Back to the Drawing Board : Opportunity, 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.

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.

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.

Intertemporal Pollution, Accountability, and Justice in Appropriation

Donny with an A — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:09:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

If we are ever able to quantify the effects of pollution, we will still need to establish the degree to which particular contributors can be held accountable for those effects. It is important to recognize that in many cases, polluting acts have happened, and will continue to happen, over a long period of time. The significance of this fact can perhaps be best illustrated by an example.

Let's say that on one fall day, three factories independently decide to dump some barrels of toxic waste into Tranquility Lake. There are no regulatory agencies to take exception to this action, and the lake is no one's private property. But the following spring, Marlon, whose property lies along the lake, notices that the grass in his back yard is not growing like it usually does. He tests the soil in his yard, and finds it to have unusually high levels of a number of unusual chemicals, which he learns are toxic to plants. He takes measurements in Tranquility Lake, and discovers that the chemicals that are killing his plant are also present in high levels in the lake. After a bit of research, Marlon discovers that the chemicals are used in the processes that the factories on the lake engage in.

He confronts the owners of the factories, and being good, honest people, the owners confess to dumping the barrels of chemicals into the lake, and apologize for the harm they caused. They all agree to settle the matter in arbitration. The solution that they reach is that Marlon is entitled to full compensation for the damage to his lawn, including compensation for his inconvenience. And because the factories all contributed to the harm in basically the same way, the factories will pay the part of the compensation corresponding to the amount of toxic waste they dumped on the autumn day. Since Factory A dumped 1 barrel, Factory B dumped 2 barrels, and Factory C dumped 3 barrels, Factory A pays 1/6 of the damages, Factory B pays 1/3, and Factory B pays 1/2. Everyone goes home happy; justice has been served.

Now let's amend the example to say that the lake had been contaminated decades ago by a number of factories that had long since shut down. The pollution was not severe enough that any damage to Marlon's property resulted (or would ever result), but the levels of the foreign chemicals were significantly higher than they would have been naturally. Now let's imagine that our three factories show up on the scene and dump their chemicals. What if, because of the previous pollution, the damage done to Marlon's lawn is more severe than it would have been if the old factories had never existed? Should the three currently operating factories be held accountable for all of the damage that they do?

One way to approach this would be to say that the three factories should "take the lake as they found it." This is the approach taken by Robert McGee and Walter Block in their essay, "Pollution Trading Permits as a Form of Market Socialism and the Search for a Real Market Solution to Environmental Pollution." McGee and Block explain, "...one can analogize the case of ordinary (human) trespass to the intrusion of pollutants onto the property of the victim. In a typical case, the thief breaks into the premises of the homeowner. Unbeknownst to the intruder, the victim has a weak heart, and is easily frightened. In this example the weak heart...amplifies the harm. As a result of the trespass, the homeowner dies from a heart attack. Can the trespasser be found liable for wrongful death? Yes, because of the doctrine of "you take your victim as you find him." Taking this approach, we would say that Marlon was particularly vulnerable because of the peculiar circumstances in which the factories found him, but this fact wouldn't absolve the factory owners of their accountability for the damage caused by the dumping of the chemicals.

However, one might object that in the weak heart example, the factor making the homeowner vulnerable was no one's fault. In Marlon's case, the only reason the damage was so severe was that other agents had committed acts in the past which put Marlon in a position of vulnerability. A case could seemingly be made that the factories should be held accountable for the damage that would have been caused in the absence of the old factories' contributions, but nothing more. However, this raises a significant problem. This approach would force us to either place the accountability for the damage to Marlon's property on the old factories' operators, or to place the burden back on Marlon.

The latter seems unacceptable. The "responsibility principle," suggested by Talbot Page in his essay, "Responsibility, Liability, and Incentive Compatibility," seem to me a reasonable starting point for arguing why. Page writes, "When A's actions impose costs on B, A should be made responsible by paying for these costs." As I interpret it, A does not need to be a single individual for this principle to make sense. As long as costs are being imposed on B, and as long as those costs are caused by A's actions, then the costs should be paid by A. This is clearest in cases like Marlon's, where B is not a member of A. The group of people including both the old factory operators and the current factory operators imposed costs on Marlon, and so they should pay those costs. To be honest, I find that so obviously true that I'm not even sure how to argue in favor of it.

Accordingly, the accountability for remaining damage would need to be allocated to the old factory operators. For the sake of discussion, we'll ignore for now all questions regarding the burden of proof, imperfect knowledge, the potential need to deal with preemptive compensation, and any difficulties arising from intertemporal compensation. These are all important issues, and I want to deal with them. But first, I think it's important to ask whether it would actually be fair to hold the old factory operators responsible for damage which resulted from the presence of their (otherwise harmless) pollution in Tranquility Lake when the three factories came along decades later to dump some chemicals there.

The first thing to notice about this example is that it seems to be the outgrowth of something like a tragedy of the commons. The damage to Marlon's lawn is caused by a situation in which a commons has been "fouled" to the extent where it is damaging property adjacent to it. So perhaps if we figured out what the right way is to think about tragedies of the commons, we could determine what to think about the Tranquility Lake situation. Basically, the problem is this: the lake had some capacity for absorbing pollution without causing any damage. Once this threshold was breached, progressively more damage would be done to Marlon with each additional amount of pollution. To steal a term from Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer's book, Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming, what the old factory operators did was "fill" some of the "environmental space" which was available due to the lake's capacity for absorbing pollution without causing damage.

As a result of the environmental space having been filled by the old factory operators, the currently operating factories' dumping did a lot more damage than it otherwise would have been. In order to hold the old factory operators responsible for part of this damage, it seems that we would need to establish that they didn't have a right to fill the environmental space in the way that they did. Otherwise, we would seem to be led to the idea that they did nothing wrong, since they acted perfectly within their rights, and (because of the responsibility principle) we should hold the currently operating factories completely responsible for the damage they caused.

So did the old factory operators have a right to do what they did? Some libertarians, like Murray Rothbard, think they did. In his essay, "Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution," Rothbard wrote, "...if a factory owned by A polluted originally unused property up to a certain amount of pollutant X, then A can be said to have homesteaded a pollution easement of a certain degree and type." So essentially, what the old factory owners did was to enclose a part of the commons (in this case the "environmental space" that they filled) and made it their own. And it does seem to me that this is what they have done. But does that mean that their actions were acceptable?

As far as I am aware, Rothbard believed so. The polluter "improves" previously unused environmental space by directing it to the achievement of her ends, and through mixing her labor with it, she acquires just title to it. Because the polluter is using previously unowned environmental space, no one can deny her the right to do as she did. But this is a left-libertarian site, and Rothbard won't be getting away that easily. Accordingly, I'll try to figure out what to think about Rothbard's position as it applies to this situation, in order to determine whether or not it gives us adequate guidance for approaching the old factory operators' actions.

The questions about Rothbard's approach come from the heart of the left-libertarian paradigm. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick wrote, "It will be implausible to view improving an object as giving full ownership of it, if the stock of unowned objects that might be improved is limited. For an object's coming under one person's ownership changes the situation of all others. Whereas previously they were at liberty...to use the object, they now no longer are. This change in the situation of others (by removing their liberty to act on a previously unowned object) need not worsen their situation. If I appropriate a grain of sand from Coney Island, no one else may now do as they will with that grain of sand. But there are plenty of other grains of sand left for them to do the same with. Or if not grains of sand, then other things...The crucial point is whether is whether appropriation of an unowned object worsens the situation of others." In the case of any scarce resource, it seems fair to say that any appropriating act has the potential to make others worse off. But more precisely, the crucial point is whether the appropriating act makes others worse off in a way that infringes upon their rights. Merely making someone worse off does not violate their rights; I am made worse off when a girl at a bar declines to kiss me. We must examine what people are entitled to in order to resolve the question of whether an act of appropriation is justified.

And as far as Rothbard is concerned, no one is made worse off in a morally relevant sense by the appropriation of an unowned object. The path of the reasoning arriving at this view is easy enough to spell out. In the case of an unowned object (such as the environmental space in our example) no one has yet "mixed" any labor with the object. Because Rothbard ostensibly believes that our claims to property originate in our mixing our labor with unowned objects (this is taken from Locke), it seems reasonable to say that no one has any property rights involving objects that have not had any labor mixed with them. But as Peter Vallentyne writes in his introduction to Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate, "Libertarianism (both left and right) construes basic individual rights as property rights." So if no one has property rights in these unowned objects, and property rights are the only kind of rights there are, then no one's rights are violated by appropriation.

In my view, something seems to be missing here. For example, let's say that in order to survive, the individuals living around the lake needed to pollute it to some degree. Let's further stipulate that if not for the old factory operators, this level of pollution would never produce any damage. According to Rothbard's approach, if Marlon's lawn ended up damaged by the pollution in the lake, the people to be held accountable for the damage are the people polluting the lake to survive. But it seems to me that the people responsible are the old factory operators, who (we might suppose) did not need to pollute the lake in order to survive.

This idea is captured by Stephen Gardiner in his essay, "A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption," when he wrote, "One way in which a generation may act badly is if it puts in place a set of future circumstances that make it morally required for its successors (and perhaps even itself) to make other generations suffer either unnecessary, or at least more than would otherwise be the case." I think Gardiner oversteps his intentions when he uses the term "morally required," but what he has in mind is clear. If in the pursuit of some "sufficient" standard of living, people needed to pollute the lake, then in some sense we would feel sympathy for them, and consider their actions to be morally permissible. If the old factory operators made it the case that these actions would harm others, where they would not have ordinarily, then the factory operators have done something wrong. It seems to me that because Rothbard's account cannot capture this notion, there is something wrong with it.

But what exactly is Rothbard’s principle missing? If we are to hold the old factory operators accountable, we need to know. This is because there is an important disanalogy between a case where people need to pollute the lake to survive and the case which we have been working with, where the three currently operating factories did not need to pollute in any similar way. The reasons why we disagree with Rothbard will determine what we think about the old factory operators' actions.

We have several options. The first is an extremely strict proviso: It is illegitimate to appropriate any resource without leaving as much of that resource (or a costlessly available substitute) as there was when you got there. Under this criterion, by depleting the natural store of environmental space embodied by Tranquility Lake, and not putting the lake back into its former state afterwards, the old factory operators acted wrongly. Accordingly, it might seem reasonable to put them on the hook for the damage caused by the depleted state of the lake.

The other end of the spectrum would be a very weak proviso: It is illegitimate to appropriate any resource without leaving enough of that resource to allow others to satisfy their basic needs. In this instance, the old factory operators wouldn't be in the wrong at all. The three currently-operating factories didn't need to dump in lake, and so the old factory operators did nothing wrong by using the resource. The accountability, then, would rest squarely on the three factories which acted most recently.

In the middle, there are a number of other provisos which warrant consideration. For one: It is illegitimate to appropriate any resource without leaving enough so that others had the opportunity attain the same level of wellbeing (I dispute this elsewhere). Or another: It is illegitimate to appropriate any resource without leaving behind something of equal value as what you took (I don't like this one either; I can't think of any coherent theory of value which would make it work).

Personally, I think the most plausible of these accounts is the weak proviso. If my appropriation makes it so that others can't satisfy their basic interests without harming others, then I think it's fair to say that I should be accountable for the damage (assuming that I didn't need to appropriate what I did). But if my appropriation just makes it so that others have to figure out some perfectly feasible alternative course of action in order to avoid harming others, then I don't see why I should be accountable if they choose the harmful alternative.

Accordingly, it seems we can say that in Marlon's case, the accountability rests solely on the three factories' operators, even though the damage caused by their acts was amplified by the polluting activities of the old factories. Because they didn't need to pollute in any morally relevant sense, they should bear the burden of any costs imposed on others by their actions. I think I'm happy with that, so I'll stop there.

Is There a Right to Culture?

Donny with an A — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:52:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

Last week I had a conversation with my thesis advisor, Dr. Harry Brighouse, in which we discussed an interesting idea which I think might prove important in one way or another, and which I think is worthy of elaboration here. The idea was that a big part of what people are concerned about in discussing climate change is that members of certain social groups will be deprived 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 were able to flourish.

To illustrate, we might travel to Bangladesh several decades in the future. In my imaginary scenario, sea levels are rising around the low-lying country, and the property of the locals is suffering considerable damage. However, because I am the master of this imaginary scenario, I'll stipulate that we have fully compensated all of these property owners for the damage done to them (regardless of whether or not they would actually be entitled to this compensation). So everyone whose property is damaged by climate change is fine.

But imagine that there is a child, Nadia, who has grown up in Bangladesh and is beginning to plan a life for herself. Perhaps it would be possible for Nadia to live in Bangladesh, but with the environmental damage being done to the area, perhaps it would be unfeasible for her to do so. It's not that she has such great opportunities elsewhere, but rather that the prospect of living a good life in Bangladesh looks bleak. Accordingly, the best choice for Nadia and her peers might be to assimilate into another culture which would offer a more promising future. Would Nadia have been deprived of something to which she was entitled?

We have stipulated that Nadia owned no property which was damaged, or that if she did, she was fully compensated for it. Further, we have stipulated that Nadia had not yet even chosen a profession, or settled down anywhere. She was simply deciding what she wanted for her life, and she saw that Bangladesh offered scarce opportunities for the kind of future she envisioned for herself. Given the way we normally think about rights violations, it doesn't seem like we have wronged Nadia in any real way.

But at the same time, I can see why Nadia would offer an objection. She might say that as a Bangladeshi, she would have wanted to be integrated into Bangladeshi society. Now, as a result of the effects of climate change, it will be extremely difficult for her to make that happen. Nadia's claim, then, would seem to be that she had some kind of right which is infringed by other people making it difficult or impossible for her to become a part of the culture of her upbringing. And it does seem like a good portion of the concern aimed at climate change is directed at the idea that we would be infringing this kind of right by contributing to a state of affairs in which Nadia is forced to find a way of life which does not reflect her native culture.

It's easy to sympathize with Nadia, and see how she would be frustrated by the state of affairs in which she finds herself. But does Nadia have any right like this? Do we act impermissibly when we put Nadia in this position?

In a previous post, I discussed the possibility that in cases involving inheritances, the would-be inheritors of some valuable object might claim injustice if that object were damaged or destroyed, even if the person or people who owned that object at the time of its destruction were compensated. I said that while I understood why someone might see things that way, it would seem to go very much against the way we normally think about property rights, and I wasn't sure I could defend the position. However, I didn't think that the problem could be dismissed as easily as that, because there was something intuitively reasonable about the objection. But I'm not dealing with that issue here.

In our story, Nadia isn't inheriting any property. Therefore, we avoid all of the problems associated with Akiko's case in the other post. Here, we're dealing with a particular right not to an object, but to a kind of opportunity which is being denied to Nadia. Namely, the opportunity to become a member of the culture.

But in spite of the differences between Nadia's case and Akiko's case, I want to reintroduce an example I used in the previous post:

...we might point out that the above case sounds a lot like a story where an agrarian community is "destroyed" by industrialization and mass production. Small scale family farms can't keep up with the low prices generated by the advanced practices of a local agribusiness concern, and can no longer support their old way of life. It's a sad story, but we wouldn't want to claim that any injustice has occurred. Perhaps as a society, we would want to help these farmers get back on their feet and find a new place in the market. But we wouldn't want to blame the agribusiness for doing something wrong.

It seems to me that if I were the offspring of one of the small scale farmers, I might feel frustration towards the agribusiness, but I would have no legitimate claim against them. So if we're going to attribute to Nadia the kind of right we're talking about here, we need to give some reason for thinking that Nadia's situation is fundamentally different from the industrialization case. In the earlier post, I pointed out that the small scale farmers' frustration is the result of relying on something which they never had any right to: the support of their customers. But the source of Nadia's frustration is less clear.

We might say that Nadia simply wants to be offerred an appealing job in the location in which she wants to work, and a place to live which matches what she hoped for. If we phrase Nadia's frustration this way, then it is clear that she has no right to these things, as they too require something of others. But this seems unfair to Nadia's case.

It seems to me that Nadia's objection is more holistic in nature. She sees her cultural community as a distinct entity, to which we could coherently apply the concepts of stability and integrity. When healthy and vital, that community would provide her with a range of opportunities to try to make a life for herself without any active facilitation by any members of the community. Certainly she could choose to pursue other opportunities, and this would not be a problem for anyone. But the option would be available to her if she wanted it. By causing climate change, we degrade Nadia's community, and diminish her opportunities. Nadia's objection seems to be that the degradation of her community, which is the result of the actions of those who contributed to climate change, represents a wrong done to her.

This is an interesting idea, but is not one which I know how to handle. I think it would be best to take some time to digest it. So having set up this discussion, I'll leave settling it for another time.

Climate Change, Vanishing Lifestyles, and Children

Donny with an A — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:56:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

So in a previous post, I discussed a case in which rising sea levels, resulting from a warming of the Earth, caused the salinization of a Bangladeshi farmer's land, so that he could no longer grow rice on it in the way to which he was accustomed. I concluded that as the owner of the land, with full property rights, he should be entitled to compensation for any damage done to him by those contributing to climate change. And it seems like this could be extended to any member of the contributors' generation who were harmed by climate change.

But costs associated with climate change will not only be incurred by individuals who are alive now, they will be realized by future people as well. The nature of the cost to future people, however, is less clear than the nature of the costs to existing people. This post will explore a sort of impact which seems to be central to people's concern about climate change, but which is difficult to deal with in the framework of human rights. Namely, many communities will be impacted in a way that makes it difficult for them to continue their cultural existence, making it necessary for the children of those cultures to find fundamentally different ways of living.

For example, indigenous communities in Africa will see progressively more significant alterations to their natural setting as the climate continues to change. Plants and animals which were once prevalent in the region will no longer be fit for survival there, and new species will move in. Knowledge developed over centuries will no longer be effective. Being ill adapted for life in a fundamentally different climate, it is conceivable that these communities will be unable to survive in the manner in which they have for countless generations. They would have to find a new way to live.

What do we say about this? It is clear that a great number of people are concerned about precisely this sort of problem, and cite it as a reason to be worried about climate change. But does it tell a story of injustice? Many people's intuitions say yes.

However, we might point out that the above case sounds a lot like a story where an agrarian community is "destroyed" by industrialization and mass production. Small scale family farms can't keep up with the low prices generated by the advanced practices of a local agribusiness concern, and can no longer support their old way of life. It's a sad story, but we wouldn't want to claim that any injustice has occurred. Perhaps as a society, we would want to help these farmers get back on their feet and find a new place in the market. But we wouldn't want to blame the agribusiness for doing something wrong.

If there is no wrongdoing in the industrialization case, where communities might be unable to sustain their old lifestyles as the result of the actions of others, then can we consistently hold that there is injustice being done to indigenous people by climate change? Or are we simply setting indigenous communities on a pedestal because they're different and mysterious, and we somehow think that by being so unusual, these individuals come to have different rights than the rest of us?

It seems to me that there is a critical difference between the destruction of the indigenous community caused by climate change and the destruction of the agrarian community caused by industrialization. In the industrialization case, it's not as if the agribusiness made it impossible for the family farmers to continue farming. Rather, the problem arises because the family farmers were depending on the support of their customers in order to sustain themselves. Given that their customers had the right to remove their support at any time, it should be clear that the farmers were depending on others making choices which they could permissibly not make, or stop making at any time. The agribusiness, with its greater efficiency, could offer much lower prices than the family farmers, and their customers decided to withdraw their support, as was their right. It should be clear that in our story, the agribusiness never did anything to the family farmers. It simply revealed the fact that the family farmers could only continue to sustain themselves in their traditional manner if their customers continued to voluntarily purchase their products. The family farmers never had any right to that support, and so when it was withdrawn, no right was violated.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the indigenous communities in question depend on anyone for their continued survival. They require only that their environments not be modified so as to make them incompatible with their lifestyles. And as far as these indigenous communities have been making use of their environments for centuries, it seems fair to say that they have some legitimate claim to their not being negatively affected by the actions of other people.

I suspect that if we told the agrarian story in a way that matched the indigenous story, our intuitions would tell us that we were dealing with a rights violation. For example, let's say an agrarian community depended on an underground stream to bring water to the region with which to grow crops. Now imagine that someone diverted the flow of water through the area so that the community's land ran dry. Surely we would say that the diversion of the water flow represented a wrong done to the farmers, right?

In the same way, it seems that changing the climate in a way that would negatively impact indigenous peoples' ability to continue living in their traditional manner would be unjust. But this is not new ground. This conclusion is pretty much the same as the one I reached in my post about the Bangladeshi farmer and the rising sea levels. I want to go one step further here.

As I mentioned before, the intuition that people have about this sort of case is not simply that our alteration of the climate is wrong because it harms currently existing indigenous peoples' ability to live in the manner to which they are accustomed. The problem is also that their children will be unable to live in that manner. That is, the issue is not just what happens to the people whose lives are made difficult by climate change, but also what happens to the people who will be unable to live in the traditional manner dictated by their culture, and what consequently happens to the culture itself.

In order to isolate these factors from the harm done to the currently existing indigenous individuals, we might imagine that these individuals have been fully compensated for the damage done to them as individuals. This compensation not only takes into account the damage to their property, but also the damage to their character and psyche; the currently existing indigenous individuals recognize they were wronged, but acknowledge that they have been compensated adequately for all that they personally have endured.

Now we might imagine that one of these indigenous individuals has a child, Akiko. Akiko is raised in the indigenous culture, but sees that she will be unable to support herself in the traditional way. She will need to live a fundamentally different lifestyle from that of her people in order to survive. If we are to sustain that climate change will result in injustice to people like Akiko, then we must say that Akiko is wronged by having to find a way of life which differs from her culture's traditions.

At first glance, this might seem absurd. I grew up in Westport, CT; do I have the right to a house there? I have a friend who comes from a family of doctors; does he have the right to be one too? Surely we don't want to say that people have a right to live like the people who brought them up lived. We must find some other way to explain what is wrong with Akiko's situation if we are to be taken seriously.

A clue can be found in the fact that just like in the example with the agribusiness and the family farmers, my demands about a house in Westport and my friend's demands for a doctor job require things of others. Given that I have no right to anything from these people, it seems ridiculous to suggest that I am wronged if they do not provide me with something. I do have the right to try to buy a house in Westport, and my friend has the right to try to be a doctor. But given that having a house or being a doctor require the voluntary consent of others (in my case, the consent of the house's previous owner; in my friends case, the consent of the hiring institution and of the customers who choose to purchase his services), we cannot have the right to these things.

Akiko's demands would also be rooted in her getting others' consent. That is, she does not own her people's land; the older members of her culture do. But the kind of consent Akiko requires is very different from the kind of consent I would need in order to get a house, in that Akiko has that consent. Akiko's people, we presume, would gladly allow Akiko to use, and even to own, the group's land. In the absence of climate change, Akiko would be able to support herself in the traditional way using nothing but this land. But because of the effects of climate change, the land will not be able to support her in the traditional way. The substance of Akiko's complaint, then, might seem to be that she should have inherited enough resources to sustain herself, but that climate change diminished those resources to make it impossible for her to use them in the way her culture would have suggested.

This leads us to an interesting idea. Remember, we have said that the current owners of the land were fully compensated for all of the damage done to them by the effects of climate change on their land. Akiko's complaint is that there is a gap between what she should have inherited and what she actually did inherit. In order to satisfy Akiko (if we have interpreted her complaint correctly), we would need to take the view that by damaging the indigenous people's land, we not only wronged those people, but also the people who stood to inherit the land later. The "damage done" would be the damage done to the current owners, as well as the "damage" done to the future owners who "should have" inherited the land in its original condition, but instead inherited it in a damaged and less useful state. Accordingly, Akiko too would be entitled to compensation.

Of course, from Akiko's standpoint, this seems like it would be a fair solution. Because climate change destroyed her people's ability to live off the land, every generation of people in her community would be compensated for the damage done to the land. I'm not sure if this would actually be right, though. It seems to go completely against the way we normally think about damage and liability. I'd like to think about this some more, but I think this was a good place to start.

Does Intrinsic Value in Nonconscious Objects Create Problems for Property Rights?

Donny with an A — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:51:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

So I wrote earlier about the idea of nonconscious objects having intrinsic value, and I was wondering about the implications of what I said for our normal conceptions regarding property rights. Basically, I argued that some objects, like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, have the inherent capacity to inspire significant reactions in people. Accordingly, it seems fair to say that they have some kind of intrinsic value, and that therefore it is somehow wrong to destroy them wastefully; that is, it doesn't take proper account of this value to "destroy" them without good reason for doing so.

It occurred to me, though, that this account might seem to be at odds with our normal ideas about property rights. I figured it might be worth writing briefly about whether this is the case. I'll bring up two issues here, discussing neither in much depth (it's Friday, dammit). The first is whether the existence of intrinsic value in nonconscious entities could imply that we don't fully own our property. The second is whether intrinsic value creates problems for our ideas about just appropriation.

So why would intrinsic value have any bearing on whether or not we fully own our property? Well, the issue arises from the claim that it's wrong to destroy something with intrinsic value in the absence of a good reason for doing so. Does this mean that we could be entitled to stop someone from destroying something on her own property if she owned it? If so, this would clearly have significant implications for the way we think about our relationship with our property.

I think that we would have to start by pointing out that if someone were going to wastefully destroy an object with significant intrinsic value, she could probably sell it to someone else, or a group of people, who would clearly value it more than her. In his essay, "Liberty, Markets, and Environmental Values: A Hayekian Defense of Free-Market Environmentalism," Mark Pennington wrote, "...a case surely can be made that it is precisely for the ends that people value most highly that they should be required to make a personal sacrifice, including perhaps a material sacrifice." I think this makes some sense.

And if the object's owners were prepared to forgo such payment in order to see the object destroyed, then it seems clear that we would want to say that she had a reasonably strong interest in destroying the object, and that this could very well constitute the kind of "good reason" which would make legitimate the destruction of an intrinsically valuable object.

But what if transactions costs prevented the person from selling the object? Perhaps the object was extremely valuable, but it would simply be unfeasible to coordinate a trade? Would the owner be doing something wrong to destroy it? It seems that in this case, we would need to come up with a relatively good reason for overriding the property rights of the owner; if she rightfully owned the object, then we would generally want to say that the ownership rights included the right to destroy the object. This seems most obvious if we say that the owner created the intrinsic value in an object. Given that the value was "put into" the object by the owner, it seems that she would have every right to destroy that value.

However, I think that this intuition becomes slightly less clear if we suppose that the intrinsic value was a natural feature of the object. I don't think that this unclarity reflects that we don't believe that property rights should be respected. Rather, I think it is a consequence of an inadequate understanding the second issue that I wanted to touch on, which asks what kinds of things we can justly appropriate, and what that appropriation entails.

If you somehow come to own the Grand Canyon, and then you decide that you want to destroy it (for no good reason), I think that other people would be right to object. But this is not because you shouldn't have a right to do what you want with your property. I think it's more because people would object to the idea of you could justly be said to own something like the Grand Canyon. It just seems like something that a person couldn't fairly appropriate for themselves.

And I think that on some level, that sounds right. Objects with significant natural intrinsic value do seem to belong to all of us; it simply wouldn't be right for someone to declare himself the exclusive owner, with the right to destroy the object if he chose. But if we take to its logical end, then we not only restrict the appropriation of the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls, but also the appropriation of a beautiful forest or scenic beach front.

I think that there is some intuitive strength to the idea that individuals should not be able to simply take such natural wonders for themselves, excluding others from accessing them. This idea seems grounded in the notion of Pareto improvement. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick writes, "It will be implausible to view improving an object as giving full ownership to it, oif the stock of unowned objects that might be improved is limited. For an object's coming under one person's ownership changes the situation of all others. Whereas previously they were at liberty...to use the object, they now no longer are." While this is a problem for all acts of appropriation, it seems especially significant when we are able to say that without any human improvement, an object naturally has the capacity to inspire strong positive reactions in people. Why should one person be allowed to appropriate all the benefits from these natural objects for themselves?

But it's not as if privatization can't be Pareto improving. I don't want to say more about this just now, because I haven't thought it out enough. But I want to appeal to the idea that human stewardship can augment the intrinsic value in natural objects, and make them more accessible and beneficial to the people who would have enjoyed them in their natural state. For example, creating hiking trails and camping areas on a beautiful mountain can enable more people to enjoy their beauty. However, I want to take into account some important objections raised by G. A. Cohen which I'll get into some other time. For now, I'm just going to leave this as an unfinished project.