Pollution

Ethical Approaches to Environmental

Protection
• Ecological Approach
• Nonhumans have intrinsic value

• Environmental rights approach

• Humans have a right to a livable environment

• Market approach
• External costs violate utility, rights, and justice; therefore, they should be
internalized.
Ecological Ethics
• Anthropocentric View: Concern for environment based on how it
affects interests of humans.

• Should we care for nonhumans?

• Is nature something that is there to serve us?

• Or does it have a value in its own self?

Ecological Ethics

• Ecological Systems: An ecological system is an interrelated and

interdependent set of organisms and environments.

• Netlogo

• Business firms are part of a larger ecological system.

Ecological Ethics

• Deep Ecology: The ethical view that nonhuman parts of the

environment deserve to be preserved for their own sake, regardless
of whether this benefits human beings.
• Singer: Pain experienced by an animal is as great an evil as a comparable
pain experienced by a human being.

• Humans may be more sensitive to pain so an animal’s pain may have to be

more intense to be comparable to a human’s pain.

• Does non-human life have intrinsic value?

• The Last Man Argument

• Asks us to imagine a man who is Earth’s last survivor.
• We recognize it is wrong for the last man to destroy all nohumans.
• So we must recognize some nonhumans have intrinsic value apart from human.
• Members of Earth First! Have driven nails into randomly selected
trees of forest areas scheduled to be logged so that power logging
saws are destroyed when they bite into the spiked trees in order to
protect forests.

• Members of Sea Shepherd Conservation society have sabotaged

whale processing plants, sunk several ships, and otherwise imposed
costs on the whaling industry to protect whales.
Environmental Rights
• Is possession of a livable environment a fundamental human right?
• Should this moral right overrise people’s right to do business free
from any regulation?
• Humans have a right to fulfill their capacities as free and rational
beings and a livable environment is essential to such fulfillment.
• So humans have a right to a livable environment and this right is
violated by practice that destroy the environment.
• Such environmental rights can lead to absolute bans on pollution
even when the costs far outweigh the benefits.
Private and Social Costs

• Private Cost: The cost an individual or company mus tpay out of its
own pocket to engage in a particular economic activity.

• Social Cost: The private internal costs plus the external costs of
engaging in a particular economic activity.
Markets and Pollution
• Total costs of making a product include a seller’s internal private costs
and the external costs of pollution paid by society.
• A supply curve based on all costs of making a product lies higher than
one based only on sellers’ internal private costs.
• The higher supply curve crosses the demand curve at a lower quantity
and a higher price than the lower supply curve.
• When sellers’ costs include only private costs, too much is produced
and price is too low.
• This lower utility, violates rights, and justice
Why it is not a just society?

• First, allocation of resources in such markets is not optimal because

more commodity is being produced that society would demand if it
had to pay the actual cost.

• Second, producers ignore these costs and make no attempt to

minimize them like they minimize their other costs.

• Third, goods are no longer efficiently distributed to consumers.

• Fourth, not all exchanges are voluntary.

Pollution and Distributive Justice
• External costs of pollution are borne largely by the poor and the minorities.
• The poor are more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods
• If a firm makes basic goods for which the poor must allocate a larger
portion of their budget, then internalizing costs may place a
proportionately greater burden on the poor than on the affluent.
• If costs of pollution rise so high that unemployment rises, the poor again
disproportionately suffer.
• Retributive justice requires that the costs of pollution control should be
paid by those who cause pollution and who have benefited from pollution
activities
• Compensatory justice requires that the benefits of pollution control should
flow to those who have had to bear the external costs of pollution.
Costs & Benefits

• Suppose the pollution from a certain firm causes $100 worth of

environmental damage, and that the only device that eliminate this
pollution would cost the firm at least $1,000.

• What would a utilitarian have us do?

• Should pollution removal be based on cost-benefit analysis?

Optimal Level of Pollution Removal
• Costs of removing pollutants rise as benefits of removal fall.
• Optimal level of removal is point where its costs equal its benefits.
• When costs and benefits are not measurable, utilitarian approach
fails.
• How do you measure the cost of damages to human health & life?
• What if risks are uncertain? (add example)
• How much weight to give to a risk of a new technology in C-B
analysis?
• Suppose society currently accepts a 0.01 risk of death associated with
driving. Does it follow that society should also be indifferent to accepting a
risk of 0.01 of death from introduction of a new technology?
• Suppose the government decides to go ahead with this technology after a
C-B analysis even though the public disagrees. Is that fine?

• What if the public doesn’t understand the costs & benefits adequately and
media biases their opinion? What should the government do in such a
case?
When Utilitarianism fails
• When costs and benefits are not measurable, utilitarian approach fails.

• Precautionary principle: If a practice carries an unknown risk of

catastrophic and irreversible consequences, but it is uncertain how large
that risk is, then the practice should be rejected until its certain the risk is
nonexistent or insignificant.
• Strong version: burden of proof on those who want to adopt the
technology
• Weak version: burden of proof on those want to reject the technology.
• Maximin Rule: First assume the worst is going to happen and then
choose the option that leaves us best off when it does happen.
• For example, in greenhouse gas emissions.
Alternatives
• Social Ecology: The environmental crises we face are rooted in the
social systems of hierarchy and domination that characterize our
society.
• Unless these are abolished, nothing is going to change.
• Our culture encourages domination in many forms, including the
domination of nature.
• Success is associated with domination: The greater the number of
people who work for a person, the greater that person’s wealth,
power, and status, and the more successful the person is deemed to
be.
• Success becomes dominating nature through science, technology, and
agriculture.
• The ideal society is one that rejects all domination and in which all
power is decentralized. Activities restricted to those that allow us to
live in harmony with nature.
Ecofeminism
• The root of our ecological crisis lies in a pattern of domination of nature
that is tightly linked to the social practices and institutions through which
women have been subordinated to men.
• The logic of dominations sets up dualisms that are used to characterize
men and women.
• Women seen closer to nature (“mother nature”) whereas men as
conquerors of nature.
• Stewards, not masters, of nature
• Alternative women’s culture based on revaluing, celebrating and defending
what patriarchy has devalued, including the feminine, nonhuman nature.
Ethics of care
• Applying ethics of care towards “mother nature”
Ethics of Conserving Depletable Resources
• Conservation:
• Saving or rationing of natural resources for later uses.
• Pollution reduction is a form of conservation. Pollution consumes
pure air and water and reducing pollution conserves them.

• Why should we conserve resources for future generations? How

much should we conserve?
Rights of Future Generations
• Do future generations exist now? Will they exist?
• I may be able to think about them but I can’t hit them, punish them, treat
them wrongly.
• Since they don’t exist, they don’t possess rights.

• Suppose that all future generations (potentially infinite) have equal right to
world’s supply of oil. Should we try to divide oil equally among them?
• If we equally divide oil among them, our share would be a few quarts at
the most.
• Second, if they do have rights, we might be led to the absurd conclusion
that we must sacrifice (even our entire civilization) for their sake.
• We can say that someone has a certain right only if we know that he
or she has a certain interest which that right protects.
• But we don’t know the interests of future generations.
• Science might come up with technologies for creating new products
from other raw materials in abundance (minerals in seawater) or they
might find potentially unlimited energy sources such as nuclear
fusion.
Justice to Future Generations
• Rawls: Leave the world no worse than we found it.
• Care Ethic: Leave our children a world no worse than we received.
• Attfield: Leave the world as productive as we found it.
• Unlikely to happen in a competitive market. Why?
• Businesses try to consume resources quickly before competitors.
• Businesses have short time horizons.
• Future is difficult for businesses to predict.
• Businesses tend to ignore externalities.
Sustainability
• The capacity something has to continue to function into the future.
• Environmental sustainability: The capacity of the natural environment
to continue to meet the needs of present generations without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs
from that environment.
• Three (interdependent) pillars of sustainability
• Our economic activities
• Our social activities
• Our environmental activities
Environmental sustainability
• Requires
• Renewable resources should not be depleted at a rate that is greater than
their rate of replacement
• The emission rate of pollution should not exceed the capacity of environment
to cleanse and assimilate that pollution
• Non-renewable resources should be depleted at a rate no greater than the
creation of renewable alternatives.
• Technology Pessimists: Science will not find substitutes for all
renewable resources. So we must conserve.
• Technology Optimists: Science will find substitutes so sustainability
requires neiter conservation nor reducing consumption.
Social Audit
• A report of the social costs and benefits of the firm’s activities.