Benjamin Hale

Geoengineering, Ocean Fertilization, and the Problem of Permissible Pollution

Many geoengineering projects have been proposed to address climate change, including both solar radiation management and carbon removal techniques. Some of these methods would introduce additional compounds into the atmosphere or the ocean. This poses a difficult conundrum: Is it permissible to remediate one pollutant by introducing a second pollutant into a system that has already been damaged, threatened, or altered? We frame this conundrum as the ‘‘Problem of Permissible Pollution.’’ In this paper, we explore this problem by taking up ocean fertilization and advancing an argument that rests on three moral claims. We first observe that pollution is, in many respects, a context-dependent matter. This observation leads us to argue for a ‘‘justifiability criterion.’’ Second, we suggest that remediating actions must take into account the antecedent conditions that have given rise to their consideration. We call this second observation the ‘‘antecedent conditions criterion.’’ Finally, we observe that ocean fertilization, and other related geoengineering technologies, propose not strictly to clean up carbon emissions, but actually to move the universe to some future, unknown state. Given the introduced criteria, we impose a ‘‘future-state constraint’’. We conclude that ocean fertilization is not an acceptable solution for mitigating climate change. In attempting to shift the universe to a future state (a) geoengineering sidelines consideration of the antecedent conditions that have given rise to it —conditions, we note, that in many cases involve unjustified carbon emissions —and (b) it must appeal to an impossibly large set of affected parties.

Remediation and Respect: Do Remediation Technologies Alter Our Responsibility?

In this paper we examine the relation between technologies that aim to remediate pollution and moral responsibility. Contrary to the common view that successful remediation technologies will permit the wheels of industry to turn without interruption, we argue that such technologies do not exculpate polluters of responsibility. To make this case, we examine several environmental and non-environmental cases. We suggest that some strategies for understanding the moral problem of pollution, and particularly those that emphasise harms, exclude an important dimension of morality. In lieu of these strategies, we employ the concept of respect to characterise the type of attitude that underlies many of our judgments about responsibility.

Culpability and blame after pregnancy loss

The problem of feeling guilty about a pregnancy loss is suggested to be primarily a moral matter and not a medical or psychological one. Two standard approaches to women who blame themselves for a loss are first introduced, characterised as either psychologistic or deterministic. Both these approaches are shown to underdetermine the autonomy of the mother by depending on the notion that the mother is not culpable for the loss if she “could not have acted otherwise”. The inability to act otherwise is explained as not being as strong a determinant of culpability as it may seem at first. Instead, people’s culpability for a bad turn of events implies strongly that they have acted for the wrong reasons, which is probably not true in the case of women who have experienced a loss of pregnancy. The practical conclusion of this paper is that women who feel a sense of guilt in the wake of their loss have a good reason to reject both the psychologistic and the deterministic approaches to their guilt—that they are justified in feeling upset about what has gone wrong, even responsible for the life of the child, but are not culpable for the unfortunate turn of events.

Moving forward with effective goals and methods for conservation: a reply to Marvier and Kareiva

We welcome the added nuance that Marvier and Kareiva have included in their response [1] to our analysis [2] of New Conservation Science (NCS). However, we take issue with multiple points that they raise. In particular, we do not believe that our arguments in any way ‘pit good values against each other’ or that we have painted conservation to date as a string of unqualified success stories. Nonetheless, we are glad that they now appear to embrace many of the same fundamental goals, strategies, and motivations that have long characterized conservation.

Risk, Judgment and Fairness in Research Incentives

By many people’s standards, £2,000 is a sizable chunk of change. In some medical trials, it may even be enough to offset the costs and risks of participating. It is also true that by standards of some very rich people, Michael Jordan and Adam Sandler for instance, £2,000 is a niggling sum, hardly worth the paper it is written on. The very rich, we might assume, would have little time or interest in participating in a medical trial that offered such insignificant incentives. By still other people’s standards, however, £2,000 is the difference between providing for oneself and one’s family and depending on others. These people, we might further assume, could be willing to take substantial risks to acquire such money. The familiar observation here relates to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth because the value of a dollar to a poor man is greater than the value of a dollar to a rich man. Given the diminishing marginal utility of wealth, consider also the Rawlsian claim that to be just a practice must be fair. Rawls’ second principle of justice proposes that social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least well off. The central idea is that the rights of all individuals must be respected, and that the surest way to guarantee that the rights of each are respected is to endorse principles that are sensitive to the proclivities of the least well off. If enticement incentives function in the manner explained previously, such that they entice wayward souls into accepting them even when it is against their self-interest, then such incentives can be said to be not only irrational and unreasonable, but unfair, unjust, and undue. Taken together, these principles suggest that the problem with money in the TeGenero trial might not be that participants did not have all of the facts, nor that all of the human subjects protection procedures were not followed properly, nor even that coercion was somehow involved, but that some participants were probably more willing to engage in a risky trial precisely because a reward was offered, despite the facts and despite the procedures. The participants in the trial were arguably members of an economically vulnerable population; members who, presumably, would have made a different decision had they been

Fukushima Daiichi, Normal Accidents, and Moral Responsibility: Ethical Questions about Nuclear Energy

On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 pm Japan Standard Time, an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale rumbled off the northeast coast of Japan. Not far from the epicenter of this quake the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex, including three functioning and three off-line ‘boiling water’ reactors, hummed in the towns of Okuma and Futaba, within the Fukushima Prefecture. At the first detection of tumult, all three operating reactors automatically shut down to protect their cores. Crews scrambled to ensure that all was in order, which it was. For a time. An hour and five minutes after the initial shockwave, the churning sea let fall a violent tsunami upon the coastline of Japan. In a matter of minutes, thousands of homes and businesses were submerged and compacted by a powerful bulldozer of water, thousands of unsuspecting people were swept out to sea, and the Fukushima Daiichi complex underwent an unfathomably complicated string of natural events and unanticipated challenges. First the plant lost power, as emergency diesel generators were knocked out by the tsunami. Then the batteries used to control steam-driven emergency pumps lost power. Then, the first three reactors began to overheat, oxidizing their protective cladding and partially melting their radioactive cores, producing hydrogen. As this happened, the explosive hydrogen in reactors 1, 2 and 3 eventually did what explosive hydrogen in a tight, hostile environment is given to do: it exploded, blowing the containment vessels and further jeopardizing the reactor cores. Meanwhile, spent fuel stored in pools at units 1, 3 and 4 lost critical cooling water, threatening a release of radioactive material into the environment. What ensued over the next several weeks was a chronology of human interventions that in turn both amplified and downplayed the disaster. With Japan facing so much devastation and such a daunting clean-up, news of the nuclear crisis trickled out slowly, over days and weeks, not hours and minutes. The Japanese government, as it

Identity crisis: Face recognition technology and freedom of the will

In this paper I present the position that the use of face recognition technology (FRT) in law enforcement and in business is restrictive of individual autonomy. I reason that FRT severely undermines autonomous self-determination by hobbling the idea of freedom of the will. I distinguish this position from two other common arguments against surveillance technologies: the privacy argument (that FRT is an invasion of privacy) and the objective freedom argument (that FRT is restrictive of ones freedom to act). To make this case, I suggest that autonomy itself is predicated on the possibility of acting ethically, of freely willing moral laws. I then claim that autonomous self-determination is established as self-determination via social interactions with others. If we conceptualize self-determination as a relation of establishing a claim to individual autonomy in a community of others, we can see how planned uses of FRT subvert possibilities for the establishment of socially recognized agency. FRT not only confuses the process of asking ethical questions but it also imposes the immanent likelihood that all actions are taken not by self-directed, free agents, but by passive subjects in the interest of abiding by the institutionally enforced law.

Ethics, Policy & Environment: A New Name and a Renewed Mission

Readers of Ethics, Place & Environment will notice at least one major change in this inaugural 2011 issue. Namely, we are no longer operating under the same name. At the Eastern Division American Philosophical Association Meeting in Boston, December 2010, we relaunched our journal under a new title, Ethics, Policy & Environment, with a small reception for any and all working in environmental philosophy. We saw many of you there. It’s a minor change of one word, but it should signal the many other modifications ‘under the hood’ which we’ve been making over the past two years. Along with the title change, we’ve altered the substantive focus of the journal more toward the intersection of the philosophical and policy communities, we’ve introduced new formats for more engaged articles, we’ve revised our editorial structure, and we’ve committed to a faster turnaround time for reviewing submissions. Ethics, Place & Environment began in 1997 as the journal Philosophy & Geography, founded by Jonathan M. Smith (Department of Geography, Texas A&MUniversity) and Andrew Light. The explicit focus of the journal was to broaden the scope of environmental philosophy, by bringing it into conversation with geographers who had long been interested in questions of space and place which had been of peripheral interest to philosophers. In 2005, Philosophy & Geography merged with Ethics, Place, Environment, another Taylor and Francis journal started primarily as a forum for geographers publishing work on ethics, furthering this legacy of expanding the bounds of theoretical environmental ethics away from an exclusive focus on questions on ‘nature’ as such. While we will continue to be interested in broader theoretical questions which have driven much of the history of environmentalism, and inspired many of the articles in the first thirteen volumes of Ethics, Place & Environment, we’ll aim now at promoting more directed work on issues at the intersection of environmental philosophy and environmental policy. In this respect we will encourage work by ethicists, and those inclined toward ethical inquiry, on the raft of environmental problems that is now buoying most other branches of environmental scholarship. Doing so will involve interdisciplinary input and collaboration—and, in fact, will demand a good deal of interrogation of practical and policy questions—but we’d hope that contributors to this journal might help refine the philosophical razor with which environmental policies are formulated, assessed, discussed, evaluated, and taught. To facilitate these ends we have rolled out a new format for our articles. Beginning in 2009, we began selecting one target article per issue—from among those submitted

Open to debate: moral consideration and the lab monkey.

It is not often that one reads of suggestions to reset the default presumption. Most moral theorists appear to ignore governing presumptions altogether, to assume that all actions take place within an ideal space of reasons, unsullied by presumption. But I think this is precisely the area that needs adjustment, and I have argued as much in other articles (Hale 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008). As Fiester (2008) rightly notes, the governing presumption of animal biotechnology research is that, in the absence of a good reason not to conduct research, anything and everything is on the table. With the burden of proof on the shoulders of those who oppose research, it is open season for animals until opponents have made their case. On its face this smacks of the precautionary principle. Fiester (2008) does not clearly tease out the contours of the distinction between the precautionary principle and the presumption of restraint in her target article, and instead devotes only a few paragraphs to treatment of the distinction between the two. I think the distinction needs a sharper edge before I address what is really on my mind. Despite first appearances, the precautionary principle functions differently than a presumption of restraint. The precautionary principle advocates only that when one acts, one should act with an abundance of caution. It thus advocates in favor of action, albeit action of a nimble and neurotic sort. Suggesting that one should presume restraint, on the other hand, advocates against action. It is, in Fiester’s (2008) words, “a default principle that guides action in the absence of compelling, overriding reasons that speak in the action’s favor” (36). She might better have said it is a principle that restrains action; that permits action only when it is justified. In effect, shifting the default presumption means that one must act with good reason, that one ought not to act absent a good reason. I strongly agree that this is a first and important step in gaining traction among institutional review boards and other approval boards. Here is where I differ. Fiester’s (2008) argument works primarily along pragmatic lines. She suggests that for every outraged reaction to animal biotech experiments, there is a plausible retort from the optimist about experimentation. As a result of this, some ghastly experiments continue without input from these concerned and critical parties. She then introduces four claims that she believes most people would accept, followed by a set of facts that is incontrovertibly true about animals, all of which she then subjects to an extreme case of experimen-

Wolf Reintroduction: Ecological Management and the Substitution Problem

Elk overgrazing in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), understood largely to be a consequence of wolf extirpation, poses not only a practical problem, but also several conceptual hurdles for park managers. The current RMNP ecosystem management plan addresses overgrazing by culling elk and fencing off riparian environments. This “functionalist” view effectively substitutes the role of wolves in the ecosystem with human intervention, and implicitly conflates the role or function of wolves with wolves themselves. In this paper, we argue that such substitution logic presents a conceptual problem for restoration. Seeking a resolution for this “substitution problem,” we distinguish between “reparative restoration” and “replacement restoration.” Where reparative restoration seeks to repair damage, replacement restoration seeks more aptly to replace the function of one ecological component with another. We suggest that in many cases reparative restoration is preferable to replacement restoration, and when characterized as such, may serve to better justify wolf reintroduction.