Back to the Drawing Board

Social Policymaking and the Libertarian Party

2008-07-07T00:57:00.006-04:00

[It occurs to me that the beginning of this post is very poorly written, and does not convey the idea that I was trying to get across. I apologize. Feel free to read it anyway, but feel even freer to skip down a little until the next bracketed comment.]

I take it that most libertarians acknowledge that society does need certain institutions and rules in order to operate, and that these rules would require individuals to abide by agreements which might end up with outcomes that they don't particularly like, but have to abide by because of the agreements. For example, if I voluntarily enter into a living arrangement in an incorporated city which is governed by a set of laws, then I must abide by those laws so long as I continue to live in the city. Going further, it seems reasonable to believe that in such a living arrangement, part of my agreement would include a mechanism for deciding on new rules which could be enforced. For example, if the members of my community wanted to employ a lawn mowing service, perhaps we could somehow get together and decide to be bound to contribute to the lawn mowing fund.

Now, what I've just described is a public policy. This public policy would be one that I could advocate for some reason like "I think we can all agree that it would be nice to have mowed lawns in our town, so we should have lawn mowing," or "It seems to me that people aren't motivated to mow their lawns, but would be glad to pay the price of mowing their lawn if for that price they knew they would get their lawn mowed and also get to live in a town of beautifully manicured laws." And given that I would be living in a community where all the members had agreed to abide by the rules turned out by some rule-making procedure, it seems like such a policy would be perfectly consistent with the ideals of anarcho-capitalism.

Hearing this, it might occur to some members of our current social order to suggest something like the following: What's the point of being an anarcho-capitalist if that's what you're going to end up with? If you have a vision of what society should be like, you should try to convince enough people that you're right, and then you can direct the political process towards implementing that vision. That's how democracy is supposed to work, and you just need to get out there and let your voice be heard!

It is this sort of thinking, as far as I can tell, that leads to the idea that a Libertarian Party can be successful. The idea, then, is that if Libertarians get their message out, they can make the government give us back our freedom and stay out of our lives. Society, under such a government, would then be able to decide whether to disband the State entirely or to attempt to maintain a smaller, more limited State. And perhaps both. After all, what's most important is that we start working towards a point where such a conversation could even be possible on a national level.

But notice an interesting feature about what I've said so far about taking a position on social issues. First, I talked about anarcho-capitalism as a starting point, and then talked about public policies that I would personally advocate for implementation in my own society, which I had voluntarily entered, and where the other members could only be bound by rules produced by a procedure that they had directly agreed to. By contrast, the capital-L Libertarians, it appears to me, leave out the first step. Their objective is to determine what rules they would want to govern their society, and then to attempt to have those rules implemented (this manifests itself in some sort of private property regime where there are very few socially enforced rules besides respect for property).

[If you just read the above, see what I mean about me not talking sense? Yea...sorry about that, I wrote the beginning of this post at 2AM last night, and didn't notice how bad it was when I resumed writing today. What follows is the main idea of this post, and hopefully makes sense on its own.]

This difference is not insignificant. To illustrate why, imagine that there is a fraternity, Alpha Beta (AB), which throws a huge party every year with a sorority, Chi Upsilon Zeta (XYZ). Let's say that a member of Alpha Beta, Chad, decides that he doesn't like the XYZ parties and no longer wants to contribute to them, but the other members of AB are willing to use force if necessary to get the money from Chad if he refuses to pay and doesn't leave the fraternity. Chad first considers leaving AB to go live elsewhere, but unfortunately, all the housing with access to his college's campus belongs to the Greek system, and all the other fraternities on campus do things that Chad finds equally lame, but would be forced to contribute to. His situation, I take it, is somewhat analogous to the one in which libertarians find themselves today (though of course Chad could transfer or drop out, but whatever).

Now, if Chad were to pursue the sort of plan I outlined in the beginning of this post, what would he need to do? Essentially, he would have several options. He could attempt to convince the other AB's (or the members of another fraternity) to allow him to build a shed on part of their lawn to sleep in. While in his part of the yard, the fraternity's rules would not apply to him, including the one which forced him to help pay for the party with the XYZ's. Second, he could purchase a patch of yard from the AB's (or another fraternity) which would belong exclusively to him, where he could make rules for himself, and would not need to contribute to any kind of fraternity organization. Third, Chad could claim a patch of lawn for himself and defend it with force of his own if anyone tried to make him contribute to any fraternity programs. There are probably a bunch of other things Chad could do instead. But the common theme here is that what Chad is doing is entering a non-affiliated state of affairs.

I should note that Chad would be an idiot to do this alone, especially if doing this would prevent him from any sort of social cooperation with anyone in the fraternity system. I don't think any reasonable anarcho-capitalist would contend that non-affiliated status would "work" if it meant that people would be out on their own. Being on your own is awful--worse, I think, than being subject to unreasonable and involuntary rule. But this is besides the point of this post.

Now let's contrast the above strategy to the kind of thing that Libertarian Party libertarians are trying to do. Imagine if instead of looking for a way out of the fraternity system, Chad thought to himself, "Well, I don't like the parties with the XYZ's. So what I should do is get AB to stop throwing the parties; if people really want to throw the parties, they can get together and organize the party voluntarily. The AB fraternity shouldn't be involved in the party; the members who want the party should be the ones to organize it." Chad would then try to popularize this idea, and get enough people in AB to agree to stop funding the party to bring about a change in the fraternity's rules. If Chad were like the Libertarian Party, he would go about this goal by trying to convince the youngest and most impressionable members of the fraternity about why the party wasn't so great, and why it would be really great if everyone who wanted the party just got together and had it without involving any of the people who didn't want to have it. Eventually, if Chad were successful, enough of AB would be filled with this new generation of Libertarian AB's, and the fraternity government would be withdrawn from involvement in throwing the party.

See how that's a very different way of getting things done? Consider, for a moment, the consequences for the AB member who is perfectly happy with the XYZ parties, and is glad to pay the dues to fund them. In the first scenario, where Chad goes out of his way to leave in a way that does not disturb the AB system of governance, the members of AB who are happy with their fraternity government still get to have their party, and without any perceptible change except for the one we want them to feel, which is that now Chad no longer has to pay for something that he doesn't want, and they have to deal with the consequences of that. If the party was only worth it to them because they could make Chad help pay for it, then perhaps they would stop having the party, and that's a good thing. But otherwise, the remaining members of AB would get to continue living the way that they were living, and it would be on Chad to figure out a way to make his new life work outside of AB.

By contrast, in the second scenario the mechanism by which the XYZ party was formerly thrown has now been denied to the AB members who have always depended upon it in the past, and if they want to have their party, it will now be contingent on them to get together and negotiate a new deal. If AB were an extremely large fraternity, and the members did not have a very good way of communicating and negotiating with each other, this might be incredibly difficult for the AB's to organize. Certainly they would have an incentive to figure it out. But that doesn't mean that they would figure it out, and figuring it out would certainly involve opportunity costs that could be very significant to them.

The difference can be summed up like this: In the scenario I've advanced, where Chad separates himself from what he takes to be an oppressive system and strikes out to pursue his own goals, what Chad does is to remove himself, but to leave the existing system intact for those who want it to remain that way. He changes nothing for anyone except so far as others were depending on him to help further their own ends (using him as a means). In the scenario in which Chad embodies the Libertarian Party, on the other hand, the entire system of government by which the other AB's are used to coordinating their activities is disabled, and they must take it upon themselves to coordinate the party in its stead. As I've suggested, this might not be particularly easy for them to do, especially if the fraternity is extremely large and communication is difficult, and lots of coordination is required to get the XYZ party off the ground.

As I see it, the former strategy is the one most consistent with the ideal of just wanting to be left alone. The latter, it seems to me, effectively stops the other AB's from imposing things on Chad by creating a coordination vacuum, which could have seriously unpleasant consequences for the AB's. It's stopping an imposition on Chad by essentially imposing something else on the AB's: the responsibility to throw a party for which they had gladly delegated the responsibility away to their fraternity government.

Essentially, this is what I think that the Libertarian Party is trying to do. It's trying to take a government entity that many people rely on and that many people believe must be involved in certain areas of their lives, and destroying its ability to fulfill the tasks that these people are looking for it to fulfill. Sure, it's probably true that these people will be able to adapt to their new circumstances and perhaps be better off than before. But the point is, people who are not libertarians don't want to live in a society that reflects libertarian ideals. They would gladly submit to a coercive government if the alternative were trying to make all the decisions necessary to decide on what kind of life they want to live. To paralyze their government, I take it, would be to do these people a profound disservice. And because I like these people, I will advocate nothing of the sort.

Rather, I will advocate what I consider to be the high road. I would gladly endure greater oppression under the state, and gladly make greater sacrifices in order to bring about a world in which secession from our statist friends is a feasible solution for libertarians who no longer want to live under the state system, rather than advocate the destruction of the state system to serve my ends, at the great expense of those who very much want the state system to remain in place, and who have no interest in giving anarchy a shot.

I want to qualify that by saying that I'm finding it hard not to want to see McCain run this country into the ground in a spectacular fashion so that Americans will have reason to critically reexamine the ideas on which they base their social order. But I think that's sort of different from wanting to force people to act like libertarians: I want them to see how stupid their system is and change their minds, as opposed to wanting them to have to act as though their minds were changed when they really hadn't been.

On the Use of the Term "Self-Interest" in Economics

2008-06-26T00:57:00.003-04:00

I've been repeatedly embroiled in an argument for the last few weeks over the term "self-interest" as it is used in economic discussion, and I wanted to hammer out my position once and for all so that I don't have to keep trying to start from the beginning. Here's the deal. I am told that within the discipline of economics, what it means to say that a person "acted in her own self-interest" is that a person "acted according to her own interests." The idea here is that all action demonstrates preference, and that this necessarily means that the actor preferred the action that was taken to all other actions. So if I jump on a grenade in order to save my friends, what I have demonstrated is that I preferred to jump on the grenade over all other alternatives that I considered, and it's fair to say that I wanted to jump on the grenade; that out of all available alternatives, the one I consider the best is the one where I jump on the grenade so that my friends live. I'm down with that.

When I jump on the grenade because I want to save my friends, I take it to be uncontroversial that I do so according to my own interests. How could it be otherwise? And if what we mean by "self-interest" is simply that I act according to my own interests, then yes, my jumping on the grenade is self-interested.

But when presented with the claim that jumping on the grenade is a self-interested behavior, the average person tends to become perplexed. It's only after a thorough explanation of the "economic" meaning of the term that it becomes clear how this could be the case. Why does this happen? The reason, I contend, is that economists mean something completely different by the term "self-interested" than lay people do. This, I will argue, is a problem, and should be remedied in order to prevent completely unnecessary confusion and error.

Let me explain. In talking about any interest or preferred scenario, there must be a subject and an object. The subject, generally speaking, is the person who has the interest or the preference. So if we're talking about my preference for eating an apple, the subject is me. It is I who prefers the apple, and the preference for the apple is incoherent without the fact that the preference is my preference. The object of the preference, on the other hand, is the end which the subject is seeking to promote. In our example, I prefer the apple, but the object of my preference is not simply the apple: I don't value the apple for itself. I want to eat the apple. The object of my preference, then, is something along the lines of my having eaten the apple (perhaps we might say that I want "the experience" of eating the apple, or "the happiness" produced by my eating the apple; the exact way we phrase this is not critical).

The critical thing to note here is that the economists' definition of "self-interest" simply refers to the idea that interests are subjective: the subject of all interests is the interested individual. It is my understanding, however, that when lay people use the term "self-interest," what they have in mind is, minimally, that the object of the preference has something to do with the interested individual. So if my sister were sick, I might go get her some medicine. To say that my getting the medicine is "self-interested" would mean, to the lay person, that I get the medicine in order to promote some self-directed end. That is, I get the medicine because, perhaps, I am happier when my sister is not sick, or my sister is irritating when she's sick, or there's a cute pharmacist who will think I'm sweet for taking care of my sick sister. The lay-person, then, would call "non-self-interested" or "selfless" an interest with an object which does not directly involve the actor. So I act selflessly if the reason I go get the medicine is that I value my sister's health for its own sake, and am willing to take on the costs necessary to promote her health.

Note that this lay definition of self-interest is not incoherent or contradictory. And note also that the "selfless" act identified by the lay definition is labeled as "self-interested" by the economist definition. Indeed, the notion of "selflessness," as identified by the lay definition, is defined out of existence by the economist definition. Because the economist identifies as "self-interested" all actions where the subject is the actor, and because all actions demonstrate an interest on the part of the actor, it becomes clear that there can be no such thing as a "non-self-interested" or "selfless" action.

A number of problems immediately present themselves. The first problem is that the economist definition completely eliminates what I take to be an extremely useful distinction between "self-interested" and "selfless" actions, which is captured very well in the lay definition, without providing an adequate substitute. One might object that the term "selfish" captures the layman's "self-interested," but to most people, the term "selfish" is emotionally charged with negative connotations. Observe the struggles of the Objectivists to try to divorce this emotional
connotation from the term! By contrast, the layman's "self-interest" is relatively neutral and already conveys the sort of thing that the economist would be trying to bend "selfish" into meaning. Further, the economist would then need a new word for the layperson's "selfish"!

Another reason that the fundamental difference between the lay person's and the economist's definition is undesirable is that the economist's definition of "self-interested" means exactly the same thing as the lay person's "interested." Because all interests are subjective, and the "self" in "self-interested" refers only to this fact, the term becomes redundant. The only thing that could conceivably be added by using the term "self-interest" would be if the addition of the "self" served to remind people that preferences are subjective. But as we have discussed, the term "self-interested" already means something, and it has nothing to do with subjectivity. If anything, the use of the term crowds out more useful terminology like "subjectively-interested."

Yet another problem with the economists' definition is that now we have a situation where the technical definition of the term "self-interested" is fundamentally different from the normally accepted definition of the word. That means that in order to actually communicate their points to lay people, economists will need to first make clear what they mean by self-interested, and ensure that their audience keeps this definition firmly in mind so as to avoid drawing bad conclusions. This also creates a systematic likelihood that people will be misled by economists who fail to properly emphasize their use of the redefined term. Nowhere is this problem more apparent than in the field of Public Choice economics. We might imagine an economist going before a crowd of lay persons and announcing that "The problem with governments is that they are run by self-interested people." We might imagine that what the economist means here is that politicians act according to their own preferences, and do not magically take on "society's" preferences when they are elected to office. They are, after all, human! And this would be a good and important point. But upon hearing the economist say that politicians are self-interested, a number of lay people might interpret the economist as making the argument that politicians are "in it for themselves" and are simply involved in politics in order to accrue benefits for themselves, regardless of whether others are harmed in the process. If it's true that the economists' use of the term "self-interest" does not offer any new or important insight into anything, as I argued above, it's unclear why we wouldn't want to simply avoid this problem altogether.

The final problem with the economists' use of the term "self-interested" is that economists themselves may end up misusing the term and reverting to the normal definition without noticing. Remember, economists are lay persons before they are economists, and have generally grown up with a meaning of the term "self-interested" which is very different from the meaning they've been trained to adopt in their profession. As a result, you end up with phenomena like economists saying things along the lines of "Because all actions are self-interested, it's clear that the reason you jump on the grenade is because you would be miserable if you didn't, and you expect that the misery would be way worse than dying." And I assure you, having heard that point made today, the risk of this sort of thing occurring is very real.

So in conclusion, I say that economists should quit their ridiculousness and give us back "self-interest." Their definition takes away a useful distinction which is captured by the normal meaning of the word, doesn't explain anything new, and doesn't accomplish anything except confusing everyone, including the economists themselves.

Cap and Trade vs. the Carbon Tax

2008-06-12T19:41:00.001-04:00

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?

2008-06-07T22:52:00.002-04:00

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

2008-05-30T17:42:00.002-04:00

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!

Enforcing the Attitude of Respect for Nature

2008-05-17T17:22:00.003-04:00

So I wrote this for my environmental ethics class, and I figured I'd post it. But I just want to make clear up front that I don't agree with Taylor's argument for the attitude of respect for nature. The paper takes its correctness as a premise, and I want to make sure it's understood that I believe that premise to be false. Nevertheless, I think it's a fascinating point of view, and I think this exercise has been valuable for me in terms of thinking about rights and how they're supposed to work. Hopefully others can find some value in it too.

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In his book, Respect for Nature, Paul Taylor offers an account of a disposition which he calls the “attitude of respect for nature.”[1] This disposition, Taylor explains, involves the recognition of the inherent worth of non-human “nature,” which leads to the treatment of nature with a proper degree of respect.[2] Proper respect, he argues, involves adherence to certain rules[3] which should not be broken in the absence of morally significant reasons. These rules include a duty to refrain from harming other organisms, from interfering in their activities, and from deceiving them or violating their trust, as well as a duty to make restitution when one does wrong.[4] For Taylor, the attitude of respect for nature is a virtue; it is view about how good people will act,[5] and for what reasons they do so.[6] For the sake of our discussion, we will make the assumption that Taylor’s view is objectively sound (a claim which Taylor does not make[7]), and the attitude of respect for nature is in fact virtuous.

Because Taylor’s view includes a mechanism by which individuals would voluntarily make restitution for any transgressions, it seems that if everyone were completely virtuous, there would never be any need to coercively enforce the mandates of justice; Taylor’s virtuous people would take care of any problems on their own. But it will immediately be noted that not all people are virtuous in Taylor’s sense. Many fail to hold the attitude of respect for nature. Because of this, they will likely do things that are inconsistent with this attitude, and which therefore represent iniquities. Accordingly, we might ask whether others would be justified in coercively interfering with these individuals’ actions in order to ensure that individuals who are not themselves virtuous nevertheless behave as if they were.

Generally, the simplest way to justify coercion is to cite the violation of some right held be the victim. As Taylor points out, rights represent things to which we are entitled,[8] so that if we are wrongfully deprived of them, our rights are violated.[9] Given that we are entitled to the objects of our rights, it seems eminently plausible that we would be justified in using force in response to the violation of our rights. If we could show that the sort of unvirtuous actions identified by the attitude of respect for nature represented rights violations, then we would have a good reason for believing that coercive enforcement might be justifiable.

Complicating matters, however, is the fact that Taylor offers two different accounts of rights, and these two views produce opposite conclusions about whether the behaviors in question violate rights.[10] In order to properly appraise the justifiability of coercion, we will need to decide between these views. According to Taylor’s first account, there are several necessary components of rights which plants and non-human animals cannot fulfill, making it impossible to conceive of them as having rights.[11] 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. Because they cannot think in terms of moral legitimacy, plants and non-human animals fail this test.[12] 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. Plants and non-human animals fail in this criterion as well.[13] 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. Because plants and non-human animals cannot make this sort of choice, they fail here as well.[14] Finally, Taylor explains that having a right involves an entitlement to “…register complaints, demand redress, or call for legal enforcement of their rights…”[15] whenever they are violated. Because plants and non-human animals lack the capacity to carry out any of these entitlements, Taylor suggests that it would be nonsensical to recognize them as having rights.[16] Though each of these objections, if correct, would be conclusive on its own, taken together they seem devastating.

However, Taylor offers a way to understand rights that would allow us to preserve the notion that acting inconsistently with the attitude of respect for nature constitutes rights-violating behavior. 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.[17] If failure to act in accordance with these duties indeed qualifies as rights-violating behavior, then actions inconsistent with Taylor’s attitude of respect for nature could certainly be understood in this way.

But do actions which fail to properly respect others’ inherent worth constitute potentially enforceable rights violations by themselves, or are the conditions described in Taylor’s first account really necessary for the recognition of rights? To answer this question, we might ask whether there are any seemingly clear cases where we would think ourselves justified in coercively enforcing the “rights” of a victim who does not fulfill one of the criteria mentioned in Taylor’s first view. And in fact, Taylor alludes to two groups of such entities: the insane and the severely mentally handicapped.[18]

Members of these two groups seem to fail on each of the four tests Taylor offers in his argument that plants and non-human animals do not have rights. 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.

Of course, it could be that we are simply unjustified in behaving in this manner towards the severely mentally handicapped and the insane. But if we are justified, then it seems that we have good reason to think that coercion could be justified in protecting plants and non-human animals, whose inherent worth we have acknowledged by assuming that Taylor’s attitude of respect for nature is an objective account of the way that virtuous individuals will interact with non-human nature.

[1] Taylor, P.W., page 59.

[2] Ibid, pages 71-80.

[3] Ibid, page 89.

[4] Ibid, pages 172-192.

[5] Ibid, pages 88-89.

[6] Ibid, pages 15-16.

[7] Ibid, page 167.

[8] Ibid, pages 226-227.

[9] Ibid, pages 243-244.

[10] Ibid, pages 219-255.

[11] Ibid, page 246.

[12] Ibid, pages 246-247.

[13] Ibid, pages 247-248.

[14] Ibid, pages 248-250.

[15] Ibid, page 251.

[16] Ibid, pages 250-251.

[17] Ibid, pages 251-255.

[18] Ibid, page 225.

On Playing "Government" When People Are Dying

2008-05-15T01:40:00.002-04:00

So today is apparently "Hey, everyone write about human rights today!" day in the "Blogosphere" (yea, I said it). I'm all in favor of such an occasion, because...well...I'm all in favor of human rights. But I'm not completely sure what to write about. I feel like it would sort of be missing the point to discuss another of the abstract theoretical issues with which this blog is generally concerned. But I also don't want to just pump out some garbage "reporting on" some current event that I don't understand any better than anyone else. The happy medium, I think, would be to compromise and talk about some current event from a very vaguely abstract perspective. I choose Myanmar.

In case you live in a hole, or in case you're reading this a while after I wrote it, Myanmar was hit by a severe storm and tens of thousands of people are in desperate need of help. According to CNN, 38,491 have been confirmed dead, and the UN predicts that the final death toll could be 100,000 or more, especially if aid does not arrive quickly. From the sound of it, there are a dearth of people who would be very happy to help these people. But to this point, the "government" of Myanmar, a military junta which took power in a 1962 coup and has violently suppressed political dissent ever since, has been obstructing much of this aid from getting to the people who need it. Apparently they've gotten their act together a little bit in the last few days, but things are still moving slowly.

Now it seems clear to me that the junta's role in this is illegitimate. There is a group of people who want to help another group of people who would undoubtedly consent to being helped in this way. I'd even go so far as to say that the people whose land they'd have to cross in order to get to these people would almost certainly consent to this happening (especially if we moved everything by plane). So bringing the aid to the people who desperately need it would likely violate no rights, and would therefore seem to be protected against interference from third parties. And yet, here are a group of people who are interfering anyway.

So the real question is, what should be done about this sort of thing? I mean, if we're not willing to violently overthrow the military junta (I'm just taking that off the table up front, if only because it wouldn't likely result in the storm victims being helped any better), the obvious option is to just shrug our shoulders and plead with the junta not to be so callous. And this seems like what people are doing. But at what cost? How many thousands of lives will be lost on account of this strategy?

I think it's reasonable to say that morality would permit us to bring the aid to the people who need it and to defend our efforts against Myanmar's government if they tried to stop us. We need to seriously consider the alternative of bringing aid to these people, junta be damned, and greeting anyone who tries to stop us with the muzzle of a gun. I'm not saying it's what we have to do, but I'm concerned about the fact that no one has even brought it up, given how ready people are to bomb entire cities of civilians into the Bronze Age in order to combat terrorists who could possibly live among them.

We need to remember that an important part of the idea that the use of force is only justified in protecting rights is the idea that force is justified when protecting rights. People are dying by the thousands, and we can save many of them. I'm appalled that the same group of people that seem to consider themselves the world's police force when they're dealing with Muslims are not even toying with the idea of approaching Myanmar's leaders with a simple position: "Listen, we're going to help these people. And if you try to stop us, I hope God has mercy on your soul, because we sure won't."

Universally Preferable Behavior and the Maxim Description Problem

2008-05-06T19:14:00.000-04:00

So now that I'm no longer going to be communicating with Stefan directly, I'm not sure if there are any real prospect of my actually understanding his book. Still, I think it might be worthwhile, if anyone's interested, to lay out a bit of criticism of some of the main themes that I actually found objectionable, and not just confusing. This post won't represent an attempt to completely tackle that task. Rather I'll focus on one idea which comes up several times in Stefan's book, and which represents a significant problem for any theory taking the form that Stefan's does.

A cursory examination of Stefan's book reveals that he's working in a distinctly Kantian framework, in the sense that he takes morality to be based on maxims which are evaluated for moral goodness or badness by universalizing them and determining whether they come into contradiction with themselves (Kant introduces this framework in his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals).

Now, I have a long track record of being accused of misrepresenting Stefan's positions, and I'm very comfortable with the assumption that I'll be accused of doing this here in describing his methodology. Nevertheless, I believe that the proof is on the paper, and I will take great care to establish beyond what I think is a reasonable doubt that this is the approach that Stefan is using. I apologize in advance if this is tedious.

Stefan writes, on page 43:

...the first test of any scientific theory is universality. Just as a theory of physics must apply to all matter, a moral theory that claims to describe the preferable actions of mankind must apply to all mankind. No moral theory can be valid if it argues that a certain action is right in Syria, but wrong in San Francisco. It cannot say that Person A must do X, but Person B must never do X. It cannot say that what was wrong yesterday is right today - or vice versa. If it does, it is false and must be refined or discarded.

Then, on page 44, he writes:

If I say that gravity affects matter, it must affect all matter. If even one pebble proves immune to gravity, my theory is in trouble. If I propose a moral theory that argues that people should not murder, it must be applicable to all people. If certain people (such as soldiers) are exempt from that rule, then I have to either prove that soldiers are not people, or accept that my moral theory is false. There is no other possibility. On the other hand, if I propose a moral theory that argues that all people should murder, then I have saved certain soldiers, but condemned to evil all those not currently murdering someone (including those being murdered!) - which is surely incorrect.

If, to save the virtue of the soldiers, I alter my theory to argue that it is moral for people to murder if someone else tells them to (a political leader, say), then I must deal with the problem of universality. If Politician A can order a soldier to murder an Iraqi, then the Iraqi must also be able to order the soldier to murder Politician A, and the soldier can also order Politician A to murder the Iraqi. The application of this theory results in a general and amoral paralysis, and thus is proven invalid.

It seems clear that Stefan is using a maxim-based approach here which is more or less identical to the one used by Kant. That approach states moral precepts in the following form: "In all circumstances C, I will do X," universalizes them, and searches for problems. It's worth pointing out that Kant discusses two different ways in which a universal law can come into contradiction with itself: it can be impossible to conceive of a world in which it is followed, or such a world could not be desired by any rational person. Stefan does not explicitly assent to this distinction, but I think that there is evidence that Stefan would accept both sorts of "contradictions" as sufficient reason for rejecting a maxim.

On page 66, Stefan writes:

Raping someone is a positive action that must be initiated, executed, and then completed. If "rape" is a moral good, then "not raping" must be a moral evil - thus it is impossible for two men in a single room to both be moral at the same time, since only one of them can be a rapist at any given moment - and he can only be a rapist if the other man becomes his victim.

He continues:

...two men in a room must be considered to be in the same situation. If only one of them can be good, because goodness is defined as rape, and only one of them can rape at any time, then we have a logical contradiction that cannot be resolved.

I take this to be pretty good evidence that Stefan accepts Kant's first sort of contradiction as a reason for rejecting a maxim. The maxim, "I will always rape," cannot be adopted as a universal law; it would be impossible to conceive of a world in which it was. Stefan also seems to accept that Kant's second sort of contradiction, that a reasonable person would be unable to will the universal adoption of the rule, would be problematic for a maxim. On page 80, Stefan writes:

...if stealing is good, then goodness becomes a state achievable only in the instant that Doug steals Bob's lighter. In that instant, only Doug can be moral, and Bob cannot be. After that, goodness becomes impossible to achieve for either party, unless Doug keeps giving Bob's lighter back and then snatching it away again.

Of course, it seems patently ridiculous to imagine that the ideal moral state is for one man to keep giving another back the property he has stolen, and then immediately stealing it again. Thus logic seems to validate our instinctual understanding of the foolishness of this as a moral ideal...

Stefan goes on to argue that a maxim advocating the practice of stealing would be contradictory for the reason discussed above (it would be impossible to conceive of a world in which everyone consistently advocated theft), but his statements here suggest that Kant's second variety of contradiction would also provide some grounds for rejecting a maxim.

It might have been noticed that I set up the phrasing of a maxim to explicitly include circumstances, and yet in many of the examples above, Stefan did not make any mention of circumstances. I would point out that in any situation in which circumstances are not explicitly set out, it is not unreasonable to think that the maxim could simply apply to all circumstances. Further, there are examples in which Stefan does make reference to circumstances as potentially providing basis for making moral distinctions. For example, returning to the soldier example on page 44, Stefan suggests that we could alter a moral theory to say that "...it is moral for people to murder if someone else tells them to (a political leader, say)..." Here we would need to make use of the maxim structure outlined earlier: "In circumstances in which another person tells me to murder, I will murder."

There is further reason to believe that circumstances should be relevant in the exposition of a moral theory: It could be that in some circumstances, an otherwise impermissible action would be perfectly acceptable. For example, it is generally impermissible to kill another person. But if that person is attacking you, then it seems that it would be acceptable to use lethal force in self-defense. The maxim, "I will kill people" seems obviously problematic; this is not so with the circumstance-dependent maxim, "In circumstances in which I am being attacked and can save myself only by killing my attacker, I will kill my attacker."

But none of this seems particularly problematic for Stefan's theory. So far, I haven't really done anything but clarify how I think the theory is supposed to work. So what's my problem? The objection is one that has been commonly raised against Kant; I'll call it the Maxim Description Problem (there's probably an "official" name for it somewhere, but I don't know what it is). The problem is this: Our evaluation of an action will depend on the maxim on which we are acting when we perform it. But any individual action can be justified by a number of different possible maxims. Accordingly, we could reach the conclusion that an act is permissible or impermissible depending on the maxim that is being used to justify it.

To invoke a classic example, we might imagine that a person has come to your door and is asking where your friend is. Unbeknownst to the person at the door, you know that the reason that she is asking is because she is a murderer who wants to kill your friend. You know where your friend is, and know that if you tell the murderer his location, she will certainly kill him. You also know that if you lie, nothing bad will happen to you, and that your friend will be able to escape with his life. What should you do?

On one hand, you can consider the maxim, "Whenever I can promote the outcomes I desire by lying, I will do so." We can imagine that if everyone adopted this maxim, no one would ever accept anyone's word for anything, and there would never be any occasion to lie in the first place. Such a maxim would simply make no sense as a universal law. On the other hand, as Christine Korsgaard points out in her essay, "The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil," it would not be absurd for everyone to adopt a maxim by which they would lie in order to keep a murderer from her victim. Here we might imagine the maxim to be "Whenever I can prevent someone from murdering a person by lying, and I know that no other negative consequences will occur on account of my actions, I will lie."

This brings into focus an important problem, however. The fact that a particular maxim is unacceptable for justifying a particular action does not mean that there is no acceptable maxim which could justify it. So it could be that an action is morally permissible, even if we can show how a number of maxims which could justify it are unacceptable. This becomes a problem for Stefan in a number of different places in his book, where he seems to try to argue that certain actions are morally impermissible by rejecting particular maxims on which they could be based.

For instance, returning to the soldier example, Stefan wrote:

If, to save the virtue of the soldiers, I alter my theory to argue that it is moral for people to murder if someone else tells them to (a political leader, say), then I must deal with the problem of universality. If Politician A can order a soldier to murder an Iraqi, then the Iraqi must also be able to order the soldier to murder Politician A, and the soldier can also order Politician A to murder the Iraqi. The application of this theory results in a general and amoral paralysis, and thus is proven invalid.

This is fine, but as I've noted before, it does not prove that soldiers are wrong in killing people (murder is a bad word to use here, because the definition of the word "murder" is "wrongful killing," and therefore it is conceptually impossible for murder to be permissible). It only proves that soldiers' killing people cannot be justified by the maxim in question. It is logically possible that there is some other maxim which would justify soldiers' actions.

And indeed, such a maxim is not too difficult to come up with. One example would be the maxim, "Whenever I have declared myself to be a combatant of a particular group in a universally recognized manner, and I can kill a recognized combatant of another group who has not surrendered in a universally recognized manner, I will do so." That maxim could be adopted as a universal law without any contradiction that I can think of. But if this is the case, then how is the maxim-based approach supposed to serve as a moral guide? It might seem like any time we come across an action that cannot be justified by a particular maxim, the most we would be able to say is that we simply aren't sure if it's permissible or not. In order to effectively put Stefan's methodology to work, we need a way to determine what the right maxim is.

This problem is brought into focus by another factor in the equation, known as the Principle of Formal Equality. This principle states that in order to treat two things as ethically different, there must be a ethically significant difference between them. We have already seen evidence that Stefan accepts this principle, when he wrote:

Just as a theory of physics must apply to all matter, a moral theory that claims to describe the preferable actions of mankind must apply to all mankind. No moral theory can be valid if it argues that a certain action is right in Syria, but wrong in San Francisco. It cannot say that Person A must do X, but Person B must never do X. It cannot say that what was wrong yesterday is right today - or vice versa. If it does, it is false and must be refined or discarded.

The implication here is that being located in Syria as opposed to San Francisco cannot represent an ethically significant difference between two scenarios; being Person A instead of Person B is not a morally relevant way to distinguish a circumstance; taking place today instead of tomorrow cannot matter to an ethical theory. For example, notice that the maxim, "Whenever it is May 6, 2008, and I am Danny Shahar, and I can steal a pen from the University Book Store without anyone ever noticing, I will do so," could be adopted as a universal law without coming into any sort of contradiction with anything. But surely that doesn't mean that it would be okay for me to steal the pen. The Principle of Formal Equality helps us explain why: the maxim I've offered is unacceptable because it only works because of distinctions that aren't morally relevant in any way.

However, as we have seen, maxims can coherently contain certain distinctions which allow them to apply only to actions which occur in specific circumstances. So, for example, I am justified in killing in self-defense when I'm being attacked, even though there are other scenarios in which I'm not justified in killing people. What is needed, then, is an account of what kinds of features of a set of circumstances are morally relevant. If we had such an account, we could conceivably come up with a proper description of the set of circumstances in which your action was taking place, and then determine whether the maxim based on that set of circumstances could be acceptably adopted as universal law.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Stefan doesn't provide any such account. And perhaps more unfortunately, no one else has either. Until someone does, it seems like any maxim-based approach to ethics is going to be hampered by the Maxim Description Problem. Annnnddd...that's part of the reason why I take a rights-based approach to ethics!

So that's one problem with Stefan's view. When I get a chance, I'll try to touch on some more problems in future posts. But for now, I hope this was helpful!

Generational Rights

2008-05-05T18:37:00.000-04:00

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

2008-05-04T18:06:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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