Interpretations of I

1. Interpretations of I Does Environmental Policy Have Any Foundations?

2. Some candidates • Vulnerability • Utilitarianism and its derivatives • Growth (next week) • Resilience • Adaptive management • Sustainability • Precaution

3. Some Common Problems • Lack of a legitimating framework • Built up from disciplines that are either without substantive ethical norms or orphaned because they are no longer connected to a legitimating narrative. • Not really about the environment—a form of anthropocentrism.

4. Outline • Vulnerability • The Perfected Market (Nordhaus/Harris) • Resilience • Sustainability/Precaution/Adaptive Management

5. Johann Karl LothThe Good Samaritan (1697)

6. Some features of Jewish Cosmology • Linearity of time; Idea that time had a beginning and is moving forward • Humanity as the pinnacle of creation; created in the image of God • Moral behavior through following God’s laws • Active, moral God who controls nature to reward or punish humans for their behavior • Human behavior connected to an end; people act morally with the view that their actions will be punished or rewarded by God

7. Some features of Christian Cosmology • 2 commandments displace the 10. • A special interest in humanity manifested through Jesus. • The possibility of an afterlife-through a responsible life. • Personal and knowable God: through reason and faith. • The Great Chain of Being.

9. Answer: obey the law to love God with all your heart, soul and strength; and your neighbor as yourself. Who is my neighbor? Schweitzer’s answer…………. How Can I Secure Eternal Life?

10. “Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side.” Good Samaritan

11. “So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast Good Samaritan

12. and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers? He said, "The one who showed mercy on him." And Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise.” Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-34:36)

13. Protecting the Vulnerable A Foundation for Environmental Policy?

14. What is protecting the vulnerable? • An injunction to prevent harms from befalling people. (p. 110) • Vulnerability is a matter of being under threat from harms. Ibid.

15. Defeating the voluntarist model. • Promises generate dependence and therefore vulnerability. Vulnerability helps me decide what promises to make. • Businesses are more knowledgeable than their customers. • Professionals must protect the client. Terms of the contract set. Duties to assist. Duties to persist. • Family relations. • Friends.

16. Elements of the theory. • Incidence. Who has the special obligation to whom? • Content. What protection should be provided? • Context. When the duties arise. • Form. The duties cannot be altered even if the parties consent.

17. Characterizing Individual Duties • Individual responsibilities. If A’s interests are vulnerable to B’s actions and choices, B has a special responsibility to protect A’s interests; the strength of this responsibility depends strictly upon the degree to which B can affect A’s interests. (p. 118) • The role of causal histories, and the doctrine of last/best chance.

18. Duties as Part of a Collective • If A’s interests are vulnerable to the actions or choices of a group of individuals, disjunctively or conjunctively, then that group has a special responsibility to (a) organize…and (b) implement a scheme for coordinated action by members such that A’s interests will be protected as well as they can be by that group, consistent with the groups other responsibilities.

19. Duties to Future generations • Why the voluntarist/contract model does not work for future persons. • How our unilateral power fits the vulnerability model.

20. Duties to the Environment • The great chain of being raises its (ugly?) head. • Duties to animals no problem—they have interests; but are they neighbors. • Is protecting the environment just a subset of our general duties to future persons? • Is the fact that the environment is vulnerable to our actions what grounds our responsibility? Has no moral standing.

21. The great chain of being

22. The Perfect Market A Foundation for Environmental Policy?

23. What is “I”? • The current dominant normative, corrected markets, framework is derived from economics/utilitarianism. • I is impacted negatively when an act or omission causes a net decline in human well-being.

24. Outline • The Corrected Domestic Market • What to do when there is no market • International Markets. • Problems in Paradise • Fellow travelers

25. 1. The Corrected (Micro) Market National and International Versions of getting more for less. (Difference between free markets and corrected markets, and between macro and micro.)

26. Dominion Assumed

27. Presenting the theory/not the reality • Globalization and its Discontents. • The Blood Bankers • Confessions of an Economic Hitman • Correction important/regulation?-?

28. Transactions Cobus Bodenstein, National Post, October 16, 2000

29. The best of all possible worlds

30. Tariffs • Subsidies • Currency frictions • Immigration • Capital immobility • Quotas • Externalities • Public Goods • Monopolies • Absence of markets • Transaction costs • Information asymmetries

31. Judging improvements from transactions • Pareto-superior. • Pareto-optimum.

32. Pareto superior • At least one person is better-off without the other one being worse-off.

33. Pareto-superior Jeremy’s utility A B P Peter’s utility

34. Pareto-optimum When it is impossible to make somebody better-off without making somebody else worse-off.

35. Pareto-optimal

36. Obstacles to Pareto-improvementsthe nasty six • Externalities. • Public goods. • Monopoly. • No market. • Transaction costs. • Information.

37. Externalities : Francisco Olvera, La Jornada, March 30, 1999.

38. Public goods (non-rival) http://www.nps.gov/goga/

39. Public goods (non-excludable) http://exn.ca/FlightDeck/Aircraft/imagearchiveresult.cfm?Keyword=19980616-avroarrow5b.jpg

40. Monopoly http://www.aircanada.ca/home.html

41. No market Weather forecast for the Montreal Area Monday, October 19, 3000. Sunny with cloudy periods High 9 ° C Low 0 ° C

42. Transaction costs http://www.kksm.com/

43. Lack of Information

44. Information

45. 2. Cost/benefit analysis: finding the market solution without the market

46. Prices already paid. • Demand side, e.g. hedonic pricing—travel costs, equipment costs—e.g. fishing tackle, licenses. • Supply side, engineers salaries, cement, farm land values for land flooded etc.

47. Computing the balance:non-market value: examples • Value of human life and health • Existence value. • Consumer surplus. • Contingent valuation. • Bequest value. • How much is nature worth? (Costanza)

48. 3. Global markets Extending the Model

49. Arguments for Free-Trade • Comparative advantage. • Protection of some industries, disadvantages others. • Competition leads to greater efficiency. • All countries lose when protectionist.

50. Tariffs • Subsidies • Currency frictions • Immigration • Capital immobility • Quotas • Externalities • Public Goods • Monopolies • Absence of markets • Transaction costs • Information asymmetries