essay, "Market-Based Environmentalism and the Free Market: They're Not the Same," Roy Cordato wrote

...environmental problems are not an unavoidable side effect of a free-market economy. Instead, they occur because the institution setting--the property rights structure--required for the operation of a free market is not fully in place. Because, in all modern societies, government has taken nearly complete responsibility for the establishment and maintenance of this institutional setting, environmental problems are more appropriately viewed as manifestations of government failure, not market failure.

Mark Pennington bolsters this view in his essay, "Liberty, Markets, and Environmental Values: A Hayekian Defense of Free-Market Environmentalism," when he writes, "Transaction costs are not the sole preserve of the market system...and we commit the "nirvana fallacy" if we suggest the alternative to an imperfect market is a government immune from the same sort of problems."

I completely agree with these two authors, and Gregory, in saying that ill-defined and unenforced property rights are at the root of most (if not all, depending on your definition of "property rights") of the problems associated with climate change.

Further, I agree that the free market can solve some of the inadequacies in the process of enforcing justice, but often only if allowed to work without interference. Pennington writes:

Although proponents of free-market environmentalism recognize that environmental markets have limits owing to the prevalence of transaction costs, they contend that these problems are more like to be overcome within an institutional framework supportive of private contractual arrangements. In this perspective, all environmental externalities represent potential profit opportunities for entrepreneurs who can devise ways of defining private-property rights and arranging contracts (via technological innovations, for example) so that those currently free riding on collective goods or imposing negative external effects (for example, water pollution) on their neighbors are required to bear the full costs of their actions.

That being said, I do think that we oversimplify if we simply suppose that the market will find a way to handle the problem in an acceptable manner, and leave it at that. In issues of justice, the "There are many ways to skin a cat" approach taken by the free market might not be acceptable. Improper conceptions of property rights are not simply inefficient, they are unjust. In his speech, "Another Take on Free Market Environmentalism: A Friendly Critique," David Roodman highlighted this idea when he said:

Fine, I own my car. And you own your lungs. Property rights are allocated, seemingly. So now can we reach happy agreement about how to resolve the conflict? Fat chance. More likely, thousands of drivers and breathers will end up suing each other and then the problem will end up in the lap of the court, which would have to decide precisely where the right to free enjoyment of one's car stops and the right to free enjoyment of one's lungs starts.

Later, he quipped, "Judges did not free the slaves; in fact, they tightened the bondage."

I don't mean to imply that libertarian judges would be unable to come up with a decent solution. I'm only suggesting that the answer might not be as simple as Rothbard made it sound when he wrote, in chapter 13 of his Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Human Nature:

...it would not be a very difficult task for Libertarian lawyers and jurists to arrive at a rational and objective code of libertarian legal principles and procedures based on the axiom of defense of person and property, and consequently of no coercion to be used against anyone who is not a proven and convicted invader of such person and property. This code would then be followed and applied to specific cases by privately-competitive and free-market courts, all of whom would be pledged to abide by the code, and who would be employed on the market proportionately as the quality of their service satisfies the consumers of their product.

The problem, in addition to the simple fact that this could be difficult to do, is that this group of Libertarian lawyers and jurists would need to arrive at decisions somehow. Either they could do so in accordance with majority opinion or some other procedural way, or (as I suspect Rothbard is aiming at) they could do so in accordance with the true principles of justice. If the former were the case, then I see no reason why we would call the result "rational and objective." And if the latter, then we should be able to replicate the activities of these lawyers and jurists on our own. But as those who have been keeping up with my work have undoubtedly seen, the task is not quite as simple as Rothbard makes it sound.

One approach would be to take a somewhat left-libertarian angle and say that climate change represents injustice due to an over-enclosure of the atmospheric commons. Edwin Dolan took this approach in his essay, "Science, Public Policy, and Global Warming: Rethinking the Market Liberal Perspective." Dolan wrote:

Liberalism in America, in particular, grew up in a Lockean state of nature where it was really true, or at least seemed true, that homesteaders, loggers, grazers, and industrialists could take what they needed while leaving "enough and as good for others." What the environmentalist side of the global warming debate is telling us is that we no longer live in such a world.

Because those responsible for climate change have, according to Dolan, taken more than their fair share, they must be subject to the demands of justice. He insists, "Defending the rights of property that has been unjustly acquired is a conservative position, not a liberal one."

But this approach has its difficulties. One problem is the fact that the atmospheric CO2 sink is not really a limited resource. The problem is not that "...the atmospheric commons - namely, the Earth's carbon absorbing capacity - are finite and depletable," as Tariq Banuri and Erika Spanger-Siegfried characterized it in their essay "Equity and the Clean Development Mechanism: Equity, Additionality, Supplementarity." As far as we're concerned (though technically this isn't true), we can dump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we want. It's not like one day we'll light a fire and the CO2 won't go into the atmosphere. The thing that's available in limited quantities is the atmosphere's capacity to absorb CO2 without causing any harm.

In light of this fact, the right way to allocate the resource in question is somewhat unclear. In a world in which we do exceed the total CO2 emissions we could release without causing objectionable climate change, what is the real significance of the amount of CO2 which we could have emitted without causing harm? This, I think, is a problem which reflects the fact that climate change is an emergent problem, and is therefore sort of different from other problems we normally face.

Of course, even if we figure out the significance of this "harmless sink capacity," there still remains a boatload of work to do in order to determine exactly who is responsible for what emissions, what rights are violated by climate change, whether non-rights-violating actions can be justly interfered with, what exactly we should hold people accountable for, who should bear what burdens, what accountability entails, what our accountabilities to future people are and how they should be enforced, and how we should administer all of this (I'm sure I'm leaving stuff out). Never mind the scientific uncertainty plaguing every step of the process!

At the end of the day, we can talk all we want about the market figuring out the answers to climate change through incentives for the enforcement of justice, but someone's going to have to figure this stuff out. If it can be done, hopefully I'll be able to figure out how, or at least set the process in motion for other people. I really hope that answers your question somehow!

Can the Free Market Solve the Problems Posed by Climate Change?

When confronted by the possibility of climate change, many libertarians default to the position that the free market, with its ability to mobilize the ingenuity of the economy for the satisfaction of the desires of the people, will provide the solutions we desire. I want to discuss this view, because I think it is the result of a mistaken understanding of the nature of the free market. For an example of this view, consider George Reisman's comments in his essay, "Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises":

The appropriate answer to the environmentalists is that we will not sacrifice a hair of industrial civilization, and that if global warming and ozone depletion really are among its consequences, we will accept them and deal with them--by such reasonable means as employing more and better air conditioners and sun block, not by giving up our air conditioners, refrigerators, and automobiles.

In his essay, "Global Warming Is Not a Threat But the Environmentalist Response to It Is," Reisman elaborates:

...if global warming is a fact, the free citizens of an industrial civilization will have no great difficulty in coping with - that is, of course, if their ability to use energy and to produce is not crippled by the environmental movement and by government controls otherwise inspired.

He goes on to say that global warming

...would certainly not be too great a problem for tens and hundreds of millions of free, thinking individuals living under capitalism to solve. It would be solved by means of each individual being free to decide how best to cope with the particular aspects of global warming that affected him.

Reisman makes an important point. When it comes to allocating resources efficiently, the free market is unparalleled in its effectiveness. In his essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," Hayek explained:

...knowledge of the circumstances...never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all...separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources--if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.

Hayek points out that

...there is...a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others in that he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation.

He concludes:

If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization.

This decentralization is the free market. Hayek explains that

...in a system where the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coordinate the parts of his plan.

And indeed, it's been demonstrated in practically every instance that the free market has the capacity to satisfy the wants of the population better than centrally organized alternatives. So I think Reisman is largely right in saying that when it comes to adapting to new problems, the market does do great work.

But when we talk about the free market, we generally have two things in mind. The first, which Reisman focuses on, is a system in which property titles are traded voluntarily in a mutually beneficial way, resulting in a continuous progression towards a more efficient allocation of resources. But the second, which underpins the first, is a system in which rights are enforced, so that individuals who infringe on the rights of others are punished, and those whose rights are infringed are compensated for the harm they suffer. It is my contention the Reisman's argument breaks down by completely brushing off this second feature of the market.

Imagine if we were trying to discuss the proper social response to a particular theft. It might be true that of all social systems, a victim of theft would be best equipped for dealing with her loss in a capitalistic free market. She would not need to consult a central planning board in order to replace the things that were taken, and her higher purchasing power, enabled by her participation in a thriving market economy, would enable her to afford the replacement with comparative ease.

And yet we would obviously not be satisfied with this "solution." The reason is simple. The thief did something wrong, and therefore, the thief ought to be held responsible for fixing it, never mind that we should perhaps have tried to stop the theft from happening in the first place. Accordingly, by suggesting that we simply allow the free market to operate so that adaptation will be easier, Reisman is smuggling in the claim that we do nothing wrong to the victims of climate change.

This seems obviously contentious. The question should not be, as Reisman seems to want to make it, whether or not the free market is the best system for facilitating adaptation to changing conditions. The question is whether we do something unjust by contributing to climate change. To be fair, Reisman briefly addresses this issue, as I discussed here. But my point is that by glossing quickly over the issue of justice, many libertarians have completely missed the point. If the free market is to be relied on to provide a "solution" to climate change, it must be through a strict adherence to the principles of justice. If we simply ignore injustice, and define fairness in terms of mere participation in the market, then we cannot claim to be advocating libertarianism.

A Short Story

Imagine, for a moment, that I am in front of Sally's house, preparing to break in and steal all of her possessions. A local policeman sees what I am about to do, and pauses to calculate how much Sally would be harmed if I carried out my plan. He approaches me and says, "If you pay Sally the amount that you would harm her, then you may rob her house. She will be made no worse off, and you will get to do something you want to do." I think about this for a moment. It doesn't seem like it would be completely fair to Sally, but I can see a kind of logic behind it. Besides, I really want Sally's stuff; I don't really care how she feels.

Overhearing our conversation, though, the policeman's partner interjects, "I can see that you want to rob Sally enough that you would be willing to pay her for the damage. Since the benefit to you from robbing Sally's house is greater than the harm that would be caused to Sally, you should just go ahead and rob her." Hearing this, I can't help but feel that this is even more unfair to Sally. But again, I'm a robber; I don't mind.

However, before I have a chance to accept the proposal, the police chief walks over with a glimmer in his eye. He says, "Why don't you pay me the amount that Sally will be harmed, and then you may go ahead and rob her house." I can't help but marvel at the evil genius of his plan. I would get to rob Sally's house, he would get a whole bunch of money, and only Sally would lose.

But I turn to the police chief and say, "Surely you can't get away with this sort of thing. If the general public finds out you're doing this, you'll be run out of town!"

He thinks a moment and replies, "They support pollution taxes; what's the difference?"

On Super-Groups and Generational Rights

So earlier, I was working on the idea that a future generation could have the right to inherit an unspoiled Earth, and I wanted to continue that a little bit here. I had drawn a distinction between the set of all the Groups of potential people that could have existed in the case where we spoil the Earth (I called the set Super-Group X) and the set of all of the Groups that could have existed in the case where we don't spoil the earth (Super-Group Y).

I left off with the idea that perhaps we might want to say that we infringe Super-Group Y's rights if we bring it about that none of its members inherit the Earth (because that would mean that we spoiled it). On further reflection, I don't think I like this way of looking at it for two reasons. The first is that if we bring it about that Super-Group Y's rights are infringed, then we also bring it about that Super-Group Y is nothing but an abstract notion. None of its members would exist. Accordingly, it seems odd to say that we infringe the rights of a set of Groups of people, where none of the people in the set ever actually exist.

The second reason that I resist this notion is that nothing could be said about our relationship with Super-Group X (or the particular Group, C, that would end up inheriting the Earth) if we only thought of ourselves as infringing Y's rights. Accordingly, we would automatically rule out the easiest avenues for talking about compensation or prohibition: that C is at least somehow tied to the rights infringement. If we draw the line so that C is on the outside, despite the fact that it's the only Group of the lot that actually exists, it seems like we create more trouble for ourselves than we need to. To be clear, I see this as more of a practical point, rather than a genuine philosophical issue, but I do think that the first objection should give me enough justification to abandon the view that we infringe Super-Group Y's rights when we cause a member of Super-Group X (Group C) to come into existence.

So instead, I'll stick to the idea that we infringe on the Generation's rights (where the Generation, L, is conceived of as an abstract entity which is the set of all Groups of potential people that could have existed at a particular time) if we spoil the Earth. I've already said that we wouldn't be violating any right that Group C could meaningfully be said to possess. But perhaps we'd want to say that Generation L had the right to inherit an unspoiled Earth, and therefore to bring about C's existence would constitute an infringement on that right (as I wrote previously, all of this discussion is in the context of suspending Nozick's rejection of the concept of emergent rights).

If we assent to this (and that's an enormous "if"), then at least it seems somewhat clear what we might think should be done about it. Generally, when we say someone has a right to something, and that right is infringed, we demand that some kind of restitution be made. Perhaps on this basis we might be able to say that even though Group C's rights weren't violated by their inheritance, we should "compensate" Generation L for infringing its rights by ensuring an outcome that would somehow be "as good" as leaving an unspoiled Earth. But I need to think about all this a little more before moving on, and I want to actually address the question of whether it's acceptable to talk about emergent rights in the way that I have been in these posts.

What Would It Mean to Say that Future Generations (As Abstract Entities) Have a Right to Inherit an Unspoiled Earth?

In an earlier post I started discussing the idea that a generation, as an abstract entity, might have the right to inherit an unspoiled Earth. I wanted to explore this idea a little more, because I do think that when people object to climate change, this is basically what they have in mind.

As I already discussed, different courses of history will produce different Groups of people who will represent a given Generation, L. And it seems like there are an infinite number of different ways for history to advance where we don't spoil the Earth. In light of this fact, it seems like we would be justified in causing one particular group of people not to exist, even if we did think that L had a right to inherit an unspoiled Earth.

To illustrate this, let's say Group A is the set of all people who would populate the Earth if history advanced in a certain way, where we didn't spoil the Earth. But let's say that before Group A came into existence, completely legitimate, innocent choices were made in a different way, and Group A never came into existence. Instead, Group B came to populate the Earth. We still didn't spoil the Earth, and therefore we didn't infringe Generation L's right to inherit an unspoiled Earth, but we did bring it about that Group A didn't inherit an unspoiled Earth. It seems that we would also want to say that Group B's rights would not have been violated if we hadn't made the choices that brought about its existence, and brought about Group A's existence instead.

So even if we uphold Generation L's right to inherit an unspoiled Earth, we don't violate any Group's rights if we prevent it from existing. Accordingly, we can say that no Group of people has the right to inherit the Earth. By extension, even if we say that L has the right to inherit an unspoiled Earth, we would also want to say that no particular group of people has the right to inherit it, because no group has the right to exist.

Therefore, when we say that Generation L has the right to inherit an unspoiled Earth, we say so in spite of the fact that no particular Group has the right to inherit an unspoiled Earth. Perhaps, though, we might want to say something along the lines of "Individuals have a right that if they are brought into existence, then they have the right to inherit an unspoiled Earth." But as I discussed in another post, it's hard to see how we would want to say that a person could have this right if they wouldn't have existed had we not spoiled the Earth. And for the people who could only exist if we didn't spoil the Earth, it doesn't seem very important to say that they had a right to inherit an unspoiled Earth, since they couldn't have possibly inherited a spoiled Earth. So that doesn't work.

Perhaps instead we'd want to say something like this: "A Generation, L, has a right such that the Group that ends up representing it must be one of the Groups that could only exist if the Earth were not spoiled, and if some individual or group of individuals brought it about that none of these groups ended up existing, then L's right would be infringed." At first glance, the following objection might come to mind: This seems like it disrespects all the groups of people whose existence is being considered "objectionable" (let's call the set of Groups of potential people who could only come into existence if the world were spoiled Super-Group X). We would basically be saying that every member of X shouldn't exist, and that if they did, then it would be bad. But I think there's a good counterexample which shows that this sort of thing isn't disrespectful in any objectionable sense.

Suppose we say that it's always objectionable for a certain set of girls to have children before they reach the age of 12, because they aren't ready for it (for all the relativists out there, I'm not ruling out that there are some girls for which this rule doesn't apply, but only that there are some for whom it does). In claiming this, it does seem like we're saying that it would be objectionable for an entire set of potential people to ever come into existence. But I don't think that this is a problem. We're only saying that if one of these potential people ever actually came into existence, it would mean that something objectionable had happened in order to cause them to be born. So in the same way, it doesn't seem disrespectful to say that we wouldn't want any member of Super-Group X to exist, as long as we agreed that the events which would bring it into existence were objectionable.

So we don't disrespect Super-Group X if we say that it shouldn't ever inherit the Earth, and that Generation L's rights would be infringed if any member of X did inherit the Earth. Let's call the set of Groups which could only exist if the Earth were not spoiled Super-Group Y. Do we want to say that we infringe Super-Group Y's rights if we bring it about that none of its members ever exist? I suppose I don't see any reason why not.

Generation L is made up of only two parts: Super-Group X and Super-Group Y. It would be nonsensical to say that we infringe X's rights if we prevent all of its members from inheriting an unspoiled Earth. But it might be useful to say that we infringe Y's rights if we do the same thing. So that's the infringement I'll focus on. But not now. I need a break; my head hurts.