Category: Ethics

What I learned from Laura Westra at the Loyola Marymount Urban Sustainability Retreat

Lisa Schweitzer

I have been following Laura Westra’s work for some time, and while I have always liked her work, I had never met her. Yesterday, I got the privilege, and she is both brilliant and delightful.

Let’s put it this way: she had a long and productive career as a philosopher, and then, at age 65, her Canadian University aged her out and she responded by turning around and getting another PhD in jurisprudence and the law. She is in her 70s, she looks fabulous (yesterday she was wearing a grey zipper suit, heels, bright turquoise glasses, and pearl hoop earrings.) She has a black belt in karate, but she doesn’t do karate any more: she does kickboxing.

She has written and edited 24 books. This is her method, loosely transcribed:

“I write it all down with a pen and a paper. Then I go through and type it all. I have a Smith Corona–such a wonderful machine. There is only one man–a wonderful little man–who fixed all these typewriters for his business for many years. Now he is long retired, but he still fixes my Smith Corona for me. I don’t use the technology. It’s too distracting.”

Laura is a rights theorist, and here are three books with which to start:

Environmental Justice and & the Rights of Ecological Refugees

Environmental Justice and the Rights of Future Generations:Law, Environmental Harm, and the Right to Health

Environmental Justice and Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

1844077977 01 SX220 SCLZZZZZZZ

Ed Glaeser, Richard Green, economics, and freedom

Lisa Schweitzer

My wonderful colleague Richard Green takes issue with Ed Glaeser’s essay in the New York Times about how economics has a moral core centered on freedom of choice. Let’s just say: barf. I don’t think we should be in the business of conflating economics with markets, for one.

Richard smartly points out that most tenured professors, particularly somebody like Ed Glaeser, have never had their backs up against the wall when it comes to anything, let alone having to chose between letting your husband beat your face in or be a single mother making minimum wage with a toddler. Yes, she’s got choices, but the rest of us have a moral obligation to her, her child, and her abuser and that obligation is not to lecture her about her choices—it’s to reflexively examine her constraints and ask how we socially and economically have co-constructed those constraints–with her and with him. And to deal with the crisis.

Poverty affects what you can even dream, let alone choose. Why that’s hard to understand is beyond me. When everybody you see on television and movies are from the city and trust funders, there is no reason to believe that you will have a better life leaving your coal mining town than you would living in a city where you know no one and where you are basically in the same labor market as unskilled rural labor from anywhere else in the world.

What markets have as their more core: the freedom for individuals to optimize, given their constraints. I do think markets can shift constraints, and lift them outwards. But don’t blow smoke up my butt about how there are no social, political, and cultural constraints for individuals in markets, or that markets make those magically disappear.

Please God, Ed, use your big brain to make useful points. I’m too old for a freaky deaky Milton Friedmann renaissance. Aren’t there any young libertarian philosophers out there with new points to make? Thomas Sowell HAS to have some students running around with something new and clever to say about freedom rather than rehashing this stuff.


Green moral tradeoffs in the WashPo

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

Like most Whole Foods shoppers, David Bain thinks he is a decent citizen of Earth. His family buys mostly organic food. They recycle. He recently fortified his green credentials by removing a leaking oil tank in his yard. But here’s a head scratcher: Though the Bains live in Arlington within walking distance of Whole Foods, they often drive there in an SUV that gets just 19 miles per gallon. He has noticed that his SUV is not alone in the lot.

link: Why going green won’t make you better or save you money

This is passed along from Alan Hyunh, one of SPPD’s wonderful undergraduates.

Ok, I don’t actually feel virtuous shopping at Whole Foods (I usually just feel rather ripped off), but the fundamental question is: Do I have to do everything 100 percent whole hog to be a “good” person. The last example is a good one: so she eats some ice cream because she exercises and works it off (in her mind). Now, yes, in the world of absolutes, she should exercise and eat carrots. But she’s not worse off having exercised if she was going to eat the ice cream anyway.

So if there is a rebound effect–what environmental economists call it when you get an efficient car or lights and start using them more-are you worse off then if you just used your regular? What if you use transit to commute and then use that as a rationale to use air travel every two weeks?

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine


Is there a moral case for free transit for students?

Lisa Schweitzer2 Comments

Student MetroCard March: “This Is What Democracy Looks Likes” – Gothamist:


From the students:

“We all came out because we can’t make it without our MetroCards. We cannot afford it, we cannot pay. Some of us are on food stamps,” and “A lot of us don’t live around here and this school helps us a lot because we don’t have good schools around us.”

From one of the instructors at one of the protesting schools:

“I don’t know why they want to cut the metrocards now, when we’re in a recession and times are so tough on everyone.”

Here’s why: “they” have a name, the New York MTA, not the “the gummint”, and “they” have an $800 million dollar budget deficit, recessions are hard on everybody, including and especially transit companies, and transit service, like all public services, cost money to provide, except in the Goodship Lollypop land of American’s brains. So we’ve refused to raise the federal gas tax since 1993, which was 17 years ago, studiously avoided increasing the tax during boom times, and states didn’t exactly race to make up the gap caused by inflation (though New York has tried; it’s a pretty high-tax state, for fuels anyway.) So the money has to come from somewhere or the service has to go away, and transit companies are looking at their patrons. You want transit, you pay. Welcome to the neoliberal hangover, kids.

We can compare this to a story reported via CNBC on German Millionaires who have volunteered to close Germany’s deficit by paying 10 percent of their income over the next 10 years. (Via the TaxProf). There are a number of appealing things about this story, like the apparent altruism of rich people who seemingly get their obligations to society. And it’s reasonable that the wealthy can and should pay more. But I am also not sure that such an approach is just. It’s probably more expedient. German millionaires are not fools, and they know that their glittering cities and spotless transit and decent schools are part of the capital that drives economic growth. This approach should bother us to. It indulges the neoliberal’s attitude about taxation which can be described as “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the guy behind the tree.”

Why should millionaires foot the entire bill? What if they paid 9/10ths and everybody else increased their expectations of themselves by 1/10th? Or 99/100s to 1/100? Redistribution via taxes does have a well-established moral theory behind it (Nancy Fraser and John Rawls), but it’s a bad idea to let the citizenry at large, even those not well off, pay nothing for services they use or deficits incurred by governments they should feel represent them. Of course, that latter statement is contestable, but if your democratic institutions do not represent you, it’s your fault in some ways, even if it is not your fault in other ways (e.g., the power of elites; however, if elites take on more of the tax bill, how does that break the disproportionate influence elites have over institutions?). Free-riding should not be encouraged even if somebody who can well afford it foots the bill for the ride because our democratic obligations should have some level of reciprocity, to each other and to our institutions.

So, going back, is there an ethical rationale for free transit for students? Free transit for students has generally been expedient politics for transit companies. Transit companies want to fill seats and be relevant, and students are a likely a patron group: they are in general are younger, have fewer children, have pretty flexible schedules, have low value of time and thus get less annoyed by the occasional transit fail, and if they are poor, are too poor or too young to have cars at all or if they do, they own crappy and unreliable cars anyway. And, in general, they are cash poor. However, most of these university programs simply tack on a student fee; students pay anyway, indirectly. I don’t know how this works for New York public schools. There is, in general, a greater tolerance for providing free service and deep discounts to students due to their financial straits than there is for providing discounts and service to people based on poverty in general: students’ poverty is considered temporary, and perhaps, even laudable as they sacrifice monetarily in order to invest in themselves. There is an intergenerational aspect to it. Students will graduate someday and then in turn pay higher amounts later in life so that other students can benefit.

Free transit passes most of the tests for reasoned public ethics. You could also make this argument in terms of fewer painful absolutes: instead of letting it be free, offer a steep discount. Instead the unsustainable transit politics gets us to where we are: it’s my way or the highway: I’m entitled to free transit; well, you can chant about your right to mobility until your head falls off, I can’t pay my unionized drivers with promises, so you’re going to pay because we’re out of money. Zero-sum. Boo-yah.


Richard Green v. The Most Interesting Man in the World

Lisa Schweitzer

I am very fond of and have great respect for my colleague Richard Green. He is witty, urbane, infinitely generous to young scholars (and old scholars, for that matter), interested in many things, and, though I am hardly one to judge, a first-rate economist. (Other first-rate economists tell me he is.)

Well, Paul Krugman linked to Richard’s blog post calling out bad thinking entitled, appropriately enough: Opinions without Data.

Do you know what this means? This means Richard officially tops the Most Interesting Man in the World in terms of being the Most Interesting Man in the World.

Here’s the Most Interesting Man in the World, according to Dos Equis:



– If he were to mail a letter without postage, it would still get there.

Here’s Richard:



-When he rants on his blog, Nobel Prize winners link to it.

Who’s more interesting? NO CONTEST.

A little more seriously, in Richard’s case, he does a nice job of laying out the problem except for one thing: his caveat that he tries to be respectful of other people’s viewpoints. Strictly stated, in pluralist society, he’s not required by principle to respect viewpoints. He’s required–if we’re thinking about Locke or any of his followers, to respect other people and their right to have different viewpoints. You don’t have to respect, like, or indulge other people’s views. You do have to respect other people and their entitlement to difference. But you don’t have to treat their opinions like they are made of glass, or something special, particularly if you have heard them out and made a genuine attempt to include, listen, or understand.

Freedom of speech means that yes, you can voice an opinion, no matter how ignorant or repellent. But freedom of speech also entitles the rest of us to point out how wrong, ignorant, or repellent that opinion is.


Matt Kahn and Eric Morris on Green Travel Behavior

Lisa Schweitzer

Mat Kahn and Eric Morris, two of the very smart peoples at UCLA, have published a very cool paper on the coherence between attitudes and behavior among environmentalists. He discusses the paper and provides a link on his blog.

Kahn, Matt and E. Morris. 2009. Walking the Walk: The Association Between Community Environmentalism and Green Travel Behavior.

Forthcoming in the Journal of the American Planning Association.

Every time Matt publishes a paper, it’s a paper I wish I’d written. I have written about a group that is suspected to be indifferent to the environment–truckers–along with CJ Brodrick and Sue Spivey at James Madison University. You can find that manuscript here. The bottom line is that truckers have two major groups–employee truckers and owner-operators, and the employee truckers do have pro-environmental attitudes. Owner-operators are, unsurprisingly, more driven by costs, which in the case of idle reduction technology, aligns with environmental interests. But capital markets are imperfect and it takes some time for the technology in the owner operator fleet to change over.

Schweitzer,L., Brodrick, C-J, , and S.Spivey. 2008. “Truck Driver Environmental Attitudes and Behaviors: An Exploratory Analysis.” Transportation Research Part D. 13 (3): Available online at: doi:10.1016/j.trd.2007.11.001.


No hoping for the environment

Lisa Schweitzer

I happened upon this article rather late, as they ran the feature in February, but here is an synopsis:

“Is hope a placebo, a distraction, merely sowing the seeds of disillusionment?” they ask, in an opinion piece titled “Abandon Hope.” The authors, co-founders and directors of the Conservation Ethics Group, an of environmental ethics consultancy, examine the proper role of hope in environmentalism. They suggest that hope’s alternative is not hopelessness or despair, but rather the inherent virtue of “doing the right thing.”

John Vucetich and Michael Nelson. Abandon Hope. The Ecologist, March 2009

I wonder about this. Much of the environmental discussion is conducted in terms of apocalypse: we’re doomed, we must save ourselves. Then when somebody like Bjorn Lomberg comes along and refutes that message, the reaction is histrionic, like the guy is a Holocaust denier or something, when all he is doing is shaking up the discussion and looking at the data. So there’s already a heavy moral component to the environment–for some people, it ties into longstanding western ethics associated with efficiency and frugality, for others it ties into obligations regarding stewardship and responsibility towards other life or for resources over which humans have control, and for yet another group it emanates from obligations towards other people, either their cohort, the next generation, or both. Anne Coulter–somebody so relentlessly self-promotional that she hardly needs me to link—maintains that environmentalism is the “religion of the left.”

So it’s not as though environmental values are not already bandied in terms of “right” and “wrong” already. When I say that I study sustainable transport, people get a pained look on their faces and say “I know I should take transit, but it just takes so long and it’s so hard to get anywhere and it’s…etc., etc., etc.” It’s not like people don’t know what they probably should be doing or should not be doing here. They don’t do “right” by the environment because they have other priorities, not because they don’t care and don’t see it as a matter of right and wrong, and you probably need better ethical imperatives to help them set their priorities than “the environment is more important than your other priorities because the environment is my priority.”


Animals and dogfighting in the sustainable society

Lisa Schweitzer

“The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), History of England

One wonders if in this regard the Puritans weren’t right. To delight in cruelty, especially when the cruelty is enacted over those with less power than you, and who are dependent upon you, portends a degradation of the human spirit that transcends the Puritan’s godly distrust of ungodly pursuits . You wish to prove your mettle and courage? Go join a cage fight your own self, don’t send your charges into one for you. You can try all the “this is my culture” excuses you want: finding entertainment or profit in another’s pain is sociopathy, no matter how dressed up.

One of my favorite books on the subject of animal-nature ethics was edited by my former colleague Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel:

Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. Published in 1998 by Verso.