The Role of Consequentialism and Respect for Personal Liberty in Discussing the Non-Identity Problem

I met with Dan Hausman again today to further discuss the Non-Identity problem, and several important things came out of it. The first was that Dr. Hausman agreed with my view that we can't legitimately say that climate change infringes upon the right of any individual to inherit an unspoiled Earth, because no individual has this right. And he pointed out that my use of the term "Emergent" to describe the rights possessed by a generation as an abstract entity might not be the best idea. He suggested that when we talk about Emergent Rights, we're not simply talking about rights possessed by groups, but rather rights that seem to "result" from groups of people coming together in some organized fashion. Since we don't want to say that the potential groups which make up the abstract entity of a generation are "coming together" or "organizing," it seems that we might want to find a different term. I foresee difficulties with the term "Group Rights," since it might be confused with the idea that people have new rights as members of certain groups, and I'm wondering whether "Cohort Rights" would be better. In any case, I'll need to think about it. But one thing is clear; if libertarians already object to Emergent Rights, then they're sure to really object to "Cohort Rights."

Another idea that came out of the conversation was that perhaps we have duties that don't correspond to rights that people have. This was a topic of some debate, and I want to think about it some more before I comment on it. So consider this as a note to myself to think about this.

The other main thing that came out of the meeting was a reference to an essay by James Woodward called "The Non-Identity Problem" (a truly audacious and edgy title, I must say). I've started reading it, and I want to just say that there's a really interesting feeling that comes with thinking about something for days, and then reading your ideas in an essay that was published over 20 years ago. But Woodward's essay has been really good so far, and it's giving me a lot to think about.

One thing that came up near the beginning was that on page 807, Woodward writes, "...while Parfit denies that an appeal to rights and fairness can explain what is wrong with certain choices in some Non-Identity cases...he explicitly allows for the possibility that an appeal to rights and fairness may be relevant in a wide variety of other Non-Identity cases. He does not endorse the claim I criticize below--that the Non-Identity Problem precludes an appeal to rights and fairness in general and forces us to adopt a purely consequentialist approach to large areas of population policy. At least in connection with the Non-Identity Problem, Parfit's usual claim is merely that the cases he discusses cannot be wholly solved by an appeal to nonconsequentialist considerations; that a principle of beneficience has some role to play in their solution."

I agree wholeheartedly with Woodward's intuitions, and that's why I've been trying so hard to explore the nonconsequentialist considerations Woodward describes. But I want to frame his point in the context of libertarian thought. Generally, libertarians don't like to think of the principle of beneficience as having direct justice implications. That is, beneficience is generally considered supererogatory in the sense that we would not be justified in forcing someone to act according to it.

Accordingly, there's a lot riding on whether we can find a nonconsequentialist reason for saying that causing climate change is unjust. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick famously wrote, "...there is no social entity with a good that undergoes a sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall social good covers this up...To use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. He does not get some overbalancing good for his sacrifice, and no one is entitled to force this upon him--least of all a state or government that claims his allegiance (as other individuals do not) and that therefore scrupulously must be neutral between its citizens." What Nozick is arguing, and I think quite effectively, is that we aren't justified in forcing costs upon individuals for the benefit of others. We can still say that "It would be nice" or "It would be socially beneficial" for people to act according to some principle of beneficience, but we generally wouldn't think we could coerce someone into acting that way.

It's critical to note that sometimes, we might have reason to disagree with Nozick. In her book, Rights, Risk & Restitution, Judith Thomson argued convincingly that in certain extreme situations, we might have reason to infringe on rights for the greater good (I'll add the quotation later; I don't have the book with me right now). The idea was put best, I think, by Douglas Lackey in his essay, "Taking Risk Seriously," when he wrote, "I am far from squeamish about defeating rights with...appeals to utility, but the balance of good over bad must be considerable before rights violations become justifiable." In the absence of some kind of impending catastrophe, though, it would be difficult to justify coercively limiting people's freedom in order to prevent climate change, unless (and this is a big "unless") we could find some reason for saying that climate change was wrong for nonconsequentialist reasons (e.g., it violates rights). Hopefully, that explains why I've been so obsessed with finding such reasons.

With that said, I'm going to get back to reading.

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.

On the Sun as the Cause of Climate Change

So I've reached the point where I've heard enough people tell me that "The Sun is responsible for climate change, and the mainstream view is just another example of alarmist propaganda by the fascist environmental movement!" where I feel like it's necessary to say something about it. Doesn't it seem odd to anyone that the overwhelming majority of people who've studied the climate for their entire lives disagree with a view that's been around for well over a decade, but a significant chunk of the general public still believes it to be true? And doesn't it seem even odder that between the two groups, it's usually only the scientists who've actually read the work on which the solar hypothesis is grounded?

Accordingly, I hereby declare that anyone who wants to say that the Sun is responsible for climate change, and people are not, should have to actually at least some research. To be clear, I have no problem with the view that "The relationship between solar variability and the climate system is poorly understood, and therefore represents an area of considerable uncertainty in climate research." But that's what the alleged "eco-fascists" think. If you're going to take the view that the mainstream is wrong and stupid, I think you should have to at least figure out what the mainstream thinks. Don't worry; I'll help!

The first place to start is the IPCC's very short answer to the question, "Can the Warming of the 20th Century be Explained by Natural Variability?" in Chapter 9 of its report, on pages 702-703. Basically, the IPCC concludes that the 20th century's climate pattern doesn't seem to bear the characteristics that we would expect if it were caused by natural variability, and does bear the characteristics that we would expect from a greenhouse gas driver (in my opinion, the most convincing piece of evidence is the cooling of the stratosphere, but perhaps unidentified and therefore unquantified solar influences on atmospheric chemistry and circulation could be responsible for that).

Because the simple answer won't satisfy anyone, the next step is the IPCC's discussion of "Solar Variability" in Chapter 2 of its report, on pages 188-193, part of its examination of various radiative forcings on the climate system. In it, the IPCC basically says that the direct effect of changes in solar irradiance can't explain the changes we've observed, but we don't really understand all of the indirect effects of the Sun on the climate system. Still, it doesn't seem like the Sun is responsible, because we haven't regularly observed the patterns we would expect to see if it were responsible. So while it's possible that we just don't understand what's really going on, and the Sun really does play a critical role in shaping the Earth's climate, there isn't really any evidence that would be decisive in this regard.

While I think those resources provide a pretty decent summary of the state of the science, I think some people might think that they come off as not really taking the question of solar forcings seriously. Accordingly, a more comprehensive examination of the issue (which is heavily relied on in the IPCC's discussion) can be found in a Hadley Center report on "The Influence of Solar Changes on the Earth's Climate." I haven't read the report myself, but I would assume that it does a good enough job that anyone who really wants to know what mainstream scientists think about the Sun's influence on the climate would be able to find what they're looking for.

I suspect, though, that when they point to the Sun as the cause of climate change, most people are relying on what they've heard about the work of certain scientists, most popular among whom I perceive to be Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center. Accordingly, it's probably worthwhile to bring up Peter Laut's controversial paper, "Solar Activity and the Terrestrial Climate: An Analysis of Some Purported Correlations," in which Svensmark and others are basically called bad scientists (though with a little more tact) because they manipulated data and used questionable scientific practices in order to justify their conclusions. Laut and Paul Damon published another shorter article titled, "Pattern of Strange Errors Plagues Solar Activity and Terrestrial Climate Data," which basically summarized the pair's earlier work and besought the general public to please stop drinking Svensmark & Co.'s Kool-Aid.

Needless to say, Svensmark & Co. weren't too pleased about this, and responded accordingly. Regarding the first paper, Svensmark released this rebuttal, and after the second one was published, Svensmark and Eigel Friis-Christensen (an important member of Svensmark & Co.) had this to say. The highlight, I think, has to be the conclusion of the latter, which says, "In summary, Laut's methodology consists of first writing false accusations, then totally neglecting the refutations, and finally referencing his very own claims as corroboration when publishing new accusations. This is in our view an interesting, but also the very only, conclusion that can be drawn from the article." So I guess one should take Laut's criticisms with a grain of salt, given the vigor with which they were disputed by their targets. I'm honestly not in a position to evaluate them, given my lack of statistical training. But if you're going to subscribe to Svensmark's views, I do think it's worthwhile to take his detractors into account.

At the end of the day, I don't think it's fair to conclude that the sun is responsible for climate change, and humans are completely innocent. As I wrote in this article, we have every reason to believe that greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic influences have played some role in shaping the state of the climate, and will continue to do so in the future. By the same token, I do think that we would be wrong to completely ignore the possibility that the sun has played more of a role than it's currently given credit for. But to say that the mainstream is espousing propaganda to fuel some sinister agenda because certain physical mechanisms aren't well understood seems flat wrong. That's especially true in light of the lack of any really convincing evidence in favor of the solar hypothesis, and the amount of effort spent to understand the nature of the Sun's influence by the mainstream climate science community.

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.

Bob Carter on Climate Change (Part IV)

Carter starts part 4 with a discussion of the urban heat island effect, which he thinks has significantly affected our ability to talk about global temperatures. Now, it's true that the heat island effect needs to be taken into account, and happily, the 2007 IPCC report has taken the first steps towards doing just that. Current research into the effect will likely not satisfy those who believe that it has significantly skewed the data, but several scientists have attempted to quantify the heat island effect, and the consensus is currently that the effect is not very significant.

It's true that some weather monitoring stations have been placed where temperatures would be expected to be higher than the surrounding areas. Carter refers to Anthony Watts' work, and Watts' old blog is actually a fantastic resource for seeing exactly what this means. If you haven't checked it out, you absolutely must. But this phenomenon has been the subject of several studies, and apparently other weather monitoring stations have also been placed in statistically cooler areas, like parks, which would tend to skew the data towards lower temperatures, and while the result isn't completely neutral, it can't account for the whole warming trend over the past century.

I'm glad to see that Steve McIntyre got a mention in this presentation. Poor Ross McKitrick (McIntyre's partner in the discussion of the hockey stick controversy) must feel terribly left out! But unfortunately, Carter talks about McIntyre in order to dredge up a piece of information that I was really hoping he wouldn't dredge up: the whole 1934 controversy. This issue has been widely discussed, and if you take it seriously, the reasonable conclusion is that it doesn't really matter, except to show that climate scientists are human, and mistakes are to be expected. Good thing the IPCC doesn't base its statements on any single study, but rather on its appraisal of the state of scientific research, or else this might be relevant!

But returning to the heat island effect, Carter points to some problems in a paper written by one of the co-authors in a major study of the heat island effect as evidence that the IPCC couldn't have properly accounted for it. But take a moment to think about that. The 2001 IPCC report (not the latest one) does rely heavily on the work of Jones et al. And part of that "et al" was apparently this Wang fellow. Wang wrote a completely separate paper which discussed the urban heat island effect in China (incidentally, Wang's paper is not directly cited in the section regarding land-surface air temperatures in the IPCC report). And some other guy wrote something which accused Wang of fabricating something in his paper.

Now, we have no way of knowing whether Wang could have defended himself against this accusation, or who this guy is who's leveling it. And we also have no idea whether the accusation has anything whatsoever to do with the paper Wang wrote with Jones. And really, it's Jones' paper that we care about, even though it's only one of a number of papers that the IPCC considered when writing its evaluation of the heat island effect. So I'm forced to wonder, what the hell does this prove about anything? Is this honestly the best case against the IPCC's assessment of the heat island effect? Before I watched this video, I was of the opinion that the heat island effect was a new field of research, and we shouldn't jump to any conclusions about it, even if the IPCC thinks that the evidence points towards it having a negligible effect. But what does it say that Carter had to resort to this kind of argument? Perhaps the IPCC's case is even stronger than I thought!

With that, Carter's assault on the science of global warming is complete. It should be clear that his case doesn't really work, even though some of his arguments do point to areas of considerable uncertainty in climate change science. I'm also forced to wonder how he takes his presentation seriously; if I can pick apart his arguments, then how can he possibly think that they're right? Isn't he supposed to be the climate scientist? I honestly don't know what to say. Perhaps I've just been brainwashed by the alarmist Kool-aid I've been served by the scare-mongering climate scientists!

But even though he's just completely dismissed the basis for believing that global warming is a problem, he moves into a discussion of the economics of climate change. So apparently, despite the fact that we have no reason to believe that anthropogenic climate change is real, and all our predictions are nonsense, we can still coherently talk about the costs and benefits of the climate change that we have no reason to believe will happen, because apparently the estimates of the costs and benefits aren't completely worthless if the premises they used in their calculations are completely false. But because I think Carter's flat wrong about the science, I'm interested to hear what he has to say about the economics.

William Nordhaus is indeed one of the central figures in the climate change debate, having come up with the conclusion (famously relied on by Bjorn Lomborg and others) that climate change will not be anywhere near as damaging as might otherwise have been expected. As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of people who say this come to their conclusion by discounting future damage by some "social discount rate," and Nordhaus is actually who I had in mind when I said that. Because Carter mentions Nicolas Stern, it's worth pointing out that Stern doesn't discount, and a large part of the difference between their conclusions is the result of that fact. But nevertheless, the article I linked in my first post discusses what I think about the sort of argument Carter gives here.

In closing, I want to say that while this has been a worthwhile exercise for me, it's important to note how much work it just took for me to do this. The fact that climate change skeptics are generally ignored is, I contend, merely a testament to this. It takes time and energy to deal with nonsense, and frankly, most people have better things to do. In fact...why did I do this on my Thursday night? Bummer! But anyway, I hope that somehow, this was helpful to someone; I'd love to hear what people think!