Sunday, March 30, 2008
I'm Famous!!
[EDIT: This post responded to a rather unflattering review I received in a podcast by Freedomain Radio's Stefan Molyneux titled The FOO Infection, which I felt was unfair and impolite. Because I honestly don't want to look at it anymore, and because I think its purpose has been fulfilled, I'm removing it from my blog. This shell of a post will remain to acknowledge what happened, but I'd just as soon forget about it and move on.]
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Balancing Benefits and Costs to Tort Victims
[It has come to my attention that I'm an idiot and apparently can't tell the difference between the word "defendant" and "plaintiff." I apologize to anyone who may have been confused by this post.]
In an earlier post, I wrote:
I said I needed to think about this idea, and after having given it a while to digest in my head, I've come to a cautious and tentative conclusion: This is still the craziest damn thing I've ever heard. I'll try to sketch some reasons why we should reject it, but I still haven't found anyone who has wanted to defend the idea, so I'm not quite ready to declare any sort of victory.
The main reason I don't like this idea is that the whole point of taking someone to court is that damage done to you is made right. Usually, what this means is making me give you some benefit (i.e. money) which supposedly makes everything okay. It doesn't seem to me that it needs to be money. Perhaps it would be difficult to say whether another kind of benefit was appropriately valuable, but we're assuming away that epistemological problem when we say that the benefits do outweigh the costs. Accordingly, it seems like what's going on is that I can legitimately harm you and then give you a compensating benefit later, but for whatever reason, it's not okay if I give you the compensating benefit at the same time as the harm you endure. How this makes sense is beyond me.
Perhaps someone could take exception to the idea of a compensating benefit "balancing out" a cost. Let's say I smash your window with a bag of money which would easily pay for a new window, with enough left over to compensate you for the inconvenience. I could see why someone might say that simply being compensated couldn't erase the harm done; the aggregating view of harms and benefits might be inadequate. But that's now what's at issue here. If you wanted to make such an objection, then it would be contentious whether or not the benefit outweighed the costs you incurred. In the example, we agree that the costs have been outweighed. Accordingly, it seems like this objection falls short.
To be honest, if I smashed your window with a big bag of money, and you agreed that the money was sufficient to compensate you for the damage I caused, then I have no idea why you would be justified in taking me to court. Perhaps you could demand an injunction so that I would be prohibited from breaking your window again. But how would it make sense to force me to compensate you again? I simply can't wrap my head around it.
In any case, I might simply be misunderstanding what's going on here. I'm no legal scholar, after all. I'll keep asking around.
In an earlier post, I wrote:
In his essay, "Science, Public Policy, and Global Warming: Rethinking the Market Liberal Position," Edwin Dolan writes, "Certain defenses are allowed against a charge of assault or trespass. Consent of the victim is one. Also, if no causal relationship can be shown between the action of the defendant and the offense to the victim, the tort is not proved. However, certain attempted defenses are not recognized as legally valid..." Of these, one is "A showing that the defendant gained benefits from the tort, the value of which exceeds the costs to the victim."
This means that an individual can perform an action which is beneficial to everyone, and still be required to compensate people for any individual negative effects resulting from the action. It is important to note that the issue is not whether it could be proven that the action produced beneficial consequences for the victim that were more significant than the costs imposed. Rather, even if this were proven, the boundary-crosser would still be required to pay the victim.
I said I needed to think about this idea, and after having given it a while to digest in my head, I've come to a cautious and tentative conclusion: This is still the craziest damn thing I've ever heard. I'll try to sketch some reasons why we should reject it, but I still haven't found anyone who has wanted to defend the idea, so I'm not quite ready to declare any sort of victory.
The main reason I don't like this idea is that the whole point of taking someone to court is that damage done to you is made right. Usually, what this means is making me give you some benefit (i.e. money) which supposedly makes everything okay. It doesn't seem to me that it needs to be money. Perhaps it would be difficult to say whether another kind of benefit was appropriately valuable, but we're assuming away that epistemological problem when we say that the benefits do outweigh the costs. Accordingly, it seems like what's going on is that I can legitimately harm you and then give you a compensating benefit later, but for whatever reason, it's not okay if I give you the compensating benefit at the same time as the harm you endure. How this makes sense is beyond me.
Perhaps someone could take exception to the idea of a compensating benefit "balancing out" a cost. Let's say I smash your window with a bag of money which would easily pay for a new window, with enough left over to compensate you for the inconvenience. I could see why someone might say that simply being compensated couldn't erase the harm done; the aggregating view of harms and benefits might be inadequate. But that's now what's at issue here. If you wanted to make such an objection, then it would be contentious whether or not the benefit outweighed the costs you incurred. In the example, we agree that the costs have been outweighed. Accordingly, it seems like this objection falls short.
To be honest, if I smashed your window with a big bag of money, and you agreed that the money was sufficient to compensate you for the damage I caused, then I have no idea why you would be justified in taking me to court. Perhaps you could demand an injunction so that I would be prohibited from breaking your window again. But how would it make sense to force me to compensate you again? I simply can't wrap my head around it.
In any case, I might simply be misunderstanding what's going on here. I'm no legal scholar, after all. I'll keep asking around.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Climate Change, Vanishing Lifestyles, and Children
So in a previous post, I discussed a case in which rising sea levels, resulting from a warming of the Earth, caused the salinization of a Bangladeshi farmer's land, so that he could no longer grow rice on it in the way to which he was accustomed. I concluded that as the owner of the land, with full property rights, he should be entitled to compensation for any damage done to him by those contributing to climate change. And it seems like this could be extended to any member of the contributors' generation who were harmed by climate change.
But costs associated with climate change will not only be incurred by individuals who are alive now, they will be realized by future people as well. The nature of the cost to future people, however, is less clear than the nature of the costs to existing people. This post will explore a sort of impact which seems to be central to people's concern about climate change, but which is difficult to deal with in the framework of human rights. Namely, many communities will be impacted in a way that makes it difficult for them to continue their cultural existence, making it necessary for the children of those cultures to find fundamentally different ways of living.
For example, indigenous communities in Africa will see progressively more significant alterations to their natural setting as the climate continues to change. Plants and animals which were once prevalent in the region will no longer be fit for survival there, and new species will move in. Knowledge developed over centuries will no longer be effective. Being ill adapted for life in a fundamentally different climate, it is conceivable that these communities will be unable to survive in the manner in which they have for countless generations. They would have to find a new way to live.
What do we say about this? It is clear that a great number of people are concerned about precisely this sort of problem, and cite it as a reason to be worried about climate change. But does it tell a story of injustice? Many people's intuitions say yes.
However, we might point out that the above case sounds a lot like a story where an agrarian community is "destroyed" by industrialization and mass production. Small scale family farms can't keep up with the low prices generated by the advanced practices of a local agribusiness concern, and can no longer support their old way of life. It's a sad story, but we wouldn't want to claim that any injustice has occurred. Perhaps as a society, we would want to help these farmers get back on their feet and find a new place in the market. But we wouldn't want to blame the agribusiness for doing something wrong.
If there is no wrongdoing in the industrialization case, where communities might be unable to sustain their old lifestyles as the result of the actions of others, then can we consistently hold that there is injustice being done to indigenous people by climate change? Or are we simply setting indigenous communities on a pedestal because they're different and mysterious, and we somehow think that by being so unusual, these individuals come to have different rights than the rest of us?
It seems to me that there is a critical difference between the destruction of the indigenous community caused by climate change and the destruction of the agrarian community caused by industrialization. In the industrialization case, it's not as if the agribusiness made it impossible for the family farmers to continue farming. Rather, the problem arises because the family farmers were depending on the support of their customers in order to sustain themselves. Given that their customers had the right to remove their support at any time, it should be clear that the farmers were depending on others making choices which they could permissibly not make, or stop making at any time. The agribusiness, with its greater efficiency, could offer much lower prices than the family farmers, and their customers decided to withdraw their support, as was their right. It should be clear that in our story, the agribusiness never did anything to the family farmers. It simply revealed the fact that the family farmers could only continue to sustain themselves in their traditional manner if their customers continued to voluntarily purchase their products. The family farmers never had any right to that support, and so when it was withdrawn, no right was violated.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the indigenous communities in question depend on anyone for their continued survival. They require only that their environments not be modified so as to make them incompatible with their lifestyles. And as far as these indigenous communities have been making use of their environments for centuries, it seems fair to say that they have some legitimate claim to their not being negatively affected by the actions of other people.
I suspect that if we told the agrarian story in a way that matched the indigenous story, our intuitions would tell us that we were dealing with a rights violation. For example, let's say an agrarian community depended on an underground stream to bring water to the region with which to grow crops. Now imagine that someone diverted the flow of water through the area so that the community's land ran dry. Surely we would say that the diversion of the water flow represented a wrong done to the farmers, right?
In the same way, it seems that changing the climate in a way that would negatively impact indigenous peoples' ability to continue living in their traditional manner would be unjust. But this is not new ground. This conclusion is pretty much the same as the one I reached in my post about the Bangladeshi farmer and the rising sea levels. I want to go one step further here.
As I mentioned before, the intuition that people have about this sort of case is not simply that our alteration of the climate is wrong because it harms currently existing indigenous peoples' ability to live in the manner to which they are accustomed. The problem is also that their children will be unable to live in that manner. That is, the issue is not just what happens to the people whose lives are made difficult by climate change, but also what happens to the people who will be unable to live in the traditional manner dictated by their culture, and what consequently happens to the culture itself.
In order to isolate these factors from the harm done to the currently existing indigenous individuals, we might imagine that these individuals have been fully compensated for the damage done to them as individuals. This compensation not only takes into account the damage to their property, but also the damage to their character and psyche; the currently existing indigenous individuals recognize they were wronged, but acknowledge that they have been compensated adequately for all that they personally have endured.
Now we might imagine that one of these indigenous individuals has a child, Akiko. Akiko is raised in the indigenous culture, but sees that she will be unable to support herself in the traditional way. She will need to live a fundamentally different lifestyle from that of her people in order to survive. If we are to sustain that climate change will result in injustice to people like Akiko, then we must say that Akiko is wronged by having to find a way of life which differs from her culture's traditions.
At first glance, this might seem absurd. I grew up in Westport, CT; do I have the right to a house there? I have a friend who comes from a family of doctors; does he have the right to be one too? Surely we don't want to say that people have a right to live like the people who brought them up lived. We must find some other way to explain what is wrong with Akiko's situation if we are to be taken seriously.
A clue can be found in the fact that just like in the example with the agribusiness and the family farmers, my demands about a house in Westport and my friend's demands for a doctor job require things of others. Given that I have no right to anything from these people, it seems ridiculous to suggest that I am wronged if they do not provide me with something. I do have the right to try to buy a house in Westport, and my friend has the right to try to be a doctor. But given that having a house or being a doctor require the voluntary consent of others (in my case, the consent of the house's previous owner; in my friends case, the consent of the hiring institution and of the customers who choose to purchase his services), we cannot have the right to these things.
Akiko's demands would also be rooted in her getting others' consent. That is, she does not own her people's land; the older members of her culture do. But the kind of consent Akiko requires is very different from the kind of consent I would need in order to get a house, in that Akiko has that consent. Akiko's people, we presume, would gladly allow Akiko to use, and even to own, the group's land. In the absence of climate change, Akiko would be able to support herself in the traditional way using nothing but this land. But because of the effects of climate change, the land will not be able to support her in the traditional way. The substance of Akiko's complaint, then, might seem to be that she should have inherited enough resources to sustain herself, but that climate change diminished those resources to make it impossible for her to use them in the way her culture would have suggested.
This leads us to an interesting idea. Remember, we have said that the current owners of the land were fully compensated for all of the damage done to them by the effects of climate change on their land. Akiko's complaint is that there is a gap between what she should have inherited and what she actually did inherit. In order to satisfy Akiko (if we have interpreted her complaint correctly), we would need to take the view that by damaging the indigenous people's land, we not only wronged those people, but also the people who stood to inherit the land later. The "damage done" would be the damage done to the current owners, as well as the "damage" done to the future owners who "should have" inherited the land in its original condition, but instead inherited it in a damaged and less useful state. Accordingly, Akiko too would be entitled to compensation.
Of course, from Akiko's standpoint, this seems like it would be a fair solution. Because climate change destroyed her people's ability to live off the land, every generation of people in her community would be compensated for the damage done to the land. I'm not sure if this would actually be right, though. It seems to go completely against the way we normally think about damage and liability. I'd like to think about this some more, but I think this was a good place to start.
But costs associated with climate change will not only be incurred by individuals who are alive now, they will be realized by future people as well. The nature of the cost to future people, however, is less clear than the nature of the costs to existing people. This post will explore a sort of impact which seems to be central to people's concern about climate change, but which is difficult to deal with in the framework of human rights. Namely, many communities will be impacted in a way that makes it difficult for them to continue their cultural existence, making it necessary for the children of those cultures to find fundamentally different ways of living.
For example, indigenous communities in Africa will see progressively more significant alterations to their natural setting as the climate continues to change. Plants and animals which were once prevalent in the region will no longer be fit for survival there, and new species will move in. Knowledge developed over centuries will no longer be effective. Being ill adapted for life in a fundamentally different climate, it is conceivable that these communities will be unable to survive in the manner in which they have for countless generations. They would have to find a new way to live.
What do we say about this? It is clear that a great number of people are concerned about precisely this sort of problem, and cite it as a reason to be worried about climate change. But does it tell a story of injustice? Many people's intuitions say yes.
However, we might point out that the above case sounds a lot like a story where an agrarian community is "destroyed" by industrialization and mass production. Small scale family farms can't keep up with the low prices generated by the advanced practices of a local agribusiness concern, and can no longer support their old way of life. It's a sad story, but we wouldn't want to claim that any injustice has occurred. Perhaps as a society, we would want to help these farmers get back on their feet and find a new place in the market. But we wouldn't want to blame the agribusiness for doing something wrong.
If there is no wrongdoing in the industrialization case, where communities might be unable to sustain their old lifestyles as the result of the actions of others, then can we consistently hold that there is injustice being done to indigenous people by climate change? Or are we simply setting indigenous communities on a pedestal because they're different and mysterious, and we somehow think that by being so unusual, these individuals come to have different rights than the rest of us?
It seems to me that there is a critical difference between the destruction of the indigenous community caused by climate change and the destruction of the agrarian community caused by industrialization. In the industrialization case, it's not as if the agribusiness made it impossible for the family farmers to continue farming. Rather, the problem arises because the family farmers were depending on the support of their customers in order to sustain themselves. Given that their customers had the right to remove their support at any time, it should be clear that the farmers were depending on others making choices which they could permissibly not make, or stop making at any time. The agribusiness, with its greater efficiency, could offer much lower prices than the family farmers, and their customers decided to withdraw their support, as was their right. It should be clear that in our story, the agribusiness never did anything to the family farmers. It simply revealed the fact that the family farmers could only continue to sustain themselves in their traditional manner if their customers continued to voluntarily purchase their products. The family farmers never had any right to that support, and so when it was withdrawn, no right was violated.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the indigenous communities in question depend on anyone for their continued survival. They require only that their environments not be modified so as to make them incompatible with their lifestyles. And as far as these indigenous communities have been making use of their environments for centuries, it seems fair to say that they have some legitimate claim to their not being negatively affected by the actions of other people.
I suspect that if we told the agrarian story in a way that matched the indigenous story, our intuitions would tell us that we were dealing with a rights violation. For example, let's say an agrarian community depended on an underground stream to bring water to the region with which to grow crops. Now imagine that someone diverted the flow of water through the area so that the community's land ran dry. Surely we would say that the diversion of the water flow represented a wrong done to the farmers, right?
In the same way, it seems that changing the climate in a way that would negatively impact indigenous peoples' ability to continue living in their traditional manner would be unjust. But this is not new ground. This conclusion is pretty much the same as the one I reached in my post about the Bangladeshi farmer and the rising sea levels. I want to go one step further here.
As I mentioned before, the intuition that people have about this sort of case is not simply that our alteration of the climate is wrong because it harms currently existing indigenous peoples' ability to live in the manner to which they are accustomed. The problem is also that their children will be unable to live in that manner. That is, the issue is not just what happens to the people whose lives are made difficult by climate change, but also what happens to the people who will be unable to live in the traditional manner dictated by their culture, and what consequently happens to the culture itself.
In order to isolate these factors from the harm done to the currently existing indigenous individuals, we might imagine that these individuals have been fully compensated for the damage done to them as individuals. This compensation not only takes into account the damage to their property, but also the damage to their character and psyche; the currently existing indigenous individuals recognize they were wronged, but acknowledge that they have been compensated adequately for all that they personally have endured.
Now we might imagine that one of these indigenous individuals has a child, Akiko. Akiko is raised in the indigenous culture, but sees that she will be unable to support herself in the traditional way. She will need to live a fundamentally different lifestyle from that of her people in order to survive. If we are to sustain that climate change will result in injustice to people like Akiko, then we must say that Akiko is wronged by having to find a way of life which differs from her culture's traditions.
At first glance, this might seem absurd. I grew up in Westport, CT; do I have the right to a house there? I have a friend who comes from a family of doctors; does he have the right to be one too? Surely we don't want to say that people have a right to live like the people who brought them up lived. We must find some other way to explain what is wrong with Akiko's situation if we are to be taken seriously.
A clue can be found in the fact that just like in the example with the agribusiness and the family farmers, my demands about a house in Westport and my friend's demands for a doctor job require things of others. Given that I have no right to anything from these people, it seems ridiculous to suggest that I am wronged if they do not provide me with something. I do have the right to try to buy a house in Westport, and my friend has the right to try to be a doctor. But given that having a house or being a doctor require the voluntary consent of others (in my case, the consent of the house's previous owner; in my friends case, the consent of the hiring institution and of the customers who choose to purchase his services), we cannot have the right to these things.
Akiko's demands would also be rooted in her getting others' consent. That is, she does not own her people's land; the older members of her culture do. But the kind of consent Akiko requires is very different from the kind of consent I would need in order to get a house, in that Akiko has that consent. Akiko's people, we presume, would gladly allow Akiko to use, and even to own, the group's land. In the absence of climate change, Akiko would be able to support herself in the traditional way using nothing but this land. But because of the effects of climate change, the land will not be able to support her in the traditional way. The substance of Akiko's complaint, then, might seem to be that she should have inherited enough resources to sustain herself, but that climate change diminished those resources to make it impossible for her to use them in the way her culture would have suggested.
This leads us to an interesting idea. Remember, we have said that the current owners of the land were fully compensated for all of the damage done to them by the effects of climate change on their land. Akiko's complaint is that there is a gap between what she should have inherited and what she actually did inherit. In order to satisfy Akiko (if we have interpreted her complaint correctly), we would need to take the view that by damaging the indigenous people's land, we not only wronged those people, but also the people who stood to inherit the land later. The "damage done" would be the damage done to the current owners, as well as the "damage" done to the future owners who "should have" inherited the land in its original condition, but instead inherited it in a damaged and less useful state. Accordingly, Akiko too would be entitled to compensation.
Of course, from Akiko's standpoint, this seems like it would be a fair solution. Because climate change destroyed her people's ability to live off the land, every generation of people in her community would be compensated for the damage done to the land. I'm not sure if this would actually be right, though. It seems to go completely against the way we normally think about damage and liability. I'd like to think about this some more, but I think this was a good place to start.
TMP 19: From The Purpose - And the Dangers, to The Seven Categories
[Part of The Molyneux Project; read the main critique here]
My Big Brother Google Analytics thing told me that a whole bunch of people checked out The Molyneux Project yesterday, and I felt really crummy about having set it aside for so long without finishing. Because I really don't have time to be doing this, I'm going to resist every urge in my body to critique every tiny point, and just focus on what I take to be important problems with Stefan's argument. I think this is justified, since the only reason I was doing it before was that I assumed that Stefan would be interested in it, and given the last few conversations I've had with him, I'm no longer sure that this is the case.
Anyway, Stefan concludes his first part by asking why we should even care about morality. He suggestss out that immoral people will not consult moral theories to determine whether they are immoral, and moral people don't need theories in order to continue being good. Further, being moral is no guarantee of safety or wellbeing. Still, Stefan insists that morality is important; he offers that one benefit of being moral is that one will have a lesser chance of being impacted by immoral people.
But remember that Stefan has defined morality in terms of universally preferable behavior. Morals are a set of rules identifying universally preferable behavior--that is, rules telling us what is necessary for the attainment of certain ends. Seen in that light, the purpose of studying morality is obvious. If we want to achieve the ends in question, then we are required to do so morally, because morality is simply a guide for achieving those ends. To put it another way, if we achieve the ends, it must be because we have acted morally, because any action capable of achieving them would fall under the umbrella of preferable actions.
Stefan then goes on to give an explanation of the glory of his task in the context of the darkness and gloom of human history. Hooray.
Starting the next section is a brief heading section entitled "Ethical Categories," in which Stefan tells us that his goal will be to examine how universally preferable behavior "validates or invalidates" common moral propositions. How exactly universally preferable behavior can do this is unclear, since Stefan has redefined most of our normal moral terms in order to fit his positive view of universally preferable behavior.
This can be made clear by an example gives in his next section, "The Seven Categories," where Stefan suggests that refraining from murder is universally preferable and "enforceable through violence." For refraining from murder to be universally preferable, it would need to be the case that murdering would, in every case, be incompatible with achieving certain ends. But I take it that there are at least some situations in which an individual's own ends could be promoted by murder. For example, let's say Clyde stands to inherit a large sum of money from hist dying grandmother. One day, when he went to visit her, she told Clyde that she was considering donating the money to a local group of skinheads, who would use the money to do absolutely horrible things. Being extremely old and weak, Clyde's grandmother is unable to struggle as Clyde smothers her with a pillow. The murder is perfect; no one ever suspects any wrongdoing, and Clyde gets the money. Further, Clyde is not plagued too severely by his conscience. His grandmother was going to die anyway, and a lot of good resulted from those skinheads not getting their hands on that money. If we are to insist that Clyde's behavior was wrong - that it was universally preferable for him to refrain from murdering his grandmother - then we must have in mind some ends which are not Clyde's. Stefan gives no account of these ends.
But more to the point, Stefan gives us no reason for considering Clyde to be evil in the way that our commonsense moral views would command us to. Clyde would simply be acting imprudently; his actions would not be conducive to achieving the ends we have in mind. Stefan would have to explain how these ends, more than having relevance in light of the fact that Clyde doesn't care about them, are actually virtuous and good, so that anyone who does not aim for them is evil.
And even if we grant this, Stefan has not given much of an account of this idea of "enforceability." It's true that he defined ethics and morality as referring to enforceable behaviors on page 48, but he didn't explain why they are enforceable, or what that means. He just said that they could be enforced, and that this enforceability had something to do with the fact that the actions in question were "inflicted" on others. Anyway, that's it for now. I'll try to make time for more later.
My Big Brother Google Analytics thing told me that a whole bunch of people checked out The Molyneux Project yesterday, and I felt really crummy about having set it aside for so long without finishing. Because I really don't have time to be doing this, I'm going to resist every urge in my body to critique every tiny point, and just focus on what I take to be important problems with Stefan's argument. I think this is justified, since the only reason I was doing it before was that I assumed that Stefan would be interested in it, and given the last few conversations I've had with him, I'm no longer sure that this is the case.
Anyway, Stefan concludes his first part by asking why we should even care about morality. He suggestss out that immoral people will not consult moral theories to determine whether they are immoral, and moral people don't need theories in order to continue being good. Further, being moral is no guarantee of safety or wellbeing. Still, Stefan insists that morality is important; he offers that one benefit of being moral is that one will have a lesser chance of being impacted by immoral people.
But remember that Stefan has defined morality in terms of universally preferable behavior. Morals are a set of rules identifying universally preferable behavior--that is, rules telling us what is necessary for the attainment of certain ends. Seen in that light, the purpose of studying morality is obvious. If we want to achieve the ends in question, then we are required to do so morally, because morality is simply a guide for achieving those ends. To put it another way, if we achieve the ends, it must be because we have acted morally, because any action capable of achieving them would fall under the umbrella of preferable actions.
Stefan then goes on to give an explanation of the glory of his task in the context of the darkness and gloom of human history. Hooray.
Starting the next section is a brief heading section entitled "Ethical Categories," in which Stefan tells us that his goal will be to examine how universally preferable behavior "validates or invalidates" common moral propositions. How exactly universally preferable behavior can do this is unclear, since Stefan has redefined most of our normal moral terms in order to fit his positive view of universally preferable behavior.
This can be made clear by an example gives in his next section, "The Seven Categories," where Stefan suggests that refraining from murder is universally preferable and "enforceable through violence." For refraining from murder to be universally preferable, it would need to be the case that murdering would, in every case, be incompatible with achieving certain ends. But I take it that there are at least some situations in which an individual's own ends could be promoted by murder. For example, let's say Clyde stands to inherit a large sum of money from hist dying grandmother. One day, when he went to visit her, she told Clyde that she was considering donating the money to a local group of skinheads, who would use the money to do absolutely horrible things. Being extremely old and weak, Clyde's grandmother is unable to struggle as Clyde smothers her with a pillow. The murder is perfect; no one ever suspects any wrongdoing, and Clyde gets the money. Further, Clyde is not plagued too severely by his conscience. His grandmother was going to die anyway, and a lot of good resulted from those skinheads not getting their hands on that money. If we are to insist that Clyde's behavior was wrong - that it was universally preferable for him to refrain from murdering his grandmother - then we must have in mind some ends which are not Clyde's. Stefan gives no account of these ends.
But more to the point, Stefan gives us no reason for considering Clyde to be evil in the way that our commonsense moral views would command us to. Clyde would simply be acting imprudently; his actions would not be conducive to achieving the ends we have in mind. Stefan would have to explain how these ends, more than having relevance in light of the fact that Clyde doesn't care about them, are actually virtuous and good, so that anyone who does not aim for them is evil.
And even if we grant this, Stefan has not given much of an account of this idea of "enforceability." It's true that he defined ethics and morality as referring to enforceable behaviors on page 48, but he didn't explain why they are enforceable, or what that means. He just said that they could be enforced, and that this enforceability had something to do with the fact that the actions in question were "inflicted" on others. Anyway, that's it for now. I'll try to make time for more later.
Climate Change and Market Definition of Property Rights
A fellow named Gregory responded to my post, "Can the Free Market Solve the Problems Posed by Climate Change?" with an argument which I think deserves to be discussed in some depth. Gregory wrote:
Gregory highlights the fact that the market has not yet developed an efficient way to enforce the property rights involved in discussions of climate change. I agree that on some level, to indict the free market for this fact would be problematic. In his essay, "Market-Based Environmentalism and the Free Market: They're Not the Same," Roy Cordato wrote
Mark Pennington bolsters this view in his essay, "Liberty, Markets, and Environmental Values: A Hayekian Defense of Free-Market Environmentalism," when he writes, "Transaction costs are not the sole preserve of the market system...and we commit the "nirvana fallacy" if we suggest the alternative to an imperfect market is a government immune from the same sort of problems."
I completely agree with these two authors, and Gregory, in saying that ill-defined and unenforced property rights are at the root of most (if not all, depending on your definition of "property rights") of the problems associated with climate change.
Further, I agree that the free market can solve some of the inadequacies in the process of enforcing justice, but often only if allowed to work without interference. Pennington writes:
That being said, I do think that we oversimplify if we simply suppose that the market will find a way to handle the problem in an acceptable manner, and leave it at that. In issues of justice, the "There are many ways to skin a cat" approach taken by the free market might not be acceptable. Improper conceptions of property rights are not simply inefficient, they are unjust. In his speech, "Another Take on Free Market Environmentalism: A Friendly Critique," David Roodman highlighted this idea when he said:
Later, he quipped, "Judges did not free the slaves; in fact, they tightened the bondage."
I don't mean to imply that libertarian judges would be unable to come up with a decent solution. I'm only suggesting that the answer might not be as simple as Rothbard made it sound when he wrote, in chapter 13 of his Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Human Nature:
The problem, in addition to the simple fact that this could be difficult to do, is that this group of Libertarian lawyers and jurists would need to arrive at decisions somehow. Either they could do so in accordance with majority opinion or some other procedural way, or (as I suspect Rothbard is aiming at) they could do so in accordance with the true principles of justice. If the former were the case, then I see no reason why we would call the result "rational and objective." And if the latter, then we should be able to replicate the activities of these lawyers and jurists on our own. But as those who have been keeping up with my work have undoubtedly seen, the task is not quite as simple as Rothbard makes it sound.
One approach would be to take a somewhat left-libertarian angle and say that climate change represents injustice due to an over-enclosure of the atmospheric commons. Edwin Dolan took this approach in his essay, "Science, Public Policy, and Global Warming: Rethinking the Market Liberal Perspective." Dolan wrote:
Because those responsible for climate change have, according to Dolan, taken more than their fair share, they must be subject to the demands of justice. He insists, "Defending the rights of property that has been unjustly acquired is a conservative position, not a liberal one."
But this approach has its difficulties. One problem is the fact that the atmospheric CO2 sink is not really a limited resource. The problem is not that "...the atmospheric commons - namely, the Earth's carbon absorbing capacity - are finite and depletable," as Tariq Banuri and Erika Spanger-Siegfried characterized it in their essay "Equity and the Clean Development Mechanism: Equity, Additionality, Supplementarity." As far as we're concerned (though technically this isn't true), we can dump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we want. It's not like one day we'll light a fire and the CO2 won't go into the atmosphere. The thing that's available in limited quantities is the atmosphere's capacity to absorb CO2 without causing any harm.
In light of this fact, the right way to allocate the resource in question is somewhat unclear. In a world in which we do exceed the total CO2 emissions we could release without causing objectionable climate change, what is the real significance of the amount of CO2 which we could have emitted without causing harm? This, I think, is a problem which reflects the fact that climate change is an emergent problem, and is therefore sort of different from other problems we normally face.
Of course, even if we figure out the significance of this "harmless sink capacity," there still remains a boatload of work to do in order to determine exactly who is responsible for what emissions, what rights are violated by climate change, whether non-rights-violating actions can be justly interfered with, what exactly we should hold people accountable for, who should bear what burdens, what accountability entails, what our accountabilities to future people are and how they should be enforced, and how we should administer all of this (I'm sure I'm leaving stuff out). Never mind the scientific uncertainty plaguing every step of the process!
At the end of the day, we can talk all we want about the market figuring out the answers to climate change through incentives for the enforcement of justice, but someone's going to have to figure this stuff out. If it can be done, hopefully I'll be able to figure out how, or at least set the process in motion for other people. I really hope that answers your question somehow!
If the market has not arrived at an efficient means regulating itself (compensating those damaged) then a government certainly will not be able to affect such a regulation efficiently. The cost of the regulation must be weighed against the benefit it provides. If economic growth is retarded by inefficient regulations, do we not harm future generations more than by waiting for the market to develop a mechanism to efficiently distribute justice?
Gregory highlights the fact that the market has not yet developed an efficient way to enforce the property rights involved in discussions of climate change. I agree that on some level, to indict the free market for this fact would be problematic. In his essay, "Market-Based Environmentalism and the Free Market: They're Not the Same," Roy Cordato wrote
...environmental problems are not an unavoidable side effect of a free-market economy. Instead, they occur because the institution setting--the property rights structure--required for the operation of a free market is not fully in place. Because, in all modern societies, government has taken nearly complete responsibility for the establishment and maintenance of this institutional setting, environmental problems are more appropriately viewed as manifestations of government failure, not market failure.
Mark Pennington bolsters this view in his essay, "Liberty, Markets, and Environmental Values: A Hayekian Defense of Free-Market Environmentalism," when he writes, "Transaction costs are not the sole preserve of the market system...and we commit the "nirvana fallacy" if we suggest the alternative to an imperfect market is a government immune from the same sort of problems."
I completely agree with these two authors, and Gregory, in saying that ill-defined and unenforced property rights are at the root of most (if not all, depending on your definition of "property rights") of the problems associated with climate change.
Further, I agree that the free market can solve some of the inadequacies in the process of enforcing justice, but often only if allowed to work without interference. Pennington writes:
Although proponents of free-market environmentalism recognize that environmental markets have limits owing to the prevalence of transaction costs, they contend that these problems are more like to be overcome within an institutional framework supportive of private contractual arrangements. In this perspective, all environmental externalities represent potential profit opportunities for entrepreneurs who can devise ways of defining private-property rights and arranging contracts (via technological innovations, for example) so that those currently free riding on collective goods or imposing negative external effects (for example, water pollution) on their neighbors are required to bear the full costs of their actions.
That being said, I do think that we oversimplify if we simply suppose that the market will find a way to handle the problem in an acceptable manner, and leave it at that. In issues of justice, the "There are many ways to skin a cat" approach taken by the free market might not be acceptable. Improper conceptions of property rights are not simply inefficient, they are unjust. In his speech, "Another Take on Free Market Environmentalism: A Friendly Critique," David Roodman highlighted this idea when he said:
Fine, I own my car. And you own your lungs. Property rights are allocated, seemingly. So now can we reach happy agreement about how to resolve the conflict? Fat chance. More likely, thousands of drivers and breathers will end up suing each other and then the problem will end up in the lap of the court, which would have to decide precisely where the right to free enjoyment of one's car stops and the right to free enjoyment of one's lungs starts.
Later, he quipped, "Judges did not free the slaves; in fact, they tightened the bondage."
I don't mean to imply that libertarian judges would be unable to come up with a decent solution. I'm only suggesting that the answer might not be as simple as Rothbard made it sound when he wrote, in chapter 13 of his Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Human Nature:
...it would not be a very difficult task for Libertarian lawyers and jurists to arrive at a rational and objective code of libertarian legal principles and procedures based on the axiom of defense of person and property, and consequently of no coercion to be used against anyone who is not a proven and convicted invader of such person and property. This code would then be followed and applied to specific cases by privately-competitive and free-market courts, all of whom would be pledged to abide by the code, and who would be employed on the market proportionately as the quality of their service satisfies the consumers of their product.
The problem, in addition to the simple fact that this could be difficult to do, is that this group of Libertarian lawyers and jurists would need to arrive at decisions somehow. Either they could do so in accordance with majority opinion or some other procedural way, or (as I suspect Rothbard is aiming at) they could do so in accordance with the true principles of justice. If the former were the case, then I see no reason why we would call the result "rational and objective." And if the latter, then we should be able to replicate the activities of these lawyers and jurists on our own. But as those who have been keeping up with my work have undoubtedly seen, the task is not quite as simple as Rothbard makes it sound.
One approach would be to take a somewhat left-libertarian angle and say that climate change represents injustice due to an over-enclosure of the atmospheric commons. Edwin Dolan took this approach in his essay, "Science, Public Policy, and Global Warming: Rethinking the Market Liberal Perspective." Dolan wrote:
Liberalism in America, in particular, grew up in a Lockean state of nature where it was really true, or at least seemed true, that homesteaders, loggers, grazers, and industrialists could take what they needed while leaving "enough and as good for others." What the environmentalist side of the global warming debate is telling us is that we no longer live in such a world.
Because those responsible for climate change have, according to Dolan, taken more than their fair share, they must be subject to the demands of justice. He insists, "Defending the rights of property that has been unjustly acquired is a conservative position, not a liberal one."
But this approach has its difficulties. One problem is the fact that the atmospheric CO2 sink is not really a limited resource. The problem is not that "...the atmospheric commons - namely, the Earth's carbon absorbing capacity - are finite and depletable," as Tariq Banuri and Erika Spanger-Siegfried characterized it in their essay "Equity and the Clean Development Mechanism: Equity, Additionality, Supplementarity." As far as we're concerned (though technically this isn't true), we can dump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we want. It's not like one day we'll light a fire and the CO2 won't go into the atmosphere. The thing that's available in limited quantities is the atmosphere's capacity to absorb CO2 without causing any harm.
In light of this fact, the right way to allocate the resource in question is somewhat unclear. In a world in which we do exceed the total CO2 emissions we could release without causing objectionable climate change, what is the real significance of the amount of CO2 which we could have emitted without causing harm? This, I think, is a problem which reflects the fact that climate change is an emergent problem, and is therefore sort of different from other problems we normally face.
Of course, even if we figure out the significance of this "harmless sink capacity," there still remains a boatload of work to do in order to determine exactly who is responsible for what emissions, what rights are violated by climate change, whether non-rights-violating actions can be justly interfered with, what exactly we should hold people accountable for, who should bear what burdens, what accountability entails, what our accountabilities to future people are and how they should be enforced, and how we should administer all of this (I'm sure I'm leaving stuff out). Never mind the scientific uncertainty plaguing every step of the process!
At the end of the day, we can talk all we want about the market figuring out the answers to climate change through incentives for the enforcement of justice, but someone's going to have to figure this stuff out. If it can be done, hopefully I'll be able to figure out how, or at least set the process in motion for other people. I really hope that answers your question somehow!
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