People or Penguins William F Baxter What is

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.