debitage

27.12.06

A Political Ecology Lesson for Ronald Bailey

I'm not terribly impressed with Jeremy Rifkin's recent article The Risks of Too Much City. His recitation of the usual list of environmentalist concerns is noteworthy only for its failure to mention climate change (even though that issue sometimes seems like the only thing environmentalists care about). And despite his title and the accompanying "hook", he never talks about the risks caused by urbanization -- rather, his problem is with industrialization and population growth.

Nevertheless, Ronald Bailey's attempted rebuttal is even worse. Bailey focuses on Rifkin's final paragraph, in which he laments humanity's failed attempt at domination of nature, and calls for "reintegration" instead. Bailey counters that "integration" with nature is a recipe for disease and famine, while urban isolation has brought longer lifespans and greater riches. Bailey insists, contrary to Rifkin's vague and wishy-washy policy advice, that this is a question of urbanization versus rural life.

Bailey says we need look no farther than how people have voted with their feet: "While some people may be pushed by war or drought, or poverty into cities, most people today are pulled in by the prospect of reinventing themselves, escaping from the narrow strictures of family, class and community, and a shot at really making it." But this description of urban migration patterns is largely inaccurate. In the first world, migration out of rural (i.e. farming) areas is driven as much by economic necessity as it is by a desire to escape the cultural constraints of rural life. Meanwhile the cities themselves are emptying out as people flee high rents and dark-skinned neighbors. These urban emigrants -- who constitute the largest population movement at present -- are moving in search of precisely the two things Bailey claims they're rejecting: rural life and nature. Many relocate to the suburbs, looking for a mythic rural-small-town-idyll, a cozy village with strong "strictures of family, class and community" in which to raise their children. Others seek a closer connection to nature, making their homes among the (dangerously flammable) pines and chaparral of exurban areas.

In the Third World, there is a strong rural-to-urban migration stream. Yet here Bailey misses the mark too, both by stressing the primacy of "pull" factors and by assuming that urban immigrants want and achieve freedom from "strictures of family, class and community." Largely external forces of worsening market conditions, lack of capital, environmental degradation, government policies that range from misguided to exploitative, population growth, and the legacy of colonial dispossession make it nearly impossible for many rural residents to make ends meet. Migration to urban areas (as well as international migration) typically begins as a way to support the rest of the family, clan, or village who remain in the rural area. One or a few individuals (usually young men) migrate to the city in search of work, then send generous remittances back home, honoring rather than escaping their family and community ties. And the jobs in question can only be described as "really making it" by contrasting them to the unemployment and poverty that these migrants faced in their original villages. Migrants to third world cities often end up living in illegal and unsanitary shantytowns, working in the "informal" (black market) economy -- hardly a recipe for escaping the depredations of disease and other "natural checks" that Bailey claims urbanization has freed us from.

Bailey claims that urbanization (actually economic globalization, but he seems to have as much trouble as Rifkin in keeping his eye on the ostensible topic) has helped us to escape the vagaries of nature. For exampple, a famine in one place can be offset by movement of food from an area less hard-hit. This is one possible effect of globalization -- but to cite only this is to ignore the potential for globalization to create famine and poverty, by (for example) encouraging the easy movement of food out of areas with low purchasing power.

But in any event, the fact that people choose a certain way of life, and that it makes them better off, misses the point of the environmentalist critique. Had Bailey not dismissed the idea of "sustainability" as a subject for platitudes, he would perhaps have realized that the core of environmentalism is pointing out that what benefits us in the short-term is setting us up for problems down the road (and that what benefits one person ends up harming others).

Bailey claims that "nothing is more destructive of nature than poverty stricken subsistence farmers." This statement can perhaps be forgiven due to Rifkin's failure to mention climate change, but it bears pointing out that it is not "poverty stricken subsistence farmers" who are projected to double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And even on the question of habitat destruction, subsistence farmers vie for the title with industrialized logging and corporate plantations. Yet Bailey's solution is not to rectify the conditions that make subsistence farming a poverty-stricken lifestyle, but rather to hustle those farmers off to the big city and replace them with industrial plantations. He is here buying into one of the most potent environmentalist myths: the wilderness myth. He asserts that the only way to save nature is to keep people out of it. An intensive use of one fraction of the earth, he says, will allow us to leave the rest alone.

This "wall it off" solution is bad science, bad political economy, and unnecessary. It's bad science because it presumes that we're capable of creating a self-contained and carefully managed ecosystem, thus detaching the human habitat from the rest of the earth. Yet such a feat is clearly beyond us -- even industrial agriculture, whose efficiency Bailey extols, is only made possible by constant infusion of petrochemical fertilizers and poisons to prop up its dangerously impoverished ecology. And of course human habitat and wild nature share the same atmosphere.

Walling us off from nature is bad political economy, because it presumes that increasing efficiency will lead to using less. In reality, it would lead to using the same amount of resources, but getting more out of it, making us richer before we crash. Does Bailey -- who, remember, writes for a libertarian magazine -- really imagine that, absent major changes in our culture and economic structure, corporations and governments would simply allow 90% of the world's resources to go unused simply because the remaining 10% can provide a first-world-middle-class-in-2006 standard of living? Even the small amounts of protected land we already have are currently under sustained assault from those who would exploit their resources.

Luckily, walling off nature is also unnecessary, because we have another option -- the "reintegration" with nature that Rifkin advocates. Contrary to the earnest strawmen promoted by libertarians and corporatists, this does not mean a movement backwards to the middle ages (or completely away from urbanization). Rather, it means finding ways to use nature without destroying it (e.g. organic rather than industrial farming), and realigning our cultural and political-economic system to encourage such use. This is not to say that protected areas are not important, but rather to re-envision them as serving an integrated function in upholding the workings of the overall system, rather than as chunks of self-sufficient nature rescued from, and set away from, humanity.

Stentor Danielson, 16:06, |

25.12.06

Utilitarianism By The Scenic Route

Continuing to read Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights, I'm having trouble understanding why it's considered one of the classics of environmental ethics. Many of his arguments just don't seem to hold up.

One of the main themes of the book is to propose an alternative to utilitarian theories of animal "rights." But as far as I can tell, a bit of work with Occam's Razor would reduce his theory to utilitarianism at its core. Besides the strange equality-based objection I discussed in my previous post, Regan has two main issues with utilitarianism. First, he says that utilitarianism treats persons* as merely containers for welfare. So what's valuable is your welfare, not you yourself. Second, utilitarianism cannot justify a strict rule against harming others, since it's always possible that the factual circumstances will be such that harming another person would maximize utility.

Regan's alternative begins with a claimed denial of the container view. All persons, he says, have equal inherent value that is independent of how much welfare they contain. Our primary moral duty is to "respect" that inherent value. "Respecting" a person's inherent value prohibits treating them as solely a container for the welfare we seek to promote. Rather, "respecting" a person's inherent value consists in ... promoting their welfare. Stated in this blunt (albeit, so far as I can tell, accurate) fashion, Regan's postulation of inherent value has no practical effect. We get to the same result, but with an added rhetorical gambit that makes his theory sound nicer than his description of utilitarianism.

Turning to the question of strict rules against harming persons, Regan's theory also fails to make an improvement over utilitarianism. He (correctly) avoids trying to narrowly circumscribe what harms actually count as real harms in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of clashes between different persons' welfares. But in allowing situations in which a choice must be made between the welfares of persons, Regan's theory ends up once again as utilitarianism-by-the-scenic-route. A utilitarian says to the person who gets the short end of the stick "I'm reducing your welfare in order to make an improvement to the welfare of someone else." Whereas Regan says "I'm disrespecting your inherent value by reducing your welfare in order to respect the inherent value of someone else by making an improvement in their welfare." Once again, the concept of inherent value does no philosophical work (though it does a lot of rhetorical work), because respecting inherent value merely consists in promoting welfare.

Nevertheless, I do think the tendency of Regan's anti-container view to collapse into utilitarianism suggests the weakness of the "container" objection to utilitarianism. The container objection's plausibility rests on thinking of welfare as a substance (a la money) that exists independently of the container. But in fact welfare is a relational property, that is in part defined by the container. And for both Regan and utilitarians, what makes the container morally important is its ability to contain welfare. So respecting the welfare-holder and filling it with welfare are not really separate ideas.

This is not to say that Regan's theory is identical to utilitarianism -- they differ in two key respects, though these are not differences that allow his theory to evade the criticisms he makes of utilitarianism. One is their definition of welfare. Utilitarians of all stripes are united in adhering to a subjectivist account of welfare -- that is, what's good for a person is defined by that person's viewpoint, e.g. the preferences they express or the pleasure and pain they experience. But Regan proposes a partly objective view of welfare, in which it's possible to ask if what a person prefers or enjoys is in fact really in their interest (though it's unclear how one would go about finding an answer). The second big difference is the rule for dealing with conflicts among different persons' welfare. While, as noted above, Regan admits the necessity at times of sacrificing a person, he proposes to make such choices in accordance with a variety of priority rules rather than on the basis of a utilitarian maximization rule.

*I'm using "person" in the philosophical sense, by which both Regan and a utilitarian would count animals as persons.

Stentor Danielson, 23:54, |

Using Semantics to Maximize Utility

I thought I'd heard all of the basic arguments against utilitarianism, but reading Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights, I came across the most bizarre one I've seen yet*. He claims that there's an inconsistency between the principle of utility ("maximize utility") and the utilitarian principle of equality ("count equal utilities of different individuals equally"). He writes:

For the utility of counting A's and B's interests as equal can vary from case to case, even if their interests themselves do not. Thus, if utility is our guide, we are permitted to count the same interests as equal in one case and as unequal in another.

If I'm reading Regan right, what he's proposing is -- while perhaps technically feasible -- truly bizarre. To make an analogy, it's like saying that it's inconsistent to say both "buy the biggest house you can find" and "count equal numbers of square feet in different houses equally." So sure, you could end up buying a bungalow while claiming to have bought the biggest house by declaring that ten square feet of bungalow is worth 100 square feet of mansion. But that seems like using a definitional move to evsicerate the substance of the actual goal.

There is a certain plausibility to counting equal things unequally if the measurement in question does not completely exhaust the meaning of the goal. So in the house example, if by "bigness" we mean a feeling of spaciousness, then we might be justified in counting equal square footages unequally, since square footage is not the only thing that contributes to a feeling of spaciousness -- a house with light-colored walls, for example, will feel more spacious than an identical house with dark walls. One may be forgiven for making this kind of conclusion in the case of utilitarianism as Regan defines it, since he draws a verbal distinction between the "utility" that is being maximized and the "interests" that are being counted equally. However, in utilitarianism, the thing that is being counted equally between individuals and the thing that is to be maximized (regardless of what we choose to call them) are by definition identical.

An alternate reading of Regan's passage is that his complaint is simply that if A wants one thing and B does not, we might sometimes give A what he wants but other times give B what she wants because of the preferences of additional individuals (hence the overall utility of satisfying A vs B changes between the situations even though A and B themselves remain the same). For example, say in the first case C is also affected by our action (and his preferences align with A's), while in the second case C is absent but D is affected (and her preferences align with B's). It is true that utilitarianism would advocate such an "inconsistency" in treatment between A and B. But I fail to see how that violates any moral principle or even intuition. Nobody would say it's unfair that while my dad voted for Rick Santorum in his last two elections but I voted for the Democratic challenger both times, in 2000 my dad got his way but in 2006 I got my way** simply due to the fact that there were more other Santorum-supporters in the picture in 2000. The voting example should further illustrate that even when a different side wins, it's not because any individual's interests have been counted differently the second time. It's a matter of having a different total set of people whose interests must be balanced.

* Which is perhaps not surprising, since if it was any good, lots of other people would have repeated it in the two decades since Regan's book was published.
** I actually voted in Arizona this year, but this is what would have happened if I'd stayed in Pennsylvania.

Stentor Danielson, 14:21, |