Back to the Drawing Board : Justice

On Desert and the Glass Ceiling

Donny with an A — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:03:00 GMT

So I've been thinking a little about Hayek's point that there's nothing about an overall state of affairs which arises from the decentralized actions of individuals in a market economy which could coherently be an "injustice." As I had said, I agree with Hayek, and I've been accordingly trying to think of a way to understand the concept of distributive justice in other terms. But on page 49 of his book, Elements of Justice, David Schmidtz raises an interesting point in discussing the idea of "desert":

...there is something slightly misleading, or at best incomplete, in assessing a society by asking whether people get what they deserve. If desert matters, then often a better question is, do people do something to deserve what they get? Do opportunities go to people who will do something to be worthy of them?

It seems to me that while there's something very intuitive about this point, there's a tension to be acknowledged. To flesh out Schmidtz's point, he offers on page 46 that "A person who receives opportunity X at t1 can be deserving at t2 because of what she did when given a chance." The idea here, then, seems to be that if a person does justice to the opportunity that she's given in the period between t1 and t2, then she proves that she deserved it at t1.

But while I think that the above may be a necessary condition for desert, I'm not sure if it's sufficient. What I have in mind is the interview where a man and a woman are being considered for a job. We might imagine that both would, if given the chance, do justice to the opportunity they were given: both are fully competent to do the job, and both would work hard at it. We might further say that both would likely succeed. But let's say that the woman candidate was better qualified for the job than the man, and it was simply a matter of prejudice on the part of the prospective employer which led him to choose the man. Even though the man would end up doing justice to the opportunity, I still think there's a sense in which we can say that he didn't really deserve the job, and that the woman did.

I wouldn't want to say that the man in the above example is entirely undeserving of the job. For his part, he did everything that we would have wanted him to do. But there is, I think, a sense in which he will have gotten something that he didn't deserve, even if he did everything he could to do justice to the opportunity he got. I definitely need to think about this some more, but it's a start.

Update:

Incidentally, Schmidtz makes more or less the same point in the next chapter in discussing whether a person who does not deserve an opportunity can still do justice to it. Sorry, Dr. Schmidtz! This seems to be a common theme...

The one thing that I think can be preserved from this post is the idea that something needs to be said about the person who is deprived of an opportunity that she did deserve because someone else got an opportunity he didn't deserve, even though the latter did justice to the opportunity once he got it, and therefore has "done all anyone could ask," to put it as Schmidtz does on page 52. Something...but I'm not sure what.

Away From Distributive Justice, Towards Collective Responsibility

Donny with an A — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 06:52:00 GMT

Here's another cool Hayek quote, from chapter 5 of his New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, entitled "The Atavism of Social Justice":

"...there can be no distributive justice where no one distributes. 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" (58).

I've been arguing basically that point of view for a while, and this is far from the first time I've heard it articulated by someone else, but I really like the way Hayek put it here. But it also got me thinking. Hayek does use as support for his argument the fact that the results of the market process are not foreseeable. And it does seem to me that a great many people see certain regrettable outcomes of the market process as quite foreseeable enough to dodge this argument.

"Perhaps the precise outcomes of the process are not foreseeable," someone might argue, "but we can easily foresee that certain things will likely occur, like the occasional occurrence of instances of extreme need. Even if, as a society, we think ourselves justified in 'playing the game' of catallaxy (as Hayek puts it on page 60 and later throughout the essay), we nevertheless might be able to point to certain predictable and regrettable outcomes of that game and demand that they be 'cleaned up.' It's on those grounds that I claim that we have some sort of obligation to ensure that no one is left behind 'by' our playing the game of catallaxy. I cannot articulate, necessarily, exactly what that obligation entails, or what is its nature, but to deny the existence of any such obligation seems simply wrong."

I think that would be a pretty fair line of attack, and I think it deserves an answer. I'm not sure what I'll find, but the question seems to become one which is perfectly tractable within my notion of rights and duties. So I pose for myself the following questions: Do we have a duty to help those in desperate need, either collective or individual? How might we understand such a duty, and what would it entail?

I'll be working on an answer to those questions over the coming months.

Law and the Knowledge Problem, a First Glance

Donny with an A — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:05:00 GMT

Update at the bottom of the post

Here's an interesting quote from Hayek's essay, "The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design," from his book, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics:

"...the natural law concept against which modern jurisprudence reacted was the perverted rationalist conception which interpreted the law of nature as the deductive constructions of 'natural reason' rather than as the undesigned outcome of a process of growth in which the test of what is justice was not anybody's arbitrary will but compatibility with a whole system of inherited but partly inarticulated rules" (101).

This does seem like a relatively accurate positive assessment of how law has evolved over time. But it does beg the question, then, of whether or not a centralized attempt to administer justice, which would rely on some understanding of what people will accept as just, would be akin to trying to plan an economy. The idea, in other words, is that if our recognition of justice relies on a partly inarticulated set of internalized rules, and those rules change over time and are sometimes contradictory, then the acceptability of any legal judgment will be in some some sense bound to the circumstances in which that attribution was made, and will necessarily fail to reflect the unanimous will of the people. If that's true, then it would seem almost impossible to determine what would be the proper standard of justice within a society at any given time, and so would be impossible to administer justice "properly" in much the same way as it's impossible to allocate resources "properly" through a centralized method of planning.

To make my case, I'll draw on a number of different quotes which I think paint a better picture of the issue than I might be able to do myself (especially given the "reason as I go" approach that generally characterizes these posts). First, from the beginning of David Schmidtz's book, Elements of Justice:

"I have become a pluralist, but there are many pluralisms. I focus not on concentric "spheres" of local, national, and international justice nor on how different cultures foster different intuitions, but on the variety of contexts we experience every day, calling in turn for principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, and need. I try to some extent to knit these four elements together, showing how they make room for each other and define each other's limits, but not at the cost of twisting them to make them appear to fit together better than they really do. Would a more elegant theory reduce the multiplicity of elements to one?" (4).

I jump over to the beginning of Rawls' Justice as Fairness: A Restatement:

"...I believe that a democratic society is not and cannot be a community, where by a community I mean a body of persons united in affirming the same comprehensive, or partly comprehensive doctrine. The fact of reasonable pluralism which characterizes a society with free institutions makes this impossible. This is the fact of profound and irreconcilable differences in citizens' reasonable comprehensive religious and philosophical conceptions of the world, and in their views of the moral and aesthetic values to be sought in human life" (3).

And with that, I jump back to Schmidtz, a few pages later:

"In effect, there are two ways to agree: We agree on what is correct, or on who has jurisdiction - who gets to decide. Freedom of religion took the latter form; we learned to be liberals in matters of religion, reaching consensus not on what to believe but on who gets to decide. So too with freedom of speech. Isn't it odd that our greatest successes in learning how to live together stem from agreeing on what is correct but from agreeing to let people decide for themselves?" (6).

And back to Hayek, this time in his essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society":

"The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess" (519).

He continues:

"In ordinary language we describe by the word "planning the complex of interrelated decisions about the allocation of our available resources. All economic activity is in this sense planning; and in any society in which many people collaborate, this planning, whoever does it, will in some measure have to be based on knowledge which, in the first instance, is not given to the planner but to somebody else, which somehow will have to be conveyed to the planner. The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process. And the problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy--or of designing an efficient economic system" (520).

And more:

"Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of particular circumstances of time and place" (521).

Just like how attributions of justice are contingent on a set of partly inarticulated rules, economic actors make their decisions according to their personal interpretations of circumstances, in light of their own value systems. And as they are inarticulated and often contradictory, they cannot be aggregated to form a "social" standard. Hayek writes:

"...the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form" (524).

So we've sort of gotten to the point I'm trying to make. Basically, if society's acceptance of certain things as just is, as Hayek says, based on compatibility with an internalized, partly inarticulated set of rules, and if these sets of rules are subject to reasonable pluralism and continuous flux, then it's as impossible to get law perfectly right through central planning as it is to get an economy perfectly right through central planning. But then the question becomes, so what? In looking at the economy, Hayek writes:

"We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization" (524).

But is this the right answer for law? That's something I'll have to leave for another day.

Update:

Hahahahahahahaha! So this post was written in a sort of "Ah hah!" moment while reading Hayek's "The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design," causing me to jump up from the book and hammer out the above. Turns out that if I had kept reading, I would have discovered Hayek making a nearly identical point in the essay itself. So I'd almost say to forget about this post and go pick up the book.

Three Different Ways of Using Force

Donny with an A — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:43:00 GMT

So here's the idea: there are at least three different ways that libertarians generally think of coercive force, and I think they've been harmed by treating them as if they were essentially the same sort of thing. The first kind of coercive "force" is the use of someone else's property without their permission, or in direct defiance of their wishes. The second kind is the initiation of physical force upon a person, again without permission or in violation of their explicit desires. The third kind is the threat of physical force directed at coercing a person into doing something against their will. I don't deny that there might be more "kinds," but these three came to mind first, so they're the one's I'll address here.

It seems to me that when many libertarians decry "coercion" or "aggressive force," they do so by means of certain kinds of arguments. These arguments sometimes take the form of identifying the "true nature" of certain kinds of coercive actions, and extending that characterization to other kinds of coercive actions which may or may not fall into different categories of force as expounded above. This, I think, can lead to mistakes.

For example, "Taxation is slavery because the product of your labor doesn't belong to you." The idea here is that the government "steals" some of your income from you (which depends on the rejection of the idea that you voluntarily live on the government's land by living in a country), and this money is the product of your own labor. But you know what you call a system in which you work, but someone else gets the product of that work? Yea, slavery. Blammo, take that government! *high fives from the libertarians*

Except here's the thing. There is exactly one sense in which taxation is like slavery, and it's not the sense that these people are talking about. The way that taxation is like slavery is that the government demands that you, or your employer, or someone not actually on their own staff, actually sends them the money. That is, if you don't put the check in the envelope, stamp it, and send it, you get punished. That's the third kind of force discussed above, where the threat of violence is used to coerce a person into doing something against their will. And that's exactly like slavery.

However, the reason that taxation is like slavery has nothing to do with the fact that the government gets the product of your work. That kind of thinking is not only sloppy, but in many ways anti-libertarian and Marxist. We live in a country where we are told that we will be taxed if we decide to work. In a slave society, slaves are told that they will be taxed and they will work, whether they like it or not. The government does not use the threat of force to make us produce income. That would be like the third kind of force, which is the kind that can be associated legitimately with slavery. We choose to work, and can choose not to do so without any government-enforced consequences.

The idea that the product of our labor should belong to us, even when we are explicitly a part of an arrangement in which it will be taken from us, is an idea that can be traced back to Marx and the labor theory of value. The very same idea is used to explain why capitalists exploit their workers: the workers produce, and the corporation gets the product of that labor. It's like wage-slavery! *high fives from the socialists*

The difference between a voluntary agreement to work and government taxation is not that corporations let you keep the product of your labor and the government doesn't. Rather, the difference is that you don't agree to the arrangement the government enforces upon you (well, under certain conceptions of voluntarity), and you do agree to the arrangement the corporation enforces upon you. In a corporate agreement, you are "paying" your employers with the product of your labor in exchange for them paying you with money that you want more than the product of your labor. In a government agreement, you are paying the government with the product of your labor so that they won't use the first kind of force (the use of your property against your will) or the second kind (the use of physical force against your person).

The slavery part of that bargain is the part where they actually make you pay the tax with the threat of those other kinds of force. If they just went to your bank and took the money from you, the slavery component would be gone. But ostensibly, nobody's complaining because we have to put a check in an envelope and mail it, or fill out a form every once in a while. I mean, that's a pain in the ass, but I really don't think that's the problem. The problem is not that taxation is like slavery, but rather that taxation is like theft.

But if you accept the view that we voluntarily live on the government's land, and part of our contract is that we pay taxes to the government, then even this characterization doesn't apply. The first kind of force (using property without the owner's permission) doesn't apply to situations where the alleged "owner" is party to an agreement through which she surrendered the title to that property, just like it's not the first kind of force when my employer takes the product of my labor without my consent. And the second kind of force (physical force against someone's person) doesn't seem to apply when the person is doing something that they have a perfect right to be doing, and are resisted against forcefully. In a sense, it would almost be self-defense for the government to collect its "rent", just like my employer would have every right to use some reasonable amount of force if I suddenly refused to give up the products of my labor in the middle of the work day (well, more accurately, he would have the right to demand that I appear in court or something similar, and if I were found to be in breach of my contract, some force would be legitimate in enforcing that contract; I'm no opponent of procedural justice).

So we see that "Taxation is slavery" collapses into "Taxation is theft, and they even make me give it to them at gunpoint", which then collapses into "The government doesn't have any legitimate claim to my property." It seems to me that all that would be perfectly clear to anyone willing to think about it for a moment if they would only separate the different kinds of force and consider each in its own light.

Protecting Others' Rights

Donny with an A — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:53:00 GMT

So here's the basic idea: It seems like there's a difference between coming to someone's aid when they're asking you to, and coming to someone's aid when you determine on your own that they're being treated wrongly. This difference, I think, is extremely important, and might open the door to an understanding of the libertarian position which would allow for a reconciliation with a lot of historically un-libertarian views. Here's what's up:

I take it that the backbone of any brand of libertarianism is a right to self-determination, such that individuals are entitled to non-interference in the absence of morally significant justification for doing so. But it's immediately clear that this exposition of the fundamental libertarian principle leaves its two core components somewhat indeterminate: it's unclear what constitutes a "morally significant" justification for interfering, and also what is meant by the "entitlement".

To illustrate how the distinction is supposed to work, without solving the problem posed by this indeterminacy: I think that most libertarians would want to recognize something like a "right to self-defense," which seems like it would be derivative from the right to self-determination. That is, it's because I have the right to self-determination that I have some right to self-defense. I am entitled to self-determination, so if others act to infringe upon that right, I am entitled to use some degree of force to stop them.

But notice that my doing this infringes upon the aggressor's right to self-determination. My use of force upon this individual would normally be unacceptable; they do have the right to self-determination. In this instance, however, they are in the process of infringing my right to self-determination. I take it, then, that this constitutes a morally significant justification for infringing their right. So it is acceptable for me to do so.

Now, here's why I like to think about it in this way: If someone wanted to object to my use of force -- to my infringement of the aggressor's right to self-determination in self-defense -- they would want to say something like "You used too much force" or "Two wrongs don't make a right." The former objection, I think, can be very informatively understood as contending that the degree to which I infringed the aggressor's rights was not justified by the circumstances under which I did so. And the latter can be understood as contending that "The fact that the aggressor was infringing your right to self-determination does not constitute a morally significant reason for using force in the way that you did." So the point is, even though I might disagree, the objections would still be stated in terms of the overarching framework for understanding rights, and we would be able to isolate the actual source of the disagreement.

Okay, so hopefully that makes sense. On, then, to the core of the discussion. Many libertarians accept the idea that if it would be permissible for me to use force against you in response to your infringing upon my rights, then it would be permissible for me to ask someone else to use that same force against you on my behalf, and for them to infringe upon your rights. It is on this basis, they argue, that we can justify things like security guards or coming to the rescue of someone who's being robbed, attacked, or raped.

I see no compelling reason to object to this doctrine, except the possibility that the person being defended might potentially not be justified in defending herself in certain situations, and a third party might not be able to know whether this were the case, and so would face a degree of uncertainty in intervening. But imagine that a businessman hires a delivery person to pick up a package from the garage at someone's home. The delivery person arrives at the house, which is empty, and sees the package sitting in the garage. She picks up the package and takes it to the businessman. Now imagine that it turns out that the package did not actually belong to the businessman, and what the delivery person has done is to steal the package on behalf of the businessman. It seems to me that the delivery person is completely innocent here, and that any accusation of wrongdoing should be aimed at the businessman. So too, then, it seems like the person who intervenes on behalf of a victim who is asking for help is guilty of no wrongdoing, even if victim were not actually in possession of the right to defend himself. The principle, then, would be that the person who transfers the justification which does not belong to him is the one who acts wrongly, and not the person who acts on the justification which they believe they have.
So, then, we can dismiss the one objection I can think of to the idea that others should be able to act as our agents in infringing the rights of others in order to protect ourselves. Shifting to the perspective of the third party, we can say that individuals are justified in intervening to protect entitlements at the request of an apparent victim, even though we must inherently face some uncertainty about whether or not the alleged victim actually has the entitlement we believe them to have (of course, standards of negligence would have to apply here).

As I have discussed in a past essay, Paul Taylor discusses two ways to conceive of rights and entitlements:

According to Taylor’s first account, there are several necessary components of rights...First, Taylor argues that to have a right, it must be possible for us to conceive of the rights-holder asserting the moral legitimacy of the claim represented by a right...Second, he claims that we must be able to conceive of the holder of a right being able to think of herself as being inherently worthy of that right...Third, Taylor contends that we must be able to conceive of a rights-holder as being able to choose whether or not to exercise his right...Finally, Taylor explains that having a right involves an entitlement to “…register complaints, demand redress, or call for legal enforcement of their rights…” whenever they are violated.

However:

Where the first view understood duties possessed by others as the corollary of rights recognized and asserted by the rights-holder, Taylor’s alternative conception of rights holds them to amount to recognitions of duties towards others which result from taking proper account of their inherent worth.

To be clear, Taylor was talking about whether or not plants and non-human animals could have rights. But it seems clear to me that the sort of example we've been working with so far, where a victim asks a third party for help, conforms very much with the first way of understanding rights. The victim perceives a rights violation, registers a complaint, and demands intervention to rectify the violation of his entitlement.

However, it should be readily apparent that there are situations in which individuals perceive a justification in intervening in situations which do not fit this form. For a first example, if you saw someone being beaten, and they were unconscious, it seems reasonable to think that you would be justified in intervening. For a second example, if you saw a child being groped in a sexual manner by a much older individual, it seems like most people would think that intervention would be acceptable. For a third example, if you saw a severely insane individual being beaten or sexually groped by a member of his institution's staff, many people would feel that intervention would be legitimate. The account of why you would be justified in intervening in each of these situations is of critical importance for understanding how intervention should work.

There are two kinds of explanations that come immediately to mind here. The first explanation, which is still in line with Taylor's first account of rights, is that the alleged victim, in the absence of "transactions costs," would ask you to intervene on their behalf, and that in situations where you can be almost certain that this is the case, you can legitimately go ahead and intervene even without being asked. But the second explanation, which falls more in line with Taylor's second account of rights, is that the person whose actions the intervention is meant to interfere with is acting improperly or unjustly, and can legitimately be stopped.

It seems to me that the aforementioned examples grow increasingly difficult to interpret through the lens of the first explanation, the the point where the third example is almost impossible to think about in that way (as is discussed in the previously mentioned essay). The first example, where the alleged victim is being beaten while unconscious, seems like a simple enough case where transaction costs are relatively uncontroversially preventing the victim from asking for help, and if the victim were physically able to, it's pretty reasonable to assume that he would ask for help.

In the second example, where the child was being sexually abused, this might be less clear; a child might not understand that she is being sexually abused by an adult, and may not understand until much later why she should have registered a complaint and requested protection. But still, one might argue that if the child were made to understand the true nature of the situation at hand (which may or may not actually be possible), she would almost certainly ask for help, and so it would be justifiable to intervene.

In the third example, however, we run into serious problems. As I wrote in the previously mentioned essay:

Some insane and severely mentally handicapped individuals are certainly unable to conceive of “legitimacy,” to see themselves as being inherently worthy of respect, to choose whether to exercise or waive a right, to complain about violations of their rights, to demand restitution, and to call for the enforcement of their rights. Accordingly, Taylor’s first view would deny that we can possibly conceive of these individuals as having rights.

But nevertheless it seems clear that we would often think ourselves justified in using coercion to protect these individuals. And it does seem that the kind of situation in which we would feel justified in doing this lines up quite well with Taylor’s second conception of rights. That is, we coercively intervene to protect the insane and the severely mentally handicapped when we feel that they are being treated by others in a manner which fails to take proper account of their inherent worth. If we feel that this practice is based on a manner in which those individuals are entitled to be treated, then it seems to follow that we recognize them as having rights, in spite of all of the objections that Taylor’s first account has to offer, and that these rights are of the kind suggested by Taylor’s second account.

If I am right about this, then it seems like what we are suggesting is that in some instances where an alleged victim would not ask us to intervene on their behalf, we would nevertheless be justified in intervening. We cannot think of this sort of thing as a voluntary transfer of justification for using force from a victim to a third party intervenor, or even a potential voluntary transfer: I take it to be uncontroversial that where we cannot conceive of some "victim" transferring some right, we cannot base a view on the potential transfer of that right by the victim. It seems, then, that we are basing our justification on the second kind of explanation: we intervene because what the "aggressor" is doing is wrong, and it would not be unacceptable to put a stop to it.

If we accept this, however, then we arrive at the conclusion that we are justifying the use of force not only to enforce that to which individuals are entitled, but also to enforce others' duty to respect things with inherent worth. And if this is the case, then an entirely new range of potentially legitimate uses for force seems to open up which would be prohibited by a simple Non-Aggression Principle (unless one takes the rather implausible view that the only things that have inherent worth are individuals' rights). For example, it would open libertarian philosophy up to the idea that environmental ethical or utilitarian concerns might play a role in justifying the use of force. But I'll have to address that another time. For now, I think I need some time to digest all of this.

Roderick Long on Property

Donny with an A — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:07:00 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cap and Trade vs. the Carbon Tax

Donny with an A — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:09:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

So I've been addressing the issue of anthropogenic climate change for some time now, and I haven't said much in the way of addressing specific policy proposals. But I was just given a delightful present by one of my fellow FEE associates: a copy of the American Institute for Economic Research's latest Economic Education Bulletin, entitled "The Global Warming Debate: Science, Economics, and Policy." I didn't read the whole thing, but my favorite part was definitely when William R. Cotton, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State, closed his completely science-oriented essay, "Summary View of Climate Change," with:

There are strong indications that our global climate is warming. But the question is, is the warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, or is it due to some other forcing mechanisms (or their transient absence) and natural variability. As human population on Earth continues to increase, the chances of human-induced changes in climate due to greenhouse gases, aerosol pollution, or alterations in land use become increasingly likely. Thus, rather than consider climate engineering, we should devise methods of encouraging the reduction of population growth through economic and quality-of-life incentives.

Period, end of conversation. No comment on that gem anywhere else in the entire essay. Who's got two thumbs and loves it? This guy.

But anyway, that's not the point. Later in the publication was an essay by Kenneth P. Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where it was argued that a carbon tax is superior to a cap-and-trade system. I bounced between frustration, amusement, and glee as I read it, and felt an immediate need to comment. Not because Green did a bad job--he did just fine--but because he was guilty of something which is very common among people who discuss climate change: he discussed the possible "solutions" to climate change without addressing the reasons that a policy was to be implemented in the first place, and how the different solutions worked to address those reasons. His argument for a tax scheme over a cap-and-trade scheme was simply that a tax scheme could achieve the same goals, but with better economic side-effects and less potential for failure. Fine, I'll even grant it. But taxes and caps are fundamentally different policies, which only make even a little sense when confronted by specific sorts of problems.

I should explain what I mean. I've discussed elsewhere the idea that in order to make any sense from an ethical point of view, pollution taxes need to be based on the idea that an individual is justified in polluting if and only if she pays compensation to her victims for any damage done to them. That idea is controversial, but for our purposes we don't need to address that controversy. The point is only that even if we accept that idea as true, there are still only certain kinds of instances in which the injustice of pollution can legitimately be dealt with through a tax on pollution. The paradigm cases are those instances in which the damage caused by pollution is directly proportional to the amount of pollution that there is, so that the tax becomes the "price" of compensating the victims of one's actions for the costs one imposes upon them.

Cap and trade schemes, on the other hand, are built for an entirely different kind of problem. In a paradigm cap and trade situation, there is a threshold level of pollution with which policymakers are concerned, and at the threshold, a certain amount of damage is anticipated. The cap and trade scheme accordingly sets the cap at the relevant amount of pollution, and then distributes "shares" of the "environmental space" below that threshold in some way (e.g., auction, grandfathering system...). Because the allocations may be economically inefficient for whatever reason, the shares can then be traded in accordance with the wishes of their owners in order to ensure that the right to pollute is distributed to those individuals who are willing to pay the most for it (note that the normal objections to the "willingness to pay" criterion are avoided by passing the buck to the distribution process, which of course must be justified separately).

The point I want to make here is that global climate change is a very different phenomenon than the sorts of phenomena for which either of these policies is built to provide a solution. As noted elsewhere, climate change is an emergent problem. That is, climate change is not the result of any individual's actions, but rather is the consequence of many individuals acting separately, so that no individual can reasonably be said to have been able to prevent climate change from occurring, and no individual could have caused climate change singlehandedly. Accordingly, it does not make sense to talk about the consequences of climate change in terms of marginal contributions. The amount of damage caused by climate change will not likely change recognizeably with an additional increment of CO2 (or any other forcing agent), so it's not reasonable to try to put a price on how much damage "a unit of climate forcing" (expressed, perhaps, in terms of GWP, or Global Warming Potential, as defined by the IPCC?) causes.

A tax on contributions to climate change, therefore, seems like a policy which would require a bit of shoehorning. Individuals paying the tax would not be paying the "social cost" of their particular contribution, taken in isolation, because that would be basically zero. They would need to be charged for their "portion" of the total amount of damage done by climate change. So what policymakers would need to do would be to determine the total amount of damage which would be done at the equilibrium price for pollution permits, and then sell the permits at that price. The problem then becomes one of economic calculation. It could be done to some degree, but it would be inherently imprecise. And remember: the end result needs to be that the victims get compensated, so the government would have to go into its own pockets (that is to say, the pockets of its treasury or, more realistically, the pockets of its Federal Reserve printing press) to take care of the balance if it aimed low. And as my wonderful economist friends would point out, there would be a considerable incentive to aim high, creating a surplus revenue stream for the government which would almost certainly not be returned. So the tax is doable, kind of, but the problem is not the kind of thing that the tax is designed for. It's just that you can use the tax to accomplish the end goal if you want.

The cap and trade system is a little harder to adapt to the task, but there are a number of ways that the idea can be useful. First, there is a level to which we could collectively exert a forcing on the climate system without producing objectionable consequences. This level of climate forcing is a threshold which could be amenable to a soft cap and trade scheme (soft like the baseball salary cap). In this kind of policy, the cap would be set at the level of forcing which would produce no negative consequences, and this "environmental space" would be allocated somehow (or, if people find this to be a bad idea, we would simply say that these shares should be allocated in proportion to one's contribution to climate change, so that the soft cap has no effect). People not receiving these shares, or polluting in excess of their shares, would be filling environmental space which represented something like "harmful social emissions". Because these emissions would not be legitimated by the soft cap, they would be the ones which would be subject to the obligation to compensate the victims (again, if the soft cap isn't being used, as mentioned above, it would just be that everyone would have to participate in compensating the victims).

Here a potential for another cap would become apparent: We might imagine that policymakers would decide on a level of pollution (corresponding to some amount of total damage) which was determined to be "socially desirable" somehow. Perhaps, using the same reasoning involved in the tax scheme discussed above, the policymakers would arrive at the level of pollution which would clear the market if everyone paid some price for it. Or perhaps the policymakers would identify a level of pollution beyond which unacceptable results would occur, and the cap would be set there. In any case, you would then have to set a cap and allocate the shares. So again, the policy could be made to work. But the problems are simply that it's difficult to identify a level of "unacceptable" pollution, it's just as difficult to identify a market clearing price in this scheme as it is with the tax (assuming that the shares are auctioned, of course), and any other way of running the scheme is sure to carry either difficulties of its own, or charges of arbitrariness which would sever the connection between the problem and the solution.

So ultimately, what we're faced with is a situation in which the only two policy suggestions that are on the table are not particularly well suited to the task of "solving" the problems arising from climate change (and I haven't even begun to address the question of how the compensation process would even work, or whether compensation could make climate change legitimate!), and the only way to make either of them work is to basically stretch and contort them until they are made to do the job acceptably. Doing so, it will be noted, requires in both cases that government decision-makers possess knowledge and foresight which they almost certainly do not have, and even then it's unclear that the policies would work properly.

Obviously, there's a lot more to say about this. I just wanted to get some preliminary thoughts down, and I think this was a good start.

Another Double Standard Between Governments and Individuals?

Donny with an A — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:07:00 GMT

[Cross-posted...a while ago...on the parent blog]

So today was my first day at the Foundation for Economic Education, where I'll be interning over the summer, and I've already had some excellent debates; this is going to be a fantastic experience. Everyone seems really passionate and interesting, and I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot from everyone. I wanted to put one of the more controversial debate topics on my blog as a record, and to get the idea out to a wider audience. I've been toying around with the idea for a few days; I'm really curious to hear what other people think.

The idea is this: If we recognize private entities' claims to property titles as legitimate, even when they have a known history of violence and illegitimacy, then it's difficult to argue that currently existing governments are illegitimate for property rights-based reasons. Governments claim that we live in their territory, and their claims have roots that go back many generations. To claim that a government is not justified in enforcing rules in its territory is, effectively, to claim that the government is not the legitimate owner of that territory. But saying that, it seems to me, makes it very difficult to consistently argue that many (most, if not all) private property titles are legitimately held.

We had a bit of fun with this one at dinner, and I'm not completely sure what I think of it. Of course, everyone else at the table was not too comfortable with the idea, and it made for some lively debate. But nevertheless, I figured I'd post it here. Feel free to leave any comments; I'll be interested to hear what people think about this.

The Responsibility Principle vs. Breach of Duty

Donny with an A — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:05:00 GMT

[Cross-posted...a while ago...on the parent blog]

So I stumbled upon a really jarring debate today. I'm sort of puzzled that I haven't already heard of this issue, and am suspicious that someone might just be able to explain to me why there isn't any problem, and I'm just confused. But in any case, here's the issue.

It seems that in our current legal system, in order to establish that someone owes you damages to compensate you for a tort, you need to show that they have breached a duty that they owed to you. If it is determined that they did nothing wrong in harming you, then the idea is that they don't owe you anything.

But on the other hand, there's this, care of Joel Feinberg:

Suppose that you are on a backpacking trip in the high mountain country when an unanticipated blizzard strikes the area with such ferocity that your life is imperiled. Fortunately, you stumble upon an unoccupied cabin, locked and boarded up for the winter, clearly somebody else’s private property. You smash in a window, enter, and huddle in a corner for three days until the storm abates. During this period you help yourself to your unknown benefactor’s food supply and burn his wooden furniture in the fireplace to keep warm. Surely you are justified in doing all these things, and yet you have infringed the clear rights of another person.

I agree that the hiker is justified in his actions. But as Judith Thomson points out, it seems true that in this case, the hiker would also be obligated to compensate the owner of the cabin for the damage. This is in line with a principle central to the doctrine of Strict Liability, called the Responsibility Principle. Talbot Paige phrased the principle like this: "When A's actions impose costs on B, A should be made responsible, by paying those costs." It sort of does seem like this is why the hiker should have to compensate the cabin owner. Even though the hiker didn't do anything wrong, he still imposed a cost on the cabin owner, and he should have to pay that cost.

So it seems like I'm rejecting the "duty of care" standard. But on the other hand, I feel like there are some situations in which Strict Liability is, well, too strict. It seems to me that the concept of negligence (as distinct from something like "mere harming") is not completely without value: I find it an attractive notion that in situations where a person does nothing wrong, they should not be subject to the coercive pressure of others (through being held to account for something by a court--here I obviously don't mean "coercive" to imply that there's anything objectionable about holding people accountable through courts).

I definitely need to think about this some more; any thoughts or suggestions would be very much appreciated!

Generational Rights

Donny with an A — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:40:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

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

Donny with an A — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:08:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

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 was a necessary condition for the richness of his later life, and that, had the 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 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 ’ 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 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 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 “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.

Climate Change and the Right to Culture

Donny with an A — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

The Right to an Opportunity for Cultural Integration

Focusing only on property damage caused by climate change, it may be noted, seems to leave out a large part of the picture of why people are concerned about climate change. In addition to the impacts discussed so far, many would find objection the fact that climate change will deprive members of certain social groups of the opportunity to integrate themselves into the societies in which they were raised, as a result of changes in the physical context in which those societies have been able to flourish. In many situations, entire cultures will be forced to relocate in order to continue to exist, and in some, they could vanish altogether. Surely this is a troubling consequence of climate change. But does it represent an infringement of rights?

In examining this question, we must take care to isolate the deprivation of an opportunity for cultural integration from the other sorts of rights infringements which we have been discussing so far. For example, if you are so deprived because your farm was flooded by ocean water and you were forced to move, then the problem seems to be one of property rights, and we already know what to say about it. To avoid confusion, we will discuss cases where the deprived party’s property is not being damaged in any way, and the only harm being done seems to be the kind of cultural deprivation that we are concerned with here.

Accordingly, we will imagine a hypothetical scenario in which a young Pacific Islander, Akiko, is setting about deciding what she wants for her life. She owns no property, and has not settled in to any profession or living situation. She is simply evaluating her options in order to choose how she will begin her adult life.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that small island communities will be particularly vulnerable to climate change. In addition to submerging land on the island, sea level rise will likely make storm surges more dangerous and exacerbate erosion and other coastal hazards. On land, water resources will likely be seriously compromised, and the introduction of salty ocean water into the environment will likely make agriculture more difficult. In the ocean itself, changing environmental conditions could fundamentally alter ecosystems, possibly affecting populations of fish and other organisms on which the islanders rely. Further, a number of studies have concluded that the effects of climate change on the tourism industry will produce generally negative outcomes for island economies. All things considered, it might be unfeasible for Akiko to try to start a traditional life for herself on the island. Changing environmental conditions could make it impossible for her to live the kind of life which has characterized her people in the past, and she must act accordingly.

It seems clear that this is something of a sad story. But it might here be noticed that there are plenty of ways which one might deprive a person of the opportunity to live in the manner for which their culture is adapted, which would not involve any violations of their rights. For example, we might imagine a community of small-scale farmers who have fallen on hard times on account of the emergence of a large agribusiness corporation, whose greater efficiency and high output caused market prices for the farmers’ goods to fall below a level which could support their traditional lifestyles. Jebediah, a child growing up in such a community, would seemingly be faced with a set of circumstances similar to Akiko’s. Circumstances would make it impossible for Jebediah to take his place in the culture of his upbringing, much like Akiko was driven away from her heritage by the changing environmental conditions on her island brought about by climate change.

Presumably, we would not think that the agribusiness corporation, in bringing its products to market in higher quantities and better prices, was doing anything wrong, even if it had no significant moral reason to support its actions. In fact, we might applaud it for representing an increase in the wellbeing of its customers, who could use the money they saved on purchasing food products to improve their material conditions in ways that would have been otherwise unavailable to them. So surely its actions would not represent infringements of any rights held by the young members of the farming community, like Jebediah, who would be denied an opportunity to carry on in the traditions of their parents. And so we might think that in the same way, Akiko’s rights are not infringed when she is denied the opportunity to become integrated into the culture of her upbringing by climate change.

One might object that there is a difference between Jebediah’s case and Akiko’s, in that Akiko’s situation is the result of rights-infringing damage to the environment in which her culture existed, whereas Jebediah’s situation is the result of customers exercising their right to withdraw their patronage from producers who do offer noncompetitive products. Jebediah lost his opportunity because it was built upon an assumption of support from others which proved to be false, and neither he nor any of his predecessors had any right to this support. Akiko’s elders, however, did have a right to the things that Akiko would need in order to exercise her opportunity, and Akiko was only denied access to them because a third party actor acted in a way that infringed upon rights.

But as we mentioned at the beginning of this section, we have to be careful to avoid focusing on infringements of the rights of those whose property is damaged by climate change. Those factors have already been accounted for. And remember, we have stipulated that none of the property which is damaged belongs to Akiko. So this avenue of establishing Akiko’s rights seems closed: it seems fairly clear that Akiko has no claim to the property of other people, and her rights are not infringed when we damage that property.

Rights as a Member of a Community

However, one might point out that Akiko’s claim is not centered on the property damage itself, but rather its implications for the island community as a whole. Viewed holistically, Akiko’s community is composed of a system of interdependences which can be “benefited” or “harmed” in a way that cannot be understood simply as the sum of impacts on individual members. From this perspective, we harm the community not only when we harm a given individual, but also when we interfere with an individual’s fulfillment of her function in the community. For example, if a community depends on the agricultural products supplied by a particular farmer, and we damage the farmer’s land so that his productivity is constrained, then we not only harm the farmer, in that his property is damaged, but we also harm the community as a whole, in that the farmer filled an important “niche” as the provider of food for the rest of the community.

From Akiko’s perspective, climate change is not only damaging a great deal of others’ property, but it is also destroying the integrity of the community in which she was raised, and of which she expected and hoped to become a part. As we have described them, the opportunities that Akiko has been deprived of seem to have been dependent on the health of the community. So it might be that in objecting to the loss of her opportunity to be integrated into her culture, what Akiko is really objecting to is the loss of her community’s integrity due to the impairment of members’ functions due to climate change.

But what is so special about the “community” in this example which sets it apart from other instances where an individual’s social functions are impaired in a way that has negative implications for others? Imagine that Russell has been training himself to work as a laborer at a pogo stick factory in his town. But when he arrives at the factory to apply for a job, he discovers that it has been destroyed by terrorists. Unfortunately, Russell’s only hope of supporting himself in his town was to work at the pogo stick factory, and its destruction will force him to leave his community.

In this case, it does not seem that the terrorists infringed on Russell’s rights (though they almost certainly infringed on the factory owners’ rights). But it is nevertheless true that Russell depended on the factory’s ability to fulfill its function as a provider of jobs, and by impairing that function, the terrorists deprived Russell of the opportunity to integrate himself into his community. It seems as though the only difference between Russell’s situation and Akiko’s is that Russell’s situation was brought about by the impairment of the functioning of a single member of the community, whereas Akiko’s was brought about by the impairment of the functioning of multiple members. I see no reason to think that this difference is morally significant. Accordingly, it seems fair to conclude that, while her tale is a sad one (as are Jebediah’s and Russell’s), Akiko’s rights are not infringed as a result of her being deprived of the opportunity to integrate herself into the culture of her upbringing.

A First Glance at What Rights Could Be Infringed by Climate Change

Donny with an A — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:18:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

Climatic Shifts and the Right to Environmental Conditions

The most obvious kind of rights infringement which could be caused by climate change involves damage done directly to individuals and property by environmental phenomena. Easiest to think about are the shifts in “normal” environmental conditions which are projected to occur in response to human influences on the climate system. One example of such a shift is the expected rise in sea level which will occur as higher global temperatures melt a portion of the ice which naturally covers part of the Earth’s land area, and cause thermal expansion in the world’s oceans. As sea levels rise, some coastline property will become submerged or otherwise damaged by encroaching water lines, and in other places, salty ocean water will mix with the water table beneath individuals’ property, potentially killing vegetation and destroying the conditions for certain agricultural practices. So far as these sorts of impacts are the direct consequences of anthropogenic climate change, it seems that we would intuitively want to say that those who contributed to climate change will have infringed on the rights of those who are harmed.

Similarly, as regional climates shift towards new equilibrium states as the result of anthropogenic forcings, it is likely that some of the natural processes on which people depend will be interfered with. For example, most organisms can only survive within a certain range of environmental conditions. Inadequate or excessive rainfall, increased average temperature, and other climatic factors could prove detrimental to the capacity of certain organisms to flourish in areas which have historically supported them well. Many individuals, notably farmers and fishermen, may be adversely affected by the effects of shifts in their regional climates for the organisms on which they rely. So far as these individuals have a right not to be interfered with in pursuing their livelihoods and wellbeing with the aid of resources which are naturally available to them, it would seem to constitute an infringement of their rights to push their climate systems out of their previous states, bringing about environmental conditions which are injurious to their interests and livelihoods.

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

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

Altered Climate Systems and Diverted Damage

Not all of the effects of climate change will occur as shifts in normal conditions. For example, a world impacted by climate change will likely see an increase in the frequency, duration, and severity of extreme climate events like floods, droughts, and heat waves. It seems that just as we have the right to have our property damaged by the direct actions of others, we should have a right against damage resulting from the amplification of an existing destructive force. Accordingly, by making the climate system more dangerous, the contributors to climate change would be infringing others’ rights to the extent that more damage resulted than would have in the absence of interference.

However, this intuition is muddied by the fact that in an altered climate system, we will almost certainly see an entirely different set of climate events than would have occurred if no interference had taken place. That is, it is not the case that we will see all of the floods, droughts, and heat waves that would have occurred naturally, except that many of them will last longer, and cause more damage, and there will be some new ones. Rather, the floods, droughts, and heat waves which normally would have occurred will never eventuate, and they will be replaced with an entirely new set of floods, droughts, and heat waves.

Going even further, even those extreme phenomena which are not made more dangerous (in a statistical sense) by climate change will likely occur in different patterns in an altered climate system. For example, while some scientists believe that a warmer climate will produce a greater number of more intense hurricanes, others believe that there will be no such change. However, even if these skeptics are correct, and hurricanes do not generally become more dangerous as a result of climate change, it is almost certain that there will be different hurricanes in an altered climate system.

Because they will be different events, affecting different areas at different times, the new set of extreme climate phenomena will impact different people in different ways. This raises an important difficulty in discussing these impacts from the perspective of justice and rights. Intuitively, it seems that we should take into account the fact that the climate system is naturally destructive, and individuals should only be held responsible for the additional damage that they cause. But in an important sense, every extreme weather event, and so every instance of damage, will be the result of the interference with the climate system. We can only talk about the “additional” damage caused by interference with the climate by aggregating the total damage done in the altered climate system and comparing it to the total damage which would have been done in the absence of interference.

But given the fact that the damage in question will be distributed differently, impacting some people more than it would have and others less, it is unclear whether such an aggregation would be justified. As many have pointed out in objecting to Utilitarianism and cost-benefit analysis, benefits to some individuals do not “cancel out” costs to other individuals. After all, the parties made worse off must still bear the entire burden of their new circumstances; they do not experience any counterbalancing good from the beneficial consequences which obtain for others. And intuitively, it seems reasonable to think that we have a right not to have damage inflicted on us, regardless of whether others are made better off as a result. Accordingly, we might say that those who interfere with the climate system violate others’ rights to the extent that they bring about consequences which are more damaging to those individuals.

Rights and Risk

One might object, however, that there are many ways of interfering with the climate system which ostensibly cause some redistribution of climatic events, producing winners and losers, but which we do not generally think of as involving rights infringements. Given the chaotic nature of the climate system, one might point out, very small interferences can have important consequences elsewhere; as the saying goes, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil might cause a tornado in Texas. But surely we do not need a morally significant reason to fly a kite, or to go base jumping, or to operate a windmill, because of the tiny disturbances which will be imposed on the climate system. And if this is so, then what should we make of the idea that we have the right not to have climatic damage diverted at us? As we have said, to have a right to something means that others may not deprive you of it in the absence of morally significant reasons. If no reasons are necessary to justify interfering with the climate system in a way which could alter the distribution of extreme climate events, then this seems to suggest that we do not have a right against climatic damage being diverted at us.

If this is true, then are no rights infringed as a result of the diversion and amplification of the destructive force of the climate system? We have good reason for thinking that the diversion of climatic damage does not infringe rights. It will be noted that we might still identify a problem with the fact that by causing climate change, we cause a greater overall amount of damage. By contrast, the eventual consequences of flying a kite on the climate system could just as easily be positive as negative; a tornado might be caused, but just as easily, a tornado might be prevented. Taken together, all of the tiny interferences on the climate system which result from our everyday activities likely do not cause a greater or lesser overall amount of damage, especially on a long time scale. But what kind of right could an individual possess which would be contingent on the overall amount of damage done by the climate?

Perhaps the answer can be found in the concept of risk. By increasing the total amount of damage which will be inflicted by the climate system, contributors to climate change increase individuals’ risk of damage due to extreme climate events. And if we add together the increase in the expected value of the climatic damage done to all individuals over a given period, we will see that the total will equal the amount by which the climate system was made “more dangerous” by the interference in question. If we recognize a right not to be put at greater risk of climatic damage by the actions of others, then we arrive at a conclusion which matches our initial intuitions perfectly: Rights are violated to the extent to which the climate system was made “more damaging” by the contributors to climate change.

The debate over whether or not we can have rights based on risk is complex, and I will avoid addressing it here. But it will be sufficient for our purposes to point out that by dealing with the problem of altered climate systems in terms of risk, we arrive at just the kind of answer that we expected to find from the beginning. Of course, intuitions are often wrong, and we certainly have not proven here that we have a right against exposure to risk. But we might say that the fact that such a right matches our intuitions counts as evidence that it is closer to being right than to being completely wrong.

Rights and Entitlements

Donny with an A — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:29:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

Libertarian conceptions of justice are built around the idea that there are certain things which we may not do to people, because as individuals and ends in themselves, they are not to be used against their will for the benefit of others. These ideas are usually represented through the notion of “rights” that individuals have. But while the concept of a “right” may seem simple, there are some difficulties in understanding exactly how they are supposed to function. Because we will be dealing extensively with issues involving rights, it seems important to pin down precisely what it means to have a right to something.

The simplest conception of rights argues that to have the right to something is to be entitled to it, so that its absence constitutes a rights-violation. But this immediately leads to difficulties. For example, as surely as I have a right to anything, I have the right not to have my leg chopped off. But if I chopped my own leg off, it would seem odd to say that my rights had been violated.

Perhaps, then, we would amend our conception of rights to say that to have a right to something is to be entitled to not being deprived of it by forces external to the holder of the right. But this too is problematic. It seems fair to say that just as clearly as I have the right to not have my leg chopped off, I have the right not to be killed. But if I fell ill with a deadly disease, it would seem absurd to say that the pathogens violated my rights.

Accordingly, we might respond that to have a right does not protect us against all external deprivations, but rather against being deprived of the object of our right by other moral agents. But again, we are faced with problems. Returning to the right not to be killed, we find that there are times where others would not act badly if they killed us. The most obvious example is self-defense. If I attack you with a knife, and the only way to stop me would be to take my life, it would surely be permissible for you to do so.

Further sharpening our conception of rights, we might therefore say that to have a right to something means to be entitled against deprivation of it by other moral agents, except when the right-holder has somehow “aggressed” against someone else. But once again, counterexamples present themselves. Joel Feinberg writes:

Suppose that you are on a backpacking trip in the high mountain country when an unanticipated blizzard strikes the area with such ferocity that your life is imperiled. Fortunately, you stumble upon an unoccupied cabin, locked and boarded up for the winter, clearly somebody else’s private property. You smash in a window, enter, and huddle in a corner for three days until the storm abates. During this period you help yourself to your unknown benefactor’s food supply and burn his wooden furniture in the fireplace to keep warm. Surely you are justified in doing all these things, and yet you have infringed the clear rights of another person.

I think that Feinberg is obviously right to say that you would be justified in doing this, even though the victim in this case would not be in any way responsible for your situation. It might be clear by now that what we seem to be working towards is the idea that to have a right to something is closest to being entitled not to be deprived of it by others in the absence of certain kinds of morally significant reasons for doing so.

This conclusion seems fitting when we recall that rights reflect the respect due to others in light of their individuality and inherent worth. Properly respecting someone does not mean that we must avoid infringing their rights at all costs. Rather, it means that we must take their rights into consideration very seriously, and only infringe upon them when doing so is necessary, and when doing so would show due respect to the victims of our actions.

What Does It Mean to Advocate a Market Solution to Climate Change?

Donny with an A — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:22:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

The purpose of this post will be to tie together some ideas I've been toying around with in other posts, in order to start working towards a coherent introduction to my thesis on the libertarian approach to thinking about climate change. Here goes nothing.

Moving Past the Science

As a group, libertarians have not dealt well with the prospect of anthropogenic climate change. As most of the world scrambles to find "solutions" to what they anticipate will be a serious problem for human civilization, the typical libertarian approach to the issue has been to deny that climate change is real, or to deny that humans have caused it. There are two problems with this position. First, the most vehement critics of what has become the "mainstream" view are not particularly well qualified for their missions, and often demonstrate a misunderstanding of their opponents' views which seem to indicate that they don't actually know what they're arguing against. Further, where there are well-qualified and well-informed "skeptics," their positions tend to be less vitriolic and more nuanced, being based more on uncertainty and imperfect knowledge, to the point where their views end up falling relatively close to those which are accepted by the mainstream scientific community. As far as I can tell, a relatively strong case can be made in favor of questioning our ability to know the precise truth about climate change, and our ability to predict future states of the climate; the same cannot be said about the position that climate change is not happening, or that humans are not causing it, or that it will not continue into the future in any significant way.

This leads to the second problem with the libertarian habit of questioning the scientific basis for concern about climate change: it does not address the question of what position libertarians would endorse if climate change were happening. There is no reason to believe that anthropogenic climate change, or some substantively similar phenomenon, could not happen. Accordingly, it seems extremely reasonable to ask what libertarians would say about such a phenomenon, if we knew that it was occurring right now. In this article, I will sketch the kind of answer we should be looking for.

Market Failures and Government Inefficacy

Where climate change has been discussed, by libertarians and others, it has generally been labeled as a market failure. Economic theory tells us that market failures occur whenever inefficient social outcomes result from individuals acting on their own desires. Looking at climate change from this paradigm, we would notice that for most individuals, the benefits of, say, driving a car instead of taking the bus more than outweigh any costs they would ever incur from their incremental contribution to climate change. Accordingly, it will be in everyone's interest to drive their car. But the predictable result of everyone making the sort of choices that result in driving everywhere, instead of using public transportation, is that we end up with climate change. As Garrett Hardin famously wrote "...we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free enterprisers."

Simply recognizing this problem will not solve it. Mitigating climate change will involve sacrifices, and individuals will undoubtedly resist making these sacrifices if they do not have the assurance that others will follow suit. Unfortunately, getting individuals to voluntarily cut down on their contributions to climate change would be fraught with difficulties, ranging from the large costs of negotiating the agreement to the pervasive incentive to "cheat". These hurdles seem to rule out the kind of decentralized solution that the free-market is capable of providing. The most obvious and widely discussed solution is the one Hardin suggests: legislation. If we know that we will "foul our own nest" if left to our own devices, then it seems reasonable to impose rules on ourselves, and to punish those who violate those rules, in order to ensure that we don't bring about our own destruction.

But many libertarians bristle at the suggestion that central planning can solve the problems presented by market failures. It seems unreasonable, they argue, to suggest that we can fix an imperfect market by simply turning the matter over to the government. After all, governments have problems of their own. As Gene Callahan points out, "Government interventions and "five year plans," even when they are sincere attempts to protect the environment rather than disguised schemes to benefit some powerful lobby, lack the profit incentive and are protected from the competitive pressures that drive private actors to seek an optimal cost-benefit tradeoff."

Accordingly, a number of libertarians have apparently taken the stance that we cannot hope for an "optimal" level of climate stability, so our best option is to simply face the realities of our suboptimal state of affairs. And because, they continue, the free market is the most efficient system we know of for allocating resources to best suit the needs of society, the best way to face climate change would be to allow individuals the freedom to adapt in their own way. As George Reisman writes, "Even if global warming is a fact, the free citizens of an industrial civilization will have no great difficulty in coping with it - that is, of course, if their ability to use energy and to produce is not crippled by the environmental movement and by government controls otherwise inspired."

Climate Change: A Matter of Justice

This view of the issue leaves out an important consideration which is central to the libertarian paradigm: According to most accounts, climate change will have victims. This fact brings us out of the realm of mere economic efficiency and forces us to confront the issue from an ethical standpoint. Imagine if we were trying to determine the proper social response to a particular theft. It might be true that of all social systems, a victim of theft would be best equipped for dealing with her loss in an unfettered free-market. She would not need to consult a central planning board in order to replace the things that were taken, and her higher purchasing power – brought about by her participation in a thriving market economy – would enable her to afford the replacement with comparative ease.

But surely libertarians would not be satisfied with this “solution.” In our story, the thief violated the rights of his victim by stealing from her, and therefore he should be held accountable for fixing the damage he caused. It is crucial to acknowledge that holding the thief responsible does not represent a departure from the normal course of the free-market; the very functioning of the free-market is predicated on the recognition of rights. This reveals an important feature of the libertarian position that the proper response to climate change is to simply allow individuals the freedom to adapt to it: It assumes that climate change does not represent an injustice. If climate change were an injustice, then the proper response would not simply be to allow people to adapt: libertarians would need to advocate the enforcement of justice.

Accordingly, it seems like the proper libertarian stance on climate change needs to be stated in terms of justice. The scientific disputes and efficiency-based arguments which have thus far characterized the libertarian position are wholly unbecoming of a political philosophy built on the foundation of respect for individuals’ rights. The libertarian community needs to ask what kinds of rights, if any, are infringed by climate change, and what should be done about those infringements. Anything else would simply be unlibertarian.