People or Penguins
William F. Baxter
What is Baxter’s goal in the article?
• He wants to define the objective – the final
end rather than the means used to get
there – that should be pursued with
respect to the environment.
• The answer can’t be “clean air” for
example, because this isn’t sufficiently
clear or final.
– We can ask, “How clean?” Or, “What does
clean mean?”
– We can ask, “Why?”
Baxter states four criteria that he
will use in defining this objective.
• Criterion 1 – “Spheres of freedom.”
– “Every person should be free to do whatever
he wishes in contexts where his actions do
not interfere with the interests of other human
beings.”
• This is the same principle as John Locke’s Law of
Nature.
Baxter’s Criterion 2.
• The dominant feature of human existence
is scarcity, and so waste is a bad thing.
– This will assure that our resources, labors,
and skills will yield the most human
satisfaction possible.
• This has a family resemblance to Utilitarianism
with its emphasis on maximizing welfare.
Baxter’s Criterion 3.
• Kant’s Respect of Persons Principle.
– Every human being should be regarded as an
end rather than as a means to be used for the
betterment of another.
Baxter’s Criterion 4.
• “Both the incentive and the opportunity to
improve his share of satisfactions should
be preserved to every individual.”
– The “incentive” part → NOT totally egalitarian
redistribution of satisfactions.
– The “opportunity” part → sufficient
redistribution to assure the minimal share of
satisfactions that is the prerequisite of the
opportunity to improve.
• Echos Rawls and Kristol’s Capitalist Justice
What do these criteria imply about
pollution?
• Although Baxter does not say this directly,
a totally pollution-free environment would
not bring humans many satisfactions,
because there would be food shortages,
absence of manufacturing, no artificial
heating, etc. [This is his point of his tale
about DDT and penguins.]
• The only objective acceptable by the
criteria is “optimal pollution.”
What is optimal pollution?
It is the point at which:
The value to us of the next unit of
environmental improvement =
The value to us of the next
good or service we have to give up
to get this improvement.
So, what does this mean?
• You can’t just appeal to factual claims
about the environment as though they
were ethical imperatives.
– For example, “DDT is killing penguins,” while
factually true, does NOT imply “Ethics
demands that we stop using DDT.”
– We first have to ask how the satisfactions we
lose by discontinuing DDT compares with the
satisfactions we gain from the continued
existence of penguins.
Or, one more example:
• So what if global warming raises the sea
level by 20 feet and half of Florida goes
underwater? Maybe I like driving my gasguzzling car a lot, and, after all, there will
still be beach left in Florida.
• This is not Baxter, but he would tell us to
find the optimal pollution point with respect
to fossil fuel use and global warming.