IEP 511: Environmental Decision Making

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 6 Future generations, equality and sustainability 2.

I. Intergenerational equality and justice

Justice between generations.
In policy documents this is often expressed in terms of 'sustainability' and ‘sustainable development’.

‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ (Brundtland Report - 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland)

(In addition: priority to the needs of the poor)

Questions:
Sustainability of what, for whom and why?

Think of your own response to this question and sketch out what would seem a reasonable reply.

If sustainability is about equity in distribution over generations:

• ‘sustainability of what?’ is a particular version of the question ‘equality of what?’
• ‘why sustainability?’ is a particular version of the question ‘why equality?’
  

Reading 5 for this block is chapter 10 of Holland, Light and O'Neill Values and the Environment (forthcoming) which is available from the discussion site.

II Prior questions about equality

‘Equality of what?’ (Sen)

• welfare understood as preference satisfaction (welfare economics),
• resources (Dworkin)
• liberty and in the distribution of primary goods (Rawls)
• opportunities of welfare (Arneson),
• access to advantage (Cohen),
• capabilities to functionings (Sen),
• capacities to satisfy objective interests and needs (Marx).

‘Sustainability of what?’

• levels of preference satisfaction (Pearce),
• options or opportunities for welfare satisfaction (Barry),
• resources,
• environmental capacities (Jacobs),
• capacities to meet needs or objective interests (Brundtland),
• stocks of natural goods (Holland)

III. Why equality?

Parfit’s distinctions:

• Telic egalitarianism: we should promote equality because it is a good outcome in itself; what is wrong with inequality is that it is a bad state of affairs as such.
• Deontic egalitarianism: we should aim at equality because to do so is to perform the right or just action; what is objectionable about inequality is that it involves wrong-doing or injustice.
• The priority view/extended humanitarianism: benefiting people matters more the worse off people are. Extended humanitarians are not strictly speaking egalitarians: redistributions are defended in virtue the greater urgency of the claims of the less well off compared to those of the better off, not because equality as such is a good.

Additional position

• Communitarian egalitarianism: equality is good because it is a constitutive condition of a good community in which certain forms of power, exploitation and humiliation are eliminated and solidarity and fellowship fostered.

IV. Why sustainability?

The sixth reading (and last you will be relieved to hear) is chapter 6 of O'Neill's Markets, Deliberation and Environmental Value (forthcoming) which is available from the discussion site.

• Telic egalitarianism: to promote equality as an end in itself
• Deontic egalitarianism: sustainability is a condition of justice across generations
• The priority view: sustainability ensures that the worse off benefit
• Communitarian egalitarianism: sustainability is a condition of a good transgenerational community.

V. Positive obligations

‘A whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like bone patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.’ (Marx Capital III)

Sustainability means ‘sustaining an improvement (or at least maintenance) in the quality of life, rather than just sustaining the existence of life’ (Pezzey Sustainable Development Concepts: An Economic Analysis)

'"Sustainability" therefore implies something about maintaining the level of human well-being so that it might improve but at least never declines (or, not more than temporarily, anyway). Interpreted this way, sustainable development becomes equivalent to some requirement that well-being does not decline through time.' (Pearce, David 1993. Economic Values and the Natural World p.48)

1. Beckerman’s objection:

‘If the rule is to interpreted…that each generation is to ensure that successor generations do not fall below the level of welfare that has been reached, however high that may be – then this rule is not intergenerationally egalitarian at all. For it would permit welfare to rise continuously, which, over time, could lead to great inequality between generations – as has happened in the past up to the present time.’ (W. Beckerman ‘Intergenerational Equity’ The Journal of Political Philosophy, 5, 1997. P.398)

Chronological unfairness?

Herzen: ‘Human development is a form of chronological unfairness since late-comers are able to profit by the labours of their predecessors without paying the same price.’

Kant: ‘[N]ature does not seem to have been concerned with seeing that man should live agreeably, but with seeing that he should work his way onwards to make himself by his own conduct worthy of life and well-being. What remains disconcerting about all this is firstly, that the earlier generations seem to perform their laborious tasks only for the sake of the later ones, so as to prepare them for a further state from which they can raise still higher the structure intended by nature; and secondly, that only the later generations will in fact have the good fortune to inhabit the building on which a whole series of their forefathers (admittedly, without conscious intention) had worked without themselves being able to share in the happiness they were preparing.’ (Kant ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’)

2. Rawls and Just Savings

Rawls Principles of justice

'1. Each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all.

2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions. First, they must be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity [the opportunity principle]; and second they must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society [the difference principle].’

Rawl’s Problem:

One cannot apply the difference principle to savings over generations.
If one did, then there should be no savings at all by any generation, gn, which would make the following generations better off than gn, since then gn would be the worst off generation and by the difference principle inequalities are justifiable only if they improve the situation of the worst off. (J. Rawls A Theory of Justice p.291)

3. Justice: Negative and positive obligations

Negative obligations

Negative obligations that concern avoiding harms to those in the future do often lend themselves to being couched in terms of justice or equity.

Deontic egalitarianism may capture the principle of equality in the distribution of burdens: there is something prima facie unjust about our engaging in projects in which the benefits fall on ourselves while the harms fall on those who follow us.

Positive obligations

Sustainable development: sustaining an improvement in the quality of life.

• It is not a principle of equality: it entails an unequal distribution of goods over time, a rising curve in which the later are better off than the earlier.
• It could not be defended on the humanitarian ground of giving priority to the worst off.
• It is not a principle of justice.

Principle of Exploitation?

‘Population A has an obligation to make population B better off than they (population A) are’

If applied within a generation it would look like a principle of exploitation (e.g. traditional justifications for rendering women’s interests subservient to those of men.)

Responses:

1. Abandon sustainable development as an aim (Beckerman – instead extended humanitarianism which would incorporate pressing negative obligations)

2. Defend it on other grounds:

a. Utilitarianism: maximise well-being. One policy that might be expected to maximise well-being over time would be for each generation to improve the condition of its successor, without making excessive sacrifices itself – that it enjoyed at least some of its inheritance bequeathed it by previous generations.

Problems:

• some paths of sustainable development may not maximise total utility
• utilitarianism as an aggregative principle for maximising total utility is any case notorious for permitting apparent injustice. Objectionably exploitative versions of the principle could also survive the utilitarian test

b. Historical communitarian view of our relations to the future

There are a series of relationships, practices and projects in which success is defined in the terms of the history of a community and where to leave those who follow in a condition that is better than one finds it is a constitutive condition of success. For example: familial relations; sciences; arts.

The worth of one’s work is defined in terms of its place in the history of a discipline, the problems it solves before and the contributions it makes to what follows.

When is exploitation objectionable: Exploitation becomes objectionable where the relative vulnerability and powerlessness of one party is a condition of being used by others.

The principle that we improve the condition of those who follow us does make sense and is compatible with justice given an understanding of the roles of narrative and community in understanding the overall assessments we make of our lives.

Sustainability of what?

Key to numbers

1= present generation human needs, 2 = future generation human wants

3= present generation human wants, 4= future generation human wants

5= present generation non-human needs, 5= future generation non-human needs

Implicit questions of justice:

1. what is to be distributed? 2. Among whom?

(from Andrew Dobson 'Environmental Sustainabilities: An Analysis and a Typology' Environmental Politics vol5 1996 pp. 401-428)

Mainstream economic literature - a certain level of human welfare, where in standard welfare economics this is understood as preference satisfaction (Pearce).

What is required so that a certain level of human welfare be maintained over time?

Capital: Each generation to leave its successor a stock of capital assets no less than it receives. Capital should be constant, or at any rate not decline, over time.

(i) overall capital - the total comprising both natural and manmade capital - should not decline.
(ii) natural capital in particular should not decline

Weak sustainability: only (i) matters

Strong sustainability: (ii) matters as well - because there are limits to which natural capital can be substituted by humanmade capital, sustainability requires that we maintain the level of natural capital, or at any rate that we maintain natural capital at or above the level which is judged to be 'critical'.

The metaphor of natural capital:

• Commercial metaphor
• To refer to the natural world as 'natural capital' is to construe it in a particular way as a 'stock' of assets with instrumental value for humans.

Strong sustainability in nature conservation:

Capital, both natural and manmade, is conceived of as a bundle of assets. We have a list of valued items, habitat types, woodlands, heathlands, lowland grasslands, peatlands and species assemblages. We maintain our natural capital if for any loss of these, we can recreate another with the same assemblages.

English Nature, define 'environmental sustainability' thus:

'environmental sustainability...means maintaining the environment's natural qualities and characteristics and its capacity to fulfil its full range of activities, including the maintenance of biodiversity’

'Those aspects of native biodiversity which cannot be readily replaced, such as ancient woodlands, we call critical natural capital. Others, which should not be allowed, in total, to fall below minimum levels, but which could be created elsewhere within the same Natural Area, such as other types of woodland, we refer to as constant natural assets.’

Conservation and development

We can allow the development to take place provided we can recreate or translocate the habitat.
The distinction between 'critical natural capital' and 'constant natural assets' turns on the technical feasibility of replacement. Time as a constraint (25 years This Common Inheritance HM Government, 1990)
Two kinds of habitat,

• the relatively ephemeral, the pond, secondary woodland, secondary heathland, meadowland, which can be shifted around to fit development
• those which take longer to recreate which are to be permanent features of the UK landscape.

Objections:

Time and history are not just technical constraints on replaceability. They are a source of the very value of habitats. We value an ancient woodland in virtue of the history of human and natural processes that together went into making it: it embodies the work of human generations and the chance colonisation of species and has value because of the processes that made it what it is. No reproduction could have the same value, because its history is wrong. The natural world, landscapes humanised and worked through pastoral and agricultural activity, the built environment, all take their value from the specific histories they contain.

We do not enter into or live within 'natural capital'. Our lived worlds are rarely natural and are not capital. We live in places that are more or less rich with past histories, the narratives of lives and communities from which our own lives take significance.

The metaphor of natural capital fails to capture the significance of the historical dimensions of environmental values.

Bringing sustainability back to life.

To criticise the concept of natural capital is not to reject the concept of sustainability. The language of sustainability does have rhetorical power because in all its technical uses it retains something of its everyday meaning, where 'to sustain' is 'to maintain the life of something'. Reference to sustaining land, children, forests, future generations, communities has power since it calls upon a metaphor of keeping going something that has a life - in either a real or metaphorical sense. Something that has a life has a potentiality to develop. To sustain the life of a community or land is not to preserve it, or to freeze it but to allow it to change and develop from a particular past into a future. It is also to allow there are conditions in which mourning death and loss is appropriate rather than attempting to keep things going as end in itself.
Sustainability needs to be placed in the context of debates about the kind of community over time to which we understand ourselves to belong.

This is the end of week 6, but please do not move on without sending some of your thoughts regarding equality and sustainability to the discussion site.