Many philosophers have discussed problems of additive aggregation across lives. In this article, I suggest that anti-additive aggregationist principles sometimes apply within lives, as well as between lives, and hence that we should reject a widely accepted conception of individual self-interest. The article has eight sections. Section I is introductory. Section II offers a general account of aggregation. Section III presents two examples of problems of additive aggregation across lives: Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion, and my Lollipops for Life CaseSection IV suggests that many may have misdiagnosed the source and scope of anti-additive aggregationist considerations, due to the influence of Rawls's and Nozick's claims about the separateness of individuals. Accordingly, many leave Sidgwick's conception of self-interest—which incorporates an additive aggregationist approach to valuing individual lives—unchallenged. Section V suggests that the separateness of individuals may have led some to conflate the issues of compensation and moral balancing. Section VI argues that an additive aggregationist approach is often deeply implausible for determining the overall value of a life. Section VII discusses a Single Life Repugnant Conclusion, first considered by McTaggart. Section VIII concludes with a summary, and a brief indication of work remaining.

The environment has often been thought to consist of resources that are unowned, and hence subject to the well-known tragedy of the commons. But in recent years, property ideas have been increasingly recruited for environmental protection, in a manner that appears to vindicate the view that property rights evolve along with the needs for resource management. Nevertheless, property regimes have some pitfalls for environmental resources: the relevant parties may not be able to come to agreement; property regimes may be weak or ineffective; they may be aimed at purposes inconsistent with environmental protection; property rights definitions may not work well for environmental resources; modern property regimes may promote monoculture rather than diverse environments. This essay describes these problems and asks to what degree they apply to a new effort to use property rights approaches, namely cap-and-trade programs to control greenhouse gases. It concludes that property rights, while imperfect and something of a retreat from a regime of complete liberty, may offer gains for environmental protection. But success will depend on close attention to the accountability and effectiveness of the governmental institutions necessary to support environmental property regimes.

There can be no relevant cardinal assessment of the welfares of individuals that would allow traditional comparisons of average and total welfare of whole societies to be made. Given that cardinally additive welfare measures are unavailable, I work out some of the implications of an ordinal utilitarian analysis of international distributional issues. I first address the general problem of utilitarian comparisons between aggregates, then the nature of ordinal transfers between groups or nations, and then the complications that population growth in impoverished nations entails for such comparisons. I conclude with remarks on the difficulties and the benefits of thinking ordinally in general.

This paper argues that the occurrence of a non-native species, such as purple loosestrife, on one's property does not constitute a nuisance in the context of background principles of common law. No one is injured by it. The control of non-native species, such as purple loosestrife, does not constitute a compelling public interest, moreover, but represents primarily the concern of an epistemic community of conservation biologists and ecologists. This paper describes a history of cases in agricultural law that establish that a public authority may enter private property to destroy a tree or other species but only to protect a compelling public interest, such as the apple industry in Virginia or the citrus industry in Florida, and only if it pays all the costs including just compensation. The paper argues a fortiori that if a public authority enters private property to control non-native or “invasive” species it must pay all the costs and indemnify the owner—contrary to what many state laws contemplate and the Environmental Law Institute recommends.

Modern discussions of natural resources focus on increasing public control over extractive industries proposing measures that range from increasing the public's share of the gain via royalties and taxes to regulating extractive activities to prevent environmental problems to outright expropriation of private investments. This article argues that such efforts are counterproductive because the fundamental economic problem of natural resources is producing the knowledge necessary to locate and extract resource deposits. The public benefit comes from enabling the use of the resources and the increased economic activity their discovery produces rather than from royalties or expropriation. The key question in designing natural resource laws is thus their effects on the incentive to discover and manage resources. Private property rights in natural resources are the best way to provide such incentives. Fortunately, the combination of property rights and tort law principles (trespass and nuisance) enables property rights to solve environmental problems related to natural resource extraction as well.

Aggregation in moral philosophy calls for the summing or averaging of values or utilities as a guide to individual behavior. But morality, it is argued, needs to be individualistic, in view of the evident separateness of persons, especially given the great disparities among individuals who nevertheless interact with each other in social life. The most plausible general moral program is the classical liberal (or “libertarian”) one calling for mutual noninterference rather than treating others as equal to oneself in point of demands on our action. Why, then, would we ever aggregate? The reason is that we are affected by behavior that has general effects, especially unintended side effects, on all sorts of people among whom we ourselves are often to be found. When we are randomly situated among such groups—as we sometimes are and often are not—minimizing aggregate harm is the plausible strategy, and sometimes promoting aggregate benefit as well.

The over-exploitation of commonly-held resources is typically analyzed as an instance of market failure that calls for legislation to internalize the social costs that private activities impose on the environment. In this article, I argue that to the extent that this analysis ignores the regulatory effect of the common law, it is unsound. In The Tragedy of the Commons, Garret Hardin points out that there are two solutions to the tragedy: privatize the resource or restrict access to it. Environmental legislation is a means restricting access to the commons. The evolutionary development of common law is a means of privatizing the commons. These represent alternative methods of environmental regulation. Proper public policy analysis requires a comparative assessment of the efficacy of these methods for resolving any particular environmental problem. In many, if not most cases, such an assessment will show common law regulation to be superior to environmental legislation.

One of the currently popular dogmata of anti-consequentialism is that consequentialism doesn't respect, recognize, or in some important way account for what is referred to as the “separateness of persons.” The charge is often made, but rarely explained in any detail, much less argued for. In this paper I explain what I take to be the most plausible interpretation of the separateness of persons charge. I argue that the charge itself can be deconstructed into at least two further objections to consequentialist theories. These objections amount to (i) the rejection of axiological aggregation, and (ii) the rejection of deontic aggregation. Of these two objections, I argue that the first one, though often made, is untenable. I also argue that the second objection, in its various forms, relies on distinctions whose moral significance is vigorously denied by almost all consequentialist theorists. I thus argue that the separateness of persons objection poses no special threat to consequentialism.

In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea suffer from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it.

In the early 1970s, we and others in the economics profession became enamored with the notion of externalties—a cost or benefit imposed on or provided to others but not taken into account by the economic agents who generate the effect. We, and others, seemed to see external effects everywhere. There was polluted water and air, noise, urban blight, traffic congestion, and other features of modern life that seemed to call out for some form of corrective action. As the externalities revolution unfolded, economists and other social scientists overlooked the importance of evolved legal and other institutions that formally and informally establish property and liability rules that cause decision makers to face the cost of their actions, including what otherwise could be external costs imposed on unwilling third parties.

While markets seemed always to fail, political institutions were seen systematically as without blemish, or so it seemed. It was this two-pronged failure, 1) a failure to consider and state assumptions about background institutional arrangements and 2) a disregard for special interest politics, that became the Achilles Heel of the otherwise elegant externality arguments. Eventually, it was the modern institutionalists, scholars who focused on laws, regulation, and rules of the marketplace, who attempted to close the lid and drive the nails on the externality coffin.

In this paper, we reach back to 1920 and trace the rise and decline of the policy importance of externalities theory. Beginning with A. C. Pigou and Alfred Marshall, our story includes some of the great figures in economic history of thought. But while theory was being built, institutions were overlooked. Pigou continues to be a dominant player in the story until the 1960s and 1970s when externalities theory was challenged by James M. Buchanan, Ronald Coase and other scholars. It is here in the twilight years of the externalities revolution that the prospects of government failure are raised as being more daunting than the likelihood of market failure. Finally, in the late 1970s and beyond, the externalities revolution is replaced by a property rights revolution.

In this article the implications of our nature as both autonomous and heteronomous beings is discussed. It is suggested that our condition as part-dependent creatures calls for a reconsideration of the nature of both freedom and liberalism, and the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jean-Paul Sartre is used to illustrate the natural and historical dimensions of our dependency. The conclusion reached is that neither deep ecological re-enchantment nor full-blooded cornucopianism are possible, and that we need to take our nature as semi-dependent creatures seriously as we seek ways of negotiating our way through our environmental problems.

This paper starts by addressing some objections to the very idea of aggregate social good. The paper goes on to review the case for letting aggregate social good be not only morally relevant but also sometimes morally decisive. Then the paper surveys objections to letting aggregate social good determine personal or political decisions. The paper goes on to argue against the idea that aggregate good is sensitive to desert and the idea that aggregate good should be construed as incorporating agent-relativity.

Environmental thinking vacillates between two conceptions of our relationship to nature: one assumes that human beings are simply a part of nature, the other that what is natural is defined by what humans have not interfered with. Both can conduce to making human extinction appear a way to protect the integrity of nature. An alternate view notes that human beings by nature possess speech and reason, or logos, which leads to our ability to articulate a concern for nature. The examples of Deep Ecology and transhumanism suggest that only when nature and logos are completely abstracted from one another will thinking about nature in these terms support advocacy of human extinction. Still, this alternative requires confronting the modern “demoralization” of nature, which can coexist only uneasily with either environmentalism's attempt to get us to value nature more, or transhumanism's effort to have us value it less.

In this article, I first compare positions I have taken in the past and those taken by Peter Singer on how the allocation of life-saving resources should be affected by (1) the aggregation of expected quality of life, quantity of life, and need, (2) both within the life of a person (intrapersonal aggregation) and across persons (interpersonal aggregation). I then reexamine the specific issue of whether and why differences in expected years of life and quality of life that a scarce resource can provide a disabled and a nondisabled person should affect our allocation decisions. I attend to how the use of the veil of ignorance bears on this issue and also how the conclusions I reach differ in certain ways from my past positions.

The science underlying global warming, climate change, and the connections between these phenomena are reviewed. Projected future climate changes under various plausible scenarios of future human behavior are explored, as are the potential impacts of projected climate changes on society, ecosystems, and our environment. The economic, security, and ethical considerations relevant to determining the threat posed by climate change are subsequently assessed. The article then discusses the various means available for climate change mitigation, focusing on the relative strengths and weaknesses of various societal alternatives including ‘geoengineering’ and transitioning to less carbon intensive energy sources. The article concludes with the author's views as to what steps might most profitably be taken to avert dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth's climate, and the ramifications if such steps are not taken.

A surprising conclusion of modern political economy is that democracies with highly ignorant voters can still deliver very good results as long as voters' errors balance each other out. This result is known as the Miracle of Aggregation. This paper begins by reviewing a large body of evidence against this Miracle. Empirically, voters' errors tend to be systematic; they compound rather than cancel. Furthermore, since most citizens vote for the policies they believe are best for society, systematic errors lead voters to support socially suboptimal policies. The paper then considers the case for “paternalistically” vetoing popular but misguided democratic decisions, presenting several arguments that overruling democratic decisions is much less objectionable than overruling individual decisions. In fact, since democracies routinely adopt paternalistic policies, the opponent of paternalism for individual decisions should embrace paternalism for democratic decisions. The paper concludes by considering several different mechanisms for improving upon majority rule.

Consequentialist and Kantian theories differ over the ethical relevance of consequences of actions. I investigate how they might differ too over the relevance of what actions are consequence of. Focusing on the case of group action and collective responsibility, I argue that there's a kind of analog to the problem of aggregating the value of consequences—about aggregating responsibility with respect to the roles of cooperating agents—that Kantian theories will not confront and consequentialist theories will. The issue provides a useful way to characterize a deep difference between Kantian and consequentialist theories and points, ironically, toward a way of making those views compatible.

Claims that a man-made global warming catastrophe is imminent have two major aspects: the scientific support offered for the claims, and the political proposals brought forth in response to the claims. The central questions are whether non-scientists should accept the claims themselves as true, and whether they should support the political proposals attached to them. Predictions of a coming disaster are shown to be a-historical in both the long term and the short term, to involve shifting predictions that are contrary to evidence, and to be opposed by many scientists. The political proposals to alleviate this alleged problem—especially plans by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—are shown to offer no alternative to fossil fuels, and to portend a major economic decline and permanent losses of liberty. The anthropogenic global warming claims are largely motivated not by science, but by a desire for socialist intervention on a national and a global scale. Neither the claims to an impending climate catastrophe nor the political proposals attached to those claims should be accepted.

This paper considers prevailing environmental policy in the United States with the emphasis on liberty, markets, utilizing information, entrepreneurial discovery, and the economic analysis of political decisions (public choice). The general discussion is illustrated by the concern over global warming and policies for addressing this concern. The political incentives to confront environmental problems directly with mandates, restrictions, and subsidies ignore the power of liberty and market incentives to solve problems by fostering an impressive network of information transfer, increasing innovation, and expanding prosperity. Indeed, most environmental policies systematically suppress liberty, censor the communication of information, and retard innovation and prosperity, with the result that they provide less environmental quality at greater cost than is possible. While such flawed policies might be justified in cases where pollution problems pose clear, serious, and immediate threats, we argue this is not true of global warming, and the most effective response to concerns over carbon emissions may be limiting the discretionary power of government to take direct action and rely on the indirect effects of liberty and market incentives to move us beyond the petroleum age more quickly and efficiently than will result from the direct action of government.

In this essay I describe how contractarianism might approach interspecies welfare conflicts. I start by discussing a contractarian account of the moral status of nonhuman animals. I argue that contractors can agree to norms that would acknowledge the “moral standing” of some animals. I then discuss how the norms emerging from contractarian agreement might constrain any comparison of welfare between humans and animals. Contractarian agreement is likely to express some partiality to humans in a way that discounts the welfare of some or all animals. While the norms emerging from the contract might be silent or inconsistent in some tragic or catastrophic cases, in most ordinary conflicts of welfare, contractors will agree to norms that produce some determinate resolution. What the agreement says can evolve depending upon how the contractors or the circumstances change. I close with some remarks on contractarian indeterminacy.