On Basic Structures and Starting Points

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls writes (7):

The basic structure is the primary subject of justice because its effects are so profound and present from the start. The intuitive notion here is that this structure contains various social positions and that men born into different social positions have different expectations of life determined, in part, by the political system as well as by economic and social circumstances. In this way the institutions of society favor certain starting places over others. These are especially deep inequalities. Not only are they pervasive, but they affect men’s initial chances in life; yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert. It is these inequalities, presumably inevitable in the basic structure of any society, to which the principles of social justice must in the first instance apply.

He elaborates (82):

The primary subject of justice, as I have emphasized, is the basic structure of society. The reason for this is that its effects are so profound and pervasive, and present from birth. This structure favors some starting points over others in the division of the benefits from social cooperation. It is these inequalities which the two principles are to regulate. Once these principles are satisfied, other inequalities are allowed to arise from men’s voluntary actions in accordance with the principle of free association. Thus the relevant social positions are, so to speak, the starting places properly generalized and aggregated.

In this post, I want to jot down some thoughts on why I find this a concerning aspect of Rawls’ approach. My concern arises from Rawls’ supposition that basic structures “contain” social positions, and thus the array of social positions in a society are the result of the choice of basic structures in that society. But the basic structure of society does not itself directly produce the distribution of starting places. In each instance where a person is born into a particular starting place, it is the consequence of some people having a child. It is somewhat difficult for me to imagine why we would think that the basic structure of a typical society could directly cause a baby to be born. Perhaps we could coherently say this if we lived in a mechanistic totalitarian society in which children were in an important sense a product of social planning, but this seems like an odd way to think about the way children are born in our society.

The extent to which the basic structure of our society impacts the array of starting places is the extent to which it has some influence on the range of opportunities that prospective parents are able to offer their children, in those cases where these people actually do choose to have children. Approaching things with this mindset, we can see that any society will “contain” an infinite number of potential starting points, and in certain relatively rare circumstances, a child will actually be born into a particular starting point. But these starting points will be the product not only of the principles governing the basic structure of society, but also (and undoubtedly more importantly) the incredible confluence of events that led up to the possibility of a particular child being born into a particular set of social circumstances, almost all of which are only tangentially related to the basic structure of society. And significantly, the way that we characterize a starting place will be significantly conditioned by the kind of parenting the individual in question will receive. I would at least be hesitant to think of the quality of one’s parents’ personal contributions to one’s childhood as being entirely the product of the basic structure of society (I would actually be a bit hesitant to make these claims about pretty much any of the social interactions that help to shape a child’s life, but for our purposes it will not be necessary to raise this challenge). If it’s true that the distribution of starting points is at least partly determined by the way that people choose to treat their children, then Rawls’ claim that the basic structure of society “contains various social positions” (where the relevant social positions are “starting places”) seems a little worrisome.

But Rawls might counter that even if the basic structure of society does not solely determine the array of starting points into which people will be born, it still has some impact on the range of opportunities that will be available to individuals whose parents decided to have them. And this, he could say, may be cause for some concern. Intuitively, this seems fair enough. I think it’s entirely reasonable, for example, to think that we may want to consider the idea that we have some duty (as individuals, social groups, communities, or whatever) to ensure that people have certain opportunities provided to them if we can help it (I don’t intend to engage this question here, but I certainly wouldn’t want to rule this out). Rawls might say that we ought to help poor families to provide education, food, or clothing for their children. He might say that we ought to help children from less fortunate backgrounds get into college or enter the workforce. Though these suggestions might be problematic for one reason or another, they don’t seem totally unreasonable on their face.

But this isn’t what Rawls wants to argue: he wants to suggest that by allowing a certain array of starting points to come into existence, the basic structure of society might itself be seen to be unjust, and would thus need to be replaced with another basic structure. This, I think, is where Rawls might be running into real trouble.

Here’s what I have in mind: Individuals who are born into particular starting points are the products of particular reproductive events. These events are the products of long histories of social changes and reproductive events which produced the circumstances in which these events occurred. Altering the basic structure of society would bring it about that a different set of reproductive events would occur, and so a different set of starting points would come about, but into these starting points would be born a totally different set of people. This is a problem because Rawls’ view is built on a scenario where the members of society are supposed to try to agree on the basic structure of society -- a mutually beneficial system of cooperation. But if we assume that living is not itself a bad thing (I have heard this disputed, but whatever), then it seems clear that the most beneficial choice of basic structures for any individual would be whatever structure brought that individual into existence. No one would really have any grounds to complain about their starting place because it would be a necessary precondition for them existing in the first place. Altering the array of starting points in society might be justified, but not on the basis that it would somehow benefit the people whose “undesirable” starting points would be eliminated. And if we’re not trying to benefit these people, then it’s sort of difficult to see how we’re still talking about a contractarian view that’s focused on starting points.

(To be honest, I’m sort of unsure about this conclusion. In this case, when I say that it’s difficult for me to see how this could be accommodated, I am not saying that rhetorically; I don’t know how it works. If anyone can explain to me how Rawls’ approach could accommodate the fact that no one will benefit from the choice of any basic structure besides the one that causes them to come into existence, that would be sweet.)

So hopefully, this post has served to establish two points on which I am confused: a) the basic structure of society doesn’t itself produce the distribution of starting places, and b) messing with the basic structure in order to alter the distribution of starting points in fundamental ways would bring about an entirely different population, which would most certainly not benefit the people whose starting points are being eliminated, and would therefore seem not be an appropriate goal of a contractarian view like Rawls’. As should be clear from the above, none of this should be taken to be “damning criticism” of Rawls; I am just hesitant about the way that Rawls is proceeding, and I think he might have made a big mistake. Even so, these do seem like the sorts of things that would need to be addressed.

A Tentative Plan for an Overly Ambitious Climate Change Project

Anyone who's been following my work will know that a main focus of my research is global climate change, viewed from an ethical and political perspective. In this post, I want to sketch out where I'd like to go with that research and how I'd like to compose a complete product. These will only be sketches, and only working sketches at that; I imagine things will change rather dramatically as I move forward. But hopefully they'll help me to organize my thoughts. And if anyone out there is interested in helping me work on some of this stuff, I'd really love to know. It would be amazing to be able to finish this project for a dissertation, but I don't know if that will be possible if I have to do this all alone... Anyway, here it is (as usual, the mainstream scientific standpoint is taken as a premise for the first parts):

1. Collective Action Problems and Coercion

Climate change is a problem that, on its surface, seems to fit right into the model of a public goods problem. People acting on their own independent interests are collectively producing something that appears to be bad. If we were to desire to prevent this bad thing from coming about, we would either need to alter the set of incentives facing the relevant agents (in this case, basically everyone) so that they would adjust their behavior, or perhaps we would need to take steps to mitigate the effects of their actions.

When we talk about an appropriate response to climate change, however, we don't have in mind a sort of Buchananite consensus-building endeavor in which we try to get everyone to agree to a system that would uncontroversially represent an improvement over the current one. Rather, we intend to coerce people -- that is, to influence them to follow plans besides their own by force if necessary -- in order to bring about the desired outcomes.

But we can't just go around coercing people whenever we think we could bring about "better" social outcomes by doing so -- we need some justification for infringing upon individuals' rights to self-determination. Accordingly, this section would attempt to sketch the kinds of reasons that one might offer in defense of an infringement of someone's right to self-determination, all focusing on duties held by the individual whose rights are being infringed.

I will discuss self-defense briefly, acknowledging Roderick Long's contributions in thinking about dealing with climate change from this paradigm, but ultimately conclude that it doesn't make much sense to approach the issue of climate change in this way. I will therefore sketch out two alternative sources of duties which might help us to justify coercion: the duty to show appropriate respect for others' rights and the duty to attempt to mitigate tragic or catastrophic consequences. The next two sections will be elaborations of these issues.

2. Climate Change as an Infringement Upon Rights

This section will draw heavily on my paper, "Justice and Climate Change: Towards a Libertarian Analysis," which will be coming out in The Independent Review in the Fall. It will outline the foundations of a duty to respect others' rights, and explore the ways in which we might think of climate change as infringing upon rights. I will build upon my earlier paper to address some of the issues that were left undiscussed there.

One way in which I will go beyond that paper in this section will be to discuss the question of whether these infringements upon rights would constitute rights-violations. I will predicate this discussion on the premise (which I will challenge in Section 4) that individuals who contribute to global climate change are responsible for the rights-infringements, and search for ways that those individuals might try to defend their actions. The purpose of this discussion will not be to reach any definitive conclusions, but rather to give us a starting point for thinking about these questions in Section 4 when we try to pin down exactly what individuals are responsible for, and how we should think of their duties in light of such an analysis.

3. When Are Consequences Correlative?

This section draws its inspiration from the concept of correlations between duties and rights, observing that some intuitively plausible kinds of duties don't seem to correlate with rights. Some of these duties which are non-correlative with rights seem to make reference to things that we owe to ourselves or to ideals to which we are committed. But others seem to have to do with our duty to promote "the good," or at least refrain from promoting "the bad" or destroying "the good."

In this section, I will attempt to approach the impacts of climate change from this sort of consequentialist perspective, trying to decide when consequences correlate with duties to act in certain ways. I will initially focus on impacts on groups of humans and on cultures, but I will attempt to expand my discussion to incorporate a consequentialist theory of environmental ethics. Much like in the previous section, my discussion in this section will be structured so as to rely on a set of carefully chosen suppositions about individuals' responsibility for bringing about these consequences that will be challenged in Section 4, but not in a way that makes the discussion here useless. Again, the purpose of the discussion here will be to create a starting point for the analysis in Section 4.

4. Collective Responsibility and Individual Duties

This section will bring into focus the emergent nature of the climate change problem, and attempt to engage the literature on collective responsibility in order to understand how we should approach this problem. I will focus particularly on Virginia Held's discussion of the responsibility of "random collections" to organize themselves to address faults corresponding to non-distributive predicates like "caused global climate change." I will draw attention to Held's reservations about the choice of a proper decision-making procedure and search for a resolution to this problem in the literature relating to the selection among sets of alternatives that are impartially reasonable to prefer to inaction.

I will also use this section to directly engage the idea of the social provision of public goods, wondering whether we can think of the ideas presented in this section as justifying or demanding this practice, or if we should rather treat the discussion here as suggesting serious limitations on the extent to which we should be looking to social decision-making mechanisms to fulfill this capacity. I will attempt to show that in certain situations, the line of thinking introduced here can be used to support social measures aimed at providing public goods without relying on perfectionist ideas. But I will also show how these arguments do not establish the sort of paradigm that perfectionists would want, and that my view cannot therefore be seen as a reconciliation between liberalism and perfectionism.

5. Justifying the Enforcement of Duties

In this section I will discuss the jump from the idea that individuals have certain duties (as discussed in the previous sections) to the idea that we could be justified in coercing these individuals to act in the manner prescribed by their duty. I will need to explore the sorts of considerations which justify the enforcement of duties and use them to try to distinguish cases where intervention is justified from those where it is not. Here I will flesh out the questions introduced in Section 4 relating to reasonable pluralism and impartiality, expanding my discussion to cover all duties. I will also explore a dialectical approach to thinking about the justice of coercive enforcement of duties. This section will set the stage for Section 6 and Section 7 by arguing that certain kinds of answers to the questions posed in those questions would make coercion unacceptable.

6. Centralized Policy-Making in a World of Reasonable Pluralism

This section will explore the foundations of political authority outside of voluntary associations. I'm really not sure how I want to approach this section, but a coherent place to start seems to be with the philosophy of Joseph Raz. I'm very much over my head in even trying to imagine what sorts of things I'll want to discuss in this section, but it does seem like I'll have to address this issue. I guess this is what grad school will be for! Hopefully by the time it's ready to actually start writing this, I'll have done a whole bunch of work on the issues raised by this section and will have something worthwhile to say.

7. Finding an Appropriate Role for Uncertainty

Everything that will have been said to this point in the project will have been predicated on the idea that global climate change is undeniably happening in the way forecasted by the IPCC. This section will question this premise and introduce some of the uncertainties involved in the mainstream scientific analysis. It will also introduce the concept of storyline uncertainty and discuss the degree to which we can be comfortable with our predictions about the future.

I will then try to think about how uncertainty should play into our thinking about this issue. I will discuss the precautionary principle and the principles of procedural justice which are enshrined in our current legal system, as well as concerns about the burden placed on victims by standards of proof. I'm not entirely sure where I'll want to go with this, but I think I'm attracted to the idea of some kind of middle ground. I'm not sure, though, so don't hold me to it!

8. Pulling It All Together

In this final section I will attempt to put together all of the pieces discussed in the previous sections in order to compose a coherent answer to the question of how we should think about the justification for a coercive and centralized policy aimed at addressing global climate change. I will highlight areas where I think that reasonable people might find room for disagreement, and where I think my discussion here could be expanded or improved. I will also voice any doubts I have about my conclusions and attempt to identify some avenues for rejecting them. Finally, to the extent that I can do so coherently, I will offer some closing thoughts about the ways that my arguments might be engaged by the policymaking community and the general public.

On Distributive Justice and the Indeterminacy of the Market Process

This turned into a long, long post. But I really like it a lot, so hopefully you will too!

Introduction

This post started out as not much more than a stream of thought. But I'm pretty happy with where it went, so here's an introduction to help you figure out what the heck is going on. In this post, I wanted to explore the idea of distributive justice, basically just to get a handle on how I felt about it. I started by hammering out a few thoughts on the simple fact that we're not actually talking about the justice of an act of distribution, which has led some thinkers to reject distributive justice. In that section, I offer some reasons for thinking distributive justice can still make sense without an actual distributive act. I then consider what I take to be the most obvious objection to my argument, which comes from Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In the process of thinking about distributive justice through the lens of Nozick's argument, I end up rejecting Nozick's position, but I nevertheless arrive at a conclusion that I think might be unpalateable to most proponents of conceptions of distributive justice. I then offer some closing thoughts about why I think we can satisfy the desires of those who hold these views without depending on the idea of distributive injustice. Because I basically wrote this off-the-cuff, there might be a little less organization than normal, but I hope it will still be readable enough to get through.

Distributive Justice Without Distribution

The concept of distributive justice is an interesting one. After all, social resources are never actually distributed. So what can distributive justice mean when resources are never distributed? Some thinkers are quick to say, "nothing." But notice that there is more sense of the word "distribution". There is the sense where we take a distribution to be an outcome of an act of distribution, but there is also the sense of a statistical distribution. If the word "distributive" in "distributive justice" is to be understood coherently, I contend that it will need to be the statistical sense of "distribution" which informs our understanding of the term.

But how can a statistical distribution be just or unjust? After all, our normal conceptions of justice tend to apply between individual human beings, not vague statistical aggregates. Imagine a man who, after his ship struck a reef and sank, managed to swim to safety on a small, uninhabited island. Surely he would be at the far low end of the distribution of social outcomes. But could he coherently get upset at the reef for wronging him? At the island for being unjustly hospitable? At the cosmos for not preventing the shipwreck from happening in the first place? I don't think so. It seems important in thinking about justice that the problem be one where people could coherently have had a say in determining the outcome.

So injustice needs to involve people somehow, but does it need to be the result of human design? In "The Atavism of Social Justice," Hayek writes (58):

Justice has meaning only as a rule of human conduct, and no conceivable rules for the conduct of individuals supplying each other with goods and services in a market economy would produce a distribution which could be meaningfully described as just or unjust. Individuals might conduct themselves as justly as possible, but as the results for separate individuals would be neither intended nor foreseeable by others, the resulting state of affairs could neither be called just nor unjust.

Surely it is true that each individual's fate in our spontaneously organizing society is not the intended outcome of the market process. And it also seems true that in most cases, no one would have been able to foresee exactly how things were going to turn out for each individual over any considerable time scale. Accordingly, we might think that Hayek is right to say that we cannot consider the outcome of a market process to be unjust. The outcomes of the dynamic market process are simply not within our control, and when thinking about its products, we might say that (to take a line from George Reisman [13]) "the proper way to regard them is as the equivalent of acts of nature."

But in Progress and Poverty, Henry George notes (7):

...just as...a community realizes the conditions which all civilized communities are striving for, and advances in the scale of material progress--just as closer settlement and a more intimate connection with the rest of the world, and greater utilization of labor-saving machinery, make possible greater economies in production and exchange, and wealth in consequence increases, not merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to population--so does poverty take a darker aspect. Some get an infinitely better and easier living, but others find it hard to get a living at all. The "tramp" comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of "material progress" as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow of the college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied.

If George is right to note that the same forces which promote progress in society also explain the emergence of poverty, then it will be a seemingly hollow position to argue that the undesirable outcomes produced by spontaneous ordering mechanisms are unforeseeable and unintended. Surely we could not predict or intend that each individual consequence were going to occur, nor could we foresee exactly who would be affected, and how and when. But we could nevertheless predict with relative certainty that someone would be affected by the dark side of the market process. Consider this observation from Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (59-60):

Yes, we should keep an eye on Joe Smith. He has been thrown out of a job by the new machine. Perhaps he can soon get another job, even a better one. But perhaps, also, he has devoted many years of his life to acquiring and improving a special skill for which the market no longer has any use. He has lost this investment in himself, in his old skill, just as his former employer, perhaps, has lost his investment in old machines or processes suddenly rendered obsolete. He was a skilled workman, and paid as a skilled workman. Now he has become overnight an unskilled workman again, and can hope, for the present, only for the wages of an unskilled workman, because the one skill he had is no longer needed. We cannot and must not forget Joe Smith. His is one of the personal tragedies that, as we shall see, are incident to nearly all industrial and economic progress.

It seems to me that it is for this reason -- that is, it is because we can foresee that there will be undesirable consequences in a free market society, even if we can not foresee exactly what they will be -- that it can make sense to talk about distributive justice at all (I am here taking the opposite position as I did in this earlier post). As I discussed before, we cannot coherently do so if we have in mind an act of distributing, as no such act ever occurs. But to the extent that conceptions of justice apply to human conduct, and to the extent that a free market system is one way in which humans can conduct themselves in a social setting, it seems fair to think that we might be able to criticize the foreseeable statistical outcomes of the market process and ask whether something ought to be (or ought to have been done) about them.

But Wait! A Challenger!

Now in saying this, I will immediately be faced with an important objection, captured by Robert Nozick in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (161):

If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn't D2 also just?

In other words, it's important to notice that when we lament any of the outcomes of spontaneous free-market organization, we lament circumstances which seem to arise without anyone doing anything that we could coherently point to as having been wrong, or wicked. The problematic outcomes are typically either emergent, or the consequences of people doing things that we generally think they have every right to do (where there is blatant mistreatment, we generally wouldn't think of the problem as being one of distributive injustice).

So does that mean that the outcomes are just? There are three ways to dispute Nozick's argument: a) to argue that the starting point at which people find themselves in a market society is not actually just, b) to argue that what arises from a just initial position from just steps is not necessarily just, and c) to argue that, contrary to intuition, the consequences of market organization do not necessarily arise from just steps. I will consider each in turn.

What Makes a Starting Point Just?

In thinking about Nozick's D1, we will encounter two very different issues, which we will need to separate in order to proceed sensible. The first issue is whether any starting point in our market society can be legitimately pointed to as being, or having been, just. But the second issue, which is somewhat more important for our purposes, is whether the problems which are contained in the idea of "distributive injustice" are the products of unjust starting points -- that is, whether it would be helpful in disputing Nozick's conclusion to pursue this kind of argument. Because I think that the answer to the second issue is "No," I will only have a few words to say about the first issue, even though it is certainly worthy of a much more thorough discussion.

So is there a "just" starting point from which we can think of a market society as having proceeded? Clearly there is nothing that is literally a starting point which is relevant to our purposes. The free market is an organic, constantly evolving ecosystem of human activity. It started when people started working together (or more accurately, when primates or their predecessors started working together), and continues on until now. It has been characterized through its history by countless injustices, atrocities, and oppressions. These past wrongs have so thoroughly influenced the current state of the system that it would be incoherent to talk about "reversing the damage" that they caused. The people who are alive today would not even exist if history had not proceeded the way that it did.

So our starting point, no matter where we arbitrarily place it, will not represent a perfectly "just" starting point. But does that matter? To an extent, yes. But also, to an extent, no. As David Schmidtz writes in his book, Elements of Justice (212):

Dwelling too much on the past is wrong for the same reason that ignoring the past altogether is wrong: Excess in either direction reduces stability in transactions, thus making it harder to go forward in peace. A routine title search when buying a house (to verify that the seller's holding of the deed is in fact uncontested) is one thing; going back as many centuries as the land has been occupied is another.

But some will not object to our modern starting point because of mistreatment in the past, but rather because of the structure of the society in which we begin. Such a perspective is characteristic of the left-libertarians in the Steiner/Otsuka/Vallentyne mold, where the idea is that non-man made natural resources ought to be initially distributed according to an egalitarian principle.

It's here, however, that I want to pull the plug on this conversation, because as G.A. Cohen points out in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality (105):

I believe...that no such constitution is to be discovered: no egalitarian rule regarding external resources alone will, together with self-ownership, deliver equality of outcome, except, as in the case of joint ownership, at an unacceptable sacrifice of autonomy. There is a tendency in self-ownership to produce inequality, and the only way to nullify that tendency (without expressly abridging self-ownership) is through a regime over external resources which is so rigid that it excludes exercise of independent rights over oneself.

In other words, the problems which concern those focused on distributive justice do not find their roots in the starting point from which social evolution proceeds. Lamentable market outcomes are not simply the outcomes of unjust or unequal initial distribution, or of historical injustice and oppression. Rather, they are a product of that evolution itself. So it will do the proponent of distributive justice no good to focus on this aspect of Nozick's argument. Accordingly, I will move on to the next avenue of objection.

Do Just Steps Preserve Justice?

The next way to object to Nozick's argument is to contend that something that arises as the result of just steps is not necessarily just, even if we don't want to object to the initial set of conditions. On its face, it seems pretty uncontroversial to say that if there's no problem with an initial condition, and all of the changes from that initial condition were perfectly legitimate and just, then we don't really have grounds for calling the outcome "unjust." We may lament them -- as Hazlitt above lamented the fate of the workman who was displaced by the machine -- but we may not have reason to say that the outcome is unjust. Perhaps it is merely unfortunate. This is the intuition which Nozick seeks to capture, and does.

But consider this: In his essay, "The Institution of Property," David Schmidtz suggests:

Note a difference between justifying institutions that regulate appropriation and justifying particular acts of appropriation. Think of original appropriation as a game and of particular acts of appropriation as moves within the game. Even if the game is justified, a given move within the game may have nothing to recommend it. Indeed, we could say (for argument's sake) that any act of appropriation will seem arbitrary when viewed in isolation, and some will seem unconscionable. Even so, there can be compelling reasons to have an institutional framework that recognizes property claims on the basis of moves that would carry no weight in an institutional vacuum.

If a game can be justified even though individual moves, when taken in isolation, might not seem justified, then why couldn't we say that a game can be unjustified even if none of its moves seem problematic? I see no reason why not.

And this seems like exactly the kind of objection that is being raised by the proponents of distributive justice. That is, the problem with the market order is not that it is characterized by unjust moves, but rather that it is supposedly an unjust game -- it is a game which generates consequences that are unacceptable, even if none of the players do anything wrong at any particular time. In other words, the allegation is that market orders generate emergent injustices.

But do they really? Is it somehow unjust of us, as participants in a market order, to "play the game" that we do? Some libertarians and free-market thinkers will point out that all it means to "play the game" of market organization is to relate to each other in a purely voluntry way. By this conception, it would seem unreasonable to think of participating in a market order as contributing to injustice. After all, in a system of purely voluntary interactions, one individual's wealth is not gotten at the expense of anyone else's interests. No one, then, is made worse off in any way to which they do not assent. It might here be noted that a state of poverty is the natural state of man, and that it is wealth that is the surprising anomaly. Accordingly, we might think of the alleged "injustice" of capitalism as simply the product of some individuals being "left behind" by the rising tide of progress.

Taking this point of view, we might come to the conclusion that a free-market order is not unjust. People who "play the game" are participating in a process which generates wealth for those who are successful, and which simply leaves the unsuccessful in their original state. We might lament the fact that we don't all win, but we would be hard-pressed to contend that this inherent inequality of outcomes is unjust. By this view, capitalism is a game which individuals play at their own peril, if they so choose; it is a system which allows each individual to do things the way that she thinks is best, on the condition that she respects others' right to do the same. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (2):

This is what the modern concept of freedom means. Every adult is free to fashion his life according to his own plans. He is not forced to live according to the plan of a planning authority enforcing its unique plan by the police, i.e., the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion. What restricts the individual's freedom is not other people's violence or threat of violence, but the physiological structure of his body and the inescapable nature-given scarcity of the factors of production. It is obvious that man's discretion to shape his own fate can never trespass the limits drawn by what are called the laws of nature.

But G.A. Cohen disagrees with this way of looking at things, arguing in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality that within a market society, a property-less proletarian "must either sell his labour power to a capitalist or die" (100), and accordingly "lacks self-ownership, in an effective sense" (ibid). Cohen is seizing upon the idea that if the choice is between voluntarily living according to someone else's plans at unfavorable terms on one hand, and starving to death or dying of exposure on the other, the sense in which one is free to choose one's own fate is "merely formal" (ibid; italics original).

This point can be more fully appreciated by calling on a definition from F.A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty (19):

By "coercion" we mean such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another. Except in the sense of choosing the lesser evil in a situation forced on him by another, he is unable either to use his own intelligence or knowledge or to follow his own aims or beliefs. Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

Now, Cohen would not want to say that an individual employer forces a worker into his service -- that is clearly untrue. But he would likely want to contend that the market system, with its institutions of private property and endemic inequality, effectively coerces the proletarian with its choice between death and an emiserated survival by the grace of some exploiter. It is precisely because coercion is evil, by this point of view, that the so-called "free-market" system is unjust.

But if we are to condemn the system in which the proletarian is allegedly coerced, we must consider how the system supposedly brings about this state of affairs. Surely the objection to a market order is not raised to demand rectification for the fate of the person who led himself to financial ruin through bad decisions and poor judgment. Though we may lament such an outcome, it seems clear that we would not want to cite this sort of thing as an injustice. The critic of the market system is most plausible when targetting her objections at circumstances like the one discussed by Hazlitt above, where workers are displaced by the perpetual churning of the marketplace, or circumstances in which individuals are born into unfortunate lifestyles through an inherited lack of access to capital resources. We shall therefore examine each of these indictments in turn.

The destruction of existing order by dynamic market processes is indeed an inherent characteristic of a healthy market process. And it is therefore true that individuals may, as a result of this so-called "creative destruction" (to steal Schumpeter's term), find themselves in a position where they are effectively coerced by force of circumstances into a sort of proletarian existence. But I think that a good case can be made for the idea that this is simply a risk of participating in the market process. That is, it is surely a lamentable feature of that process that some people end up on the losing side, but I am unsure how we would justify calling this an unjust feature of the market. As F.A. Hayek writes in his essay, "Individualism: True and False" (21-22):

...if the individual is to be free to choose, it is inevitable that he should bear the risk attaching to that choice and that in consequence he be rewarded, not according to the goodness or badness of his intentions, but solely on the basis of the value of the results to others.

Perhaps I will need to think about this some more, but I can't see any reason for thinking about this sort of thing as anything more than an unfortunate characteristic of the market system.

More concerning, I think, is the state of affairs faced by the proletarian who is born into his situation -- forced by the nature of his upbringing into a sort of "wage slavery." The free-market proponent can undoubtedly point to a number of examples of such cases where through hard work, talent, and a little bit luck led the individual to a prosperous life. The critic can undoubtedly point to a larger number of such examples where no such thing took place. The point that the free-market critic makes in citing such examples is not that injustice cannot be overcome, as the free-market proponent's counterargument may often make it appear. Rather, the point is that such circumstances are unjust regardless of whether or not they can be overcome.

But how do these circumstances come about? The private property system itself seems like a popular target, given that the most obvious reason for the proletarian's state of affairs is her lack of access to the resources which would empower her to take better control of her life in order to direct it to her own ends, and the most apparent reason why she does not have access to those resources is a coercive set of institutions which will stop her if she tries to use them. As G.A. Cohen observes in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality (55-56):

The banal truth is, if the state prevents me from doing something that I want to do, then it places a restriction on my freedom. Suppose, then, that I want to perform an action which involves a legally prohibited use of your property. I want, let us say, to pitch a tent in your large back garden, perhaps just in order to annoy you, or perhaps for the more substantial reason that I have nowhere to live and no land of my own, but I have got hold of a tent, legitimately or otherwise. If I now try to do this thing that I want to do, the chances are that the state will intervene on your behalf. If it does, I shall suffer a constraint on my freedom. The same goes, of course, for all unpermitted use of a piece of private property by those who do not own it, and there are always those who do not own it, since 'private ownership by one person presupposes non-ownership on the part of other persons.

But is the problem really that we have a society in which there are rules delineating who has the right of way with respect to the use of specific objects? As David Schmidtz writes in his book, Elements of Justice (157):

We cannot live together without rules that secure our possessions, thereby enabling us to plan our separate lives.

Even Karl Marx, in his essay on "Estranged Labour," allows that material possessions are critical to one's ability to find fulfillment and to shape one's own identity. Marx writes:

It is...in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.

The problem with the market system, it seems, is not that it is characterized by property rules. Rather, the problem appears to be that the proletarian doesn't have property, and is therefore not able to pursue the self-defining ends which both libertarians and non-libertarians prize. In other words, the alleged "injustice" of the market system is not that there is property, but rather that the proletarian doesn't have any.

The critic of the market system must therefore build his case on the idea that the injustice caused by the market system is in bringing it about that the proletarian is born into poverty. But this is where the case crumbles. The case crumbles because it is decidedly not the fault of the market system that the proletarian is born into poverty. Rather, it is the fault of the proletarian's parents that she is born into poverty. Neither the market system nor its propertied participants can be blamed for the fact that the proletarian was put into a position where she had to choose between being a wage-slave and dying. The fact that the proletarian did not simply show up on the scene, but was rather brought to the scene by her parents, seems to absolve "the system" of guilt for the proletarian's position, at least in my mind.

Now there are two ways that I can imagine someone objecting to this conclusion. The first would be to pointedly ask, "Are you seriously saying that poor people shouldn't have children?," and then to rattle off a list of reasons why I am a heartless, evil jerk. To this I would respond that if it is true that it is an injustice for someone to have to live a life of wage slavery, and if it is further true that a parent can foresee that by having a child, she will be condemning him to a life of emiserated labor, in which he will be unable to pursue his own fulfillment, then perhaps that is what I am saying. But I would qualify this claim with the important point that even poor parents can prepare their children for an active and fulfilling role in society by raising them well, and would therefore be responsible for no injustice in having a child. My only claim is that if we find an individual whose life we wish to declare an injustice because of his upbringing and the circumstances of his birth, then it would seem odd to place the blame elsewhere than on the individuals who were directly responsible for that upbringing and birth.

The second kind of response I can imagine would be to insist that the system can be blamed for the state of the parents (or the parents' parents, and so on) because of some past injustice which explains the cycle of poverty in the midst of which we find our proletarian. And while that response is perhaps a legitimate one, I would have to point the responder back to the previous section for my reply.

So, then, it seems to me that in declaring a distribution to be unjust, one cannot blame the market system itself, or the society which participates in that system, for unjustly "playing the game." The game, it seems to me, is not at fault for alleged distributive injustices.

At this point we should pause and retrace our steps. The problem with which we are here concerned starts with Robert Nozick's claim that any outcome which arises through just steps from a just initial starting point is itself just. We were concerned because this claim is at odds with the concept of distributive justice, which suggests that some of the outcomes of market processes are disturbing for intuitively moral reasons. We first asked whether we could save our intuitions by rejecting Nozick's implication that the market process has a just starting point, but concluded that this would not help our argument. In this section, we objected to the idea that just steps preserve justice, pointing out that a system of institutions can itself be unjust. We then considered whether or not the market system is itself an unjust system, and concluded that in the cases where we might intuitively want to identify distributive injustice, we cannot coherently blame the market system for unjustly bringing about those outcomes. Accordingly, rejecting this part of Nozick's argument will not help us to defend our intuitions about distributive injustice.

At the outset of our discussion, we said that there were going to be three steps in our examination, which leaves one left: the claim that the outcomes to which we object do not actually arise from a just initial starting position through just steps. But because we have objected to the structure of Nozick's argument, it will be irrelevant for us to explore this question -- we have seen that just steps do not necessarily preserve justice, and that it is irrelevant whether an initial starting point is in some sense "just." But we can rephrase the issue in light of the conclusions that we have drawn so far.

Ought We Really to Rely Upon the Market Process to Ensure Desirable Outcomes?

We will therefore ask: Even if we do not wish to take exception to some past state of affairs from which our current circumstances evolved, and even if we do not wish to claim that the market system itself is somehow an "unjust game," is it really true that we have no reason to object to the social process by which people have ended up in undesirable circumstances? Another (I think) equivalent way to think about this question is, if it is the case that undesirable outcomes arise for certain individuals purely through the normal workings of the market process (to which we do not want to object), and if those undesirable outcomes are allowed to stand, will it necessarily be the case that everyone has a claim to moral blamelessness?

In his essay, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Peter Singer writes:

...if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

In the example, we are not supposed to assume that the individual walking past the pond has put the child in the pond. No crime is supposed to have produced the child's unfortunate circumstances. And further, it is by no systemic injustice of the complex web of social interrelationships that the child is drowning. Yet if we simply watched the child drown, would that not seem wrong?

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.

With this realization, we can declare our analysis to be complete. I think I'm happy with this conclusion. Thanks for reading along!

Generational Rights

The conclusion that we cannot infringe upon future people’s right by causing climate change may not appeal to individuals who see injustice in the fact that by causing climate change, the world we leave behind for future people could be substantially less hospitable than it would have been if presently existing people had not caused climate change. One might argue that perhaps we do not infringe the rights of individual people by creating dangerous or otherwise undesirable circumstances which are necessary conditions for their existence, but we infringe the rights of their generation by leaving behind a “spoiled” Earth.

The appeal of this notion is in the fact that a generation is simply the group of people who come into existence during a particular period of time, and there is no requirement for who exactly those people are. So, for example, we may say that a woman, Charlene, is a member of some generation A. If Charlene’s mother had conceived a child with a different man than Charlene’s father, Charlene would never have existed. But so long as the child was conceived around the same time as Charlene was, that child would have also been a member of generation A. Because the identity of the generation does not depend on the identities of its members, one might see an opportunity for getting around the Non-Identity Problem by focusing on what happens to generations instead of individuals under different policy choices.

So do future generations have a right to inherit an unspoiled Earth? For that matter, do future generations have rights at all? We may once again recall that rights represent the respect to which we are due as individuals and as ends-in-ourselves. Because of the inclusion of individuality as a part of our conception of rights, it might be said that generations cannot possibly have rights, because they are not individuals. But it seems reasonable to say that to talk about respecting the individuality of a generation is only so suggest that it should not be sacrificed for the interests of others—namely, other generations.

One might point out that other groups, like corporations or organized communities, can be seen as “individuals” and “ends-in-themselves” in the sense that they are entities which utilize means in the pursuit of their own distinct ends. These entities can be “benefited” and “harmed” in a meaningful sense by impairing their ability to pursue their own goods, and so it would not be inconceivable to suppose that these entities had rights of their own which were not simply the sums of the rights of their members (whether they can truly be disrespected is a separate and controversial issue, which we will not address here).

It may be noted, however, that generations do not seem to have an analogous “good of their own,” and do not pursue their own distinct ends in any recognizable sense. Any discussion of “the good of a generation” seems like it could be nothing more than a vague statistical statement about the good of its members. Indeed, the aforementioned groups can be seen as ends-in-themselves only through an understanding of the way that they are organized. In the way that a body is composed of organs which have functions in terms of the good of the body, a corporation’s constituent parts are organized to promote the ends of the corporation. The members of a generation, on the other hand, have no identifiable function in terms of the good of the generation itself. Temporal coexistence does not seem to illustrate the sort of structure which could make it meaningful to talk about a generation as an abstract entity with a good of its own. And if a generation does not have a good of its own, then it is difficult to imagine how we could disrespect it. Accordingly, we may conclude that generations cannot have rights, and so cannot have a right to inherit an unspoiled Earth.

Rights for Future People in Light of the Non-Identity Problem

To this point, we have identified rights-infringements as occurring where climate change causes the climate system to become more dangerous. It might seem, then, that wherever the impacts of a more dangerous climate system are felt, rights will be infringed, into perpetuity. After all, the mere passage of time between a cause and its effects does not seem like the kind of feature which would lead us to deny that a rights-infringement has taken place.

But we might take a different view if we thought that those upon whom the impacts of climate change will eventuate will necessarily not be made any worse off than they possibly could have been. How could this be true? Consider the implications of climate change not being caused. Those who otherwise would have contributed to climate change would spend their money on different things, travel to different places, and get different jobs. More importantly, they would meet different people, and fall in love under different circumstances.

As Derek Parfit points out in his book, Reasons and Persons, “Each of us grew from a particular pair of cells: an ovum and the spermatozoon by which, out of millions, it was fertilized.” If our parents had conceived their children under substantially different circumstances than the ones through which we were brought into existence (perhaps even with different partners), the consequence would be that we would not exist; other people would have existed instead. Accordingly, Parfit observes:

If a choice between two social policies will affect the standard of living or the quality of life for about a century, it will affect the details of all the lives that, in our community, are later lived. As a result, some of those who later live will owe their existence to our choice of one of these two policies. After one or two centuries, this will be true of everyone in our community.

The changes in our lifestyles that would be necessary in order to prevent anthropogenic climate change seem like they would constitute the sort of differences which would affect the identities of future people within a relatively small number of generations. Even those communities which are completely isolated from the rest of civilization would likely be affected by the decision not to cause climate change, through differences in the climatic conditions in which they lived. Accordingly, we can say with a reasonable level of certainty that if humanity does not cause climate change, the people who will inherit the Earth will be a completely different group of people than would have existed if climate change had been allowed to occur.

Acknowledging this phenomenon, referred to as the Non-Identity Problem, we are faced with a startling conclusion. If we cause climate change, the people who will experience its effects will be people who could not possibly have existed if climate change had not occurred. Accordingly, they will be no worse off as a result of our choice to allow climate change to occur than they could have been in any other scenario. The climate change that they would face would be a necessary condition of their existence. Confronted with this fact, we must ask, do we infringe these individuals’ rights by contributing to climate change?

Perhaps the most intuitive response would be that we do not. There is a sense in which we generally think of rights-infringements as involving harm to their victims, and it difficult to identify any person among the future generations who will have to deal with the impacts of climate change who is harmed by the actions of the present-day contributors to climate change; none of them will be any worse off than they could have been in any other scenario. Essentially, the only thing that will have been done to them is that they will have been brought into existence. And while it is conceivable that in some cases, where a life is deemed to be not worth living, it might be seen as harmful to be brought into existence, this possibility does not seem to create problems for the overall notion that bringing a different set of people into existence is not a harmful act. If harm is a core component of rights, then, it seems that no rights are infringed when future people, who are only brought into existence because of climate change, have to deal with the effects of that climate change.

But some might point out that even if they are not technically worse off than they could have been, the impacts of climate change will involve definite costs for future people. Individuals have interests in certain things being the case, and it imposes a cost on them when those interests are hampered, even if their overall wellbeing is not made any lower than it otherwise could have been. An individual whose house is destroyed by a flood must still deal with the consequences of that destruction, even if the flood’s occurrence is a necessary condition of that individual’s existence.

Accordingly, one might coherently argue that individuals have a right not to have their interests interfered with by others, even if those costs do not result in the victim being made worse off as a result. For example, James Woodward writes:

In his moving memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl seems to suggest that, as a result of his imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, he developed certain resources of character, insights into the human condition, and capacities for appreciation that he would not otherwise have had. Let us suppose, not implausibly, that Frankl’s mistreatment by the Nazis was a necessary condition for the richness of his later life, and that, had the Nazis behaved differently toward him, his life would have been, on balance, less full and good. It seems wildly counterintuitive to suggest that it follows from this fact alone that the Nazis did not really wrong Frankl or violate his rights.

I think that Woodward’s suggestion is completely correct. It does seem as though Frankl’s rights were infringed by the Nazis’ actions, even though he was not actually made worse off on the whole, and that this is so because of the costs that were imposed on him. As we have discussed, the contributors to climate change will bring about the occurrence of phenomena which will impose costs on future people. If we accept the view that the hampering of certain kinds of interests is sufficient grounds for identifying a rights infringement, then, we might be led to the position that climate change does infringe the rights of future individuals.

However, we must note a critical difference between what it means for the Nazis to hamper Frankl’s interests and what it means for the contributors to climate change to hamper future people’s interests. We can reasonably say that if the Nazis had not imprisoned Frankl (and nor did anyone else), then Frankl would have gone unimprisoned. This is not the case for those future individuals whose interests are affected by climate change. If the contributors to climate change had not acted as they did, it is not as if the future individuals in question would have gone unaffected by climate change. They would have never come into existence.

We may think of this difference in terms of a particular set of conditions’ “distance” from some baseline representing the fulfillment of some interest. For Frankl, the relevant baseline was a state of liberty, in which his interest in being free of unjust imprisonment was fulfilled. By imprisoning Frankl, the Nazis “moved” Frankl away from the baseline in a way that impeded his interest in freedom. On the other hand, the future people who will be affected by climate change will be born into a world in which they are inherently not “on” the baseline of freedom from the costs that will be imposed upon them by climate change. By the nature of their existence, this baseline is unattainable. Where Frankl is moved off of his baseline, the future people who will be affected by climate change are not.

It seems intuitive to me that in order to have a right that something be the case, it needs to be possible that that thing be the case. If the thing in question is the integrity of my interest, then it must be possible that my interest is fulfilled. But the future people’s interests which will be hindered by climate change cannot possibly be fulfilled. Accordingly, it seems reasonable to say that future people have no right to these interests.

Reflecting upon our discussion of the nature of rights, this conclusion seems to be the correct one. As we have said, rights reflect the respect to which individuals are due as ends-in-themselves. If it is impossible that a person exist unless certain things are the case, then it seems odd to say that we could disrespect that person by bringing it about that those things are the case (again, excluding the possibility that the person’s life is not worth living). Accordingly, it seems fair to conclude that we do not infringe future people’s rights by causing phenomena that will impose costs upon them, so far as the occurrence of those phenomena are necessary conditions of those individuals’ existence.

"Costs" vs. "Harms" and Rights in Light of the Non-Identity Problem

So I've been talking a lot about the implications of the Non-Identity Problem for the way we think about our obligations to future people, and I came up with the idea that perhaps we want to talk about "costs" to future people, as opposed to "harms," because the concept of harm doesn't seem to apply. In my most recent post on the subject, I created a thought experiment which (I hope) demonstrated that costs can be imposed on people in spite of the fact that these costs don't represent harms (I'll be referring to the thought experiment in this post, so you might want to have read it before continuing on here). I concluded that post wondering what ethical significance we could attribute to these costs, since they don't actually represent harms.

In an earlier post, I suggested that Sidney's de-pantsing couldn't possibly be a violation of any rights held by him:

...when we talk about an infringement of rights, we compare a certain outcome to a baseline. In a paradigm case, we might say that if I infringe your right not to be robbed by robbing you, I "move you away" from the baseline of you not being robbed, in the "direction" of you being robbed. And if I infringe your right to inherit an unspoiled Earth, I must be bringing it about that you do not inherit an unspoiled Earth. And indeed I do. But I can't coherently say that I "move you away" from a baseline of inheriting an unspoiled Earth. So instead I have to say that I simply place you in a situation in which you are not on the baseline.

Is this morally the same sort of thing? If the critical element of a rights infringement is that I bring it about that you aren't on the baseline, then my action might qualify as one. But we have to acknowledge that your rights are not to "remaining on the baseline" or "not being moved away from the baseline." They're purely to "being on the baseline," even though you couldn't possibly have been there. We would have to say that the "movement away" from the baseline is not an essential part of the equation. But honestly, I think it is.

In his boldly titled essay, "The Non-Identity Problem," James Woodward disagrees. He discusses the choice of an energy policy which will cause a nuclear catastrophe in the future, and writes, "...the sort of analysis I have been exploring explains the wrongfulness of the choice of the nuclear policy by focusing on the difference between the situation of the nuclear people under the choice of the nuclear policy (when they are killed, injured, etc.) and an (unattainable) baseline situation in which the nuclear people exist and these violations of their rights do not occur. This difference represents a loss which, arguably, one can coherently think of as happening to the nuclear people."

It's almost amusing how similar Woodward's point is to what I've been saying. Really, there is only one major difference between our thinking. Woodward thinks that these events which represent departures from an abstract baseline represent violations of rights, where I do not. Why does Woodward think that this is the case? He writes, "Presumably what the nuclear people will complain about is the fact that many of their number have been killed, injured, poisoned, and so forth. Presumably they will not say, "We recognize that nothing wrong has been done to us. What awakens our indignation is rather that even better off people would have been produced if the alternative energy policy had been chosen."" And I agree. Just as Sidney would complain about having had his pants pulled down, and that the problem with Vlad's actions seems to be tied to the costly event that Sidney will be put through, it does seem that what's wrong with the nuclear policy is that it brings it about that people are killed, injured, poisoned, etc.

But remember that we have assumed as a precondition that all of these people had lives that were worth living. A reasonably strong case could seemingly be made that while these people would complain about these things, and think that they were wronged, their anger would be irrational. By saying that their rights had been violated, they would need to say that their existence violated their rights. And as long as they didn't wish that they had never been born (or as long as it didn't actually "harm" them to be born), we might say that their complaints represent a desire to have their cake and eat it to. Accordingly, I find myself unconvinced by Woodward's point.

It seems to me that a better place to start would be with a statement like, "It is wrong to act in such a way that a person comes into existence, upon whom the consequences of your actions will impose costs, but who will not have been provided with proper compensation for those costs." In my thought experiment, costs were imposed upon Sidney by Vlad's actions, and he was not provided with any form of compensation. In the same way, the nuclear people are not compensated for the damage done to them by the nuclear catastrophe. Accordingly, this principle would say that Vlad acted badly, and the policymakers acted badly, which I think reflects our intuitions about the situations. Further, it would capture an intuition, which Woodward and I share, that if we provided proper compensation to future people for costs our actions impose on them, then our overall actions would be acceptable.

There's another important factor which is dealt with by this principle, which was touched on by Steve Vanderheiden in his essay, "Conservation, Foresight, and the Future Generations Problem." Even if, as I have discussed, we think that Sidney and the nuclear people do not have their rights violated by the actions of the people in the past, we don't think that Sidney or the nuclear people would look back on those actions with approval. We might imagine Sidney saying, "Sure, I wouldn't trade the opportunity to live for not getting my pants pulled down. But still, Vlad was wrong to launch the rocket; he never should have done it. It's true that if he had acted rightly, I wouldn't exist. But I can accept that without wishing that I had never been born."

I think I'm happy with this, so I'll stop here.

Costs to Future People: A Thought Experiment

50th post! Hooray!

So I've been talking a lot about the implications of the Non-Identity Problem for dealing with issues like climate change, and I've come up with a thought experiment to help think about it.

Vlad is a mad scientist, and knows that his neighbors, the Crosbys, have been planning to have a child. He constructs a sophisticated robot in his laboratory (pronounced luh-bor-uh-tory), which he mounts atop a rocket. Vlad then waits at his window with his binoculars until he sees Mr. and Mrs. Crosby walk outside their house to have dinner on the porch. As the Crosbys sit down to eat, Vlad launches his rocket right out of his roof, filling his neighbors with awe and wonder. Inevitably, the fact that the Crosbys watched the rocket fly into space introduces tiny differences in the rest of their lives. Instead of eating at 6:03, they eat at 6:05; instead of talking to her friend Janet for 4 minutes and 35 seconds the next day, Mrs. Crosby talks for 4 minutes and 57 seconds. The differences are so tiny that they aren't really noticeable, but two days later, when the Crosbys get into bed to conceive their child, a different spermatozoon fertilizes Mrs. Crosby's egg than would have done so otherwise. The child developing inside of Mrs. Crosby would not have existed but for Vlad's rocket launch. Programmed to watch for this development, Vlad's robot detects the growing fetus and watches from space as the child is born and grows older.

Sidney Crosby, the Crosbys' son, is now thirteen, and has developed a crush on a girl in his class. One day at recess, he finally musters the courage to go talk to her. This is exactly what Vlad's robot has been waiting for. It turns on a cloaking device (which renders it invisible) and silently descends from space, coming up right behind Sidney as he approaches the girl. Right as the two begin to talk, Vlad's robot grabs hold of Sidney's pants and jerks them to the ground. As the playground erupts with laughter, Vlad's robot silently slips away, leaving Sidney to wallow in his humiliation.

Now, because the robot is only mechanically doing as it was programmed, it should be clear that the sole responsibility for Sidney's de-pantsing lies with Vlad. And assuming that neither Vlad nor anyone else can stop the robot once it's been launched, Sidney's de-pantsing is a necessary condition for Sidney's existence. If Vlad hadn't launched the robot, the Crosbys would have simply had a different child. So Sidney is no worse off than he could possibly have been.

But I don't think it's difficult to see why we might nevertheless want to say that a cost is imposed on Sidney when Vlad's robot pulls his pants down. But what does it mean to say this? And what ethical significance could such a cost have?

Cost-Benefit Analysis in Light of the Non-Identity Problem

So earlier I wrote about the role played by discounting in doing cost-benefit analyses on the impacts of climate change. I concluded that discounting of future damage is unethical because it treats future people as if their interests matter less than present people's. But recently, I've also been discussing the implications of the Non-Identity Problem, and it should be clear that cost-benefit analysis needs to explain its relevance in light of this problem.

For those who haven't been paying attention (or have only recently begun seeing my blog at its spiffy new alternative location), I explained the relevance of the Non-Identity Problem like this:

If we were to act to prevent or mitigate climate change, we would bring it about that people would spend their money on different things, travel to different places, meet different people, get different jobs, and most importantly, have different children (just think how tiny are the chances of a particular spermatozoon fertilizing a particular egg!). In 100 years, it's likely (if not certain) that the world would be populated by an entirely different set of people.

As a consequence of this "fact" (I will accept it as one), we are pretty much forced to say that the people who inherit a world affected by climate change are no worse off than they could have been, because if we had caused less climate change, they wouldn't have existed. Accordingly, it seems difficult to see how we could say that climate change "harms" anyone; if we did anything differently "to" them, they'd simply not exist.

So if the people who would face climate change will be different people than the ones who would have existed if we didn't cause climate change, how can we reasonably talk about costs being incurred as a result of climate change? It seems like when we talk about costs, we do rely on some sort of counterfactual, based on what would have happened if the event in question hadn't happened. For example, let's say I'm talking about a cost imposed on me by a car accident. What I have in mind is that there is a difference between what actually happened to me and what would have happened to me if the accident hadn't happened.

And when we talk about costs imposed by climate change, it seems like we're using the same sort of thinking: the costs imposed by climate change represent the difference between what happens to people in a climate change scenario, and what would have happened to them in the absence of climate change. But as I've said, what would happen to them in the absence of climate change is that they wouldn't exist. So how can we say that a cost has been imposed?

It's my view that this is actually not a problem for cost-benefit analyses at all. When we talk about what would have happened if a particular event had not occurred, I don't think it's necessary that it would actually have been possible for the event not to have occurred. I might say, "What costs and benefits did I incur as a result of being born male instead of female?" I couldn't have been born female; if my parents had a female child, it wouldn't have been me. But I still think we can ask such a question without speaking utter gibberish.

Some might be quick to point out that doing so would involve a lot of serious difficulties, because we'd have to hypothesize exactly what kind of life "I" would have lived, and we'd need to somehow compare that life to the one I already have. In the same way, it's extremely difficult to establish what someone's life would have been like if climate change hadn't affected them, and probably harder still to compare that hypothetical life to the one that actually happens. But it's important to see that this problem isn't confined to situations characterized by the Non-Identity Problem. The same kind of difficulties seem to be present when we ask, "What costs and benefits did I incur as a result of majoring in philosophy?" And it seems to me that any cost-benefit analysis is going to have to face these problems.

So back to the real question: does the Non-Identity Problem create any new problems for cost-benefit analysis? It does if we think of costs as representing harmful deviations from alternative possibilities. As I pointed out earlier, the concept of harm seems to include the idea of being moved away from a baseline, and the sort of baseline we'd need to refer to here is one where the individual couldn't possibly be on the baseline. If you couldn't exist if certain things didn't happen, then it's hard to see why we would say that you're harmed by their happening. But costs don't need to be thought of as harmful to people. As I alluded to earlier, I wouldn't want to say that I was harmed by being born a male instead of a female. My being male seems to be a necessary condition for my existence. But I can still try to determine what costs being a male has imposed on me.

So the fact that we can't consider the costs involved in future cost-benefit calculations to be harmful doesn't prevent us from being able to conduct the cost-benefit analysis. But one thing we have to keep in mind is whether the costs that we'd be measuring have any ethical significance. I want to think more about that, so I'll stop here.

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.

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.