1. Environmental Ethics in Ecological Economics Tim Capon

2. Admin Lecture notes on blackboard from PD “Other resources” - for workshops

3. Lecture Outline Overview Brief history Utilitarianism Rawls’ theory of justice Public goods, externalities and social dilemmas Social norms and social capital

4. Value systems and economic systems Allocating scarce resources Opportunity costs Good way to allocate things?

5. Economic questions 1.What should we allocate resources to produce? 2.By what method should we produce? 3.Who receives what is produced ?

6. Neoclassical Economics Provided certain assumptions are met, the market can be relied upon to determine what to produce, how to produce and who receives the benefits of that production People pursue their own objectives as individuals.

7. Ethics Ethics is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with moral duty and ideal human character. Deontological ethics Teleological ethics

8. Deontological ethics An action is judged on its intrinsic rightness. Kant Metaphysics of Morals (1785) Hypothetical and categorical imperatives Kant’s categorical imperative

9. Deep ecology Devall and Sessions (1985) “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (intrinsic value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.”

10. Ancient ethical philosophy Plato’s Republic –Hierarchical –authoritarian Confucius (around 500 B.C.E. ) –Social harmony –Conformity Individualism and Collectivism

11. Social contract A social contract is the set of common understandings that allow the citizens of a society to coordinate their efforts (Binmore, 2005) Table manners, traffic rules, property rights

12. Is social convention helpful or harmful? Confuscius. Folow it for the sake of a harmonius society. Plato. Figure out whether it corresponds to ideal forms of virtue. Descartes and the rationalists. Disregard it and obey reason. Locke and the empiricists. Agree to follow it in order to avoid trouble. Kant and the idealists. Obey the one true convention, namely, treat others as you want to be treated. Kierkegaard and the existentialists. Look through it to the real you. Marx. Figure out how it promotes the forces of production and rebel against it. Foucault and the post-structuralists. Keep struggling with it; there’s no way to escape its power.

13. Distributive justice Justice – the ethics of who should receive benefits and burdens, good or bad things of many sorts, given that others might receive these things. Distributive justice - concerns the ethical appropriateness of which recipients get which benefits and burdens.

14. Rawls, John (1921 - “A theory of justice” (1971) Justice as fairness Based on a hypothetical social contract Original position Veil of ignorance

15. Original position The notion of the original position is that people are bound by their own situations and circumstances. And that if people were equal they would then choose principles for the formation of social contracts which were just. In justice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional theory of social contract.

16. Veil of ignorance Within the original position principles of Justice are formed under a veil of ignorance. “Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like” p.11.

17. Rawls’ two principles of justice “First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all. ” Rawls (1971, p.53)

18. Difference principle “if it not possible to distribute such liberties equally, then social and economic inequalities must be arranged so as to provide the greatest benefit from increases in the overall well-being of a society to those who are least advantaged.”

19. Teleological ethics Telos is a Greek term for end or purpose. Under teleological systems of ethics, an action is judged not by its intrinsic value but by the extent to which the action has instrumental value in providing advancement toward a desirable end.

20. Utilitarianism Utilitarianism is hedonistic: it treats pleasure and pain as the sole good and bad things in human lives. The ends justify the means Replaces inconsistent common sense moral intuitions with a unified system

21. "the insipid, pedantic, leather-lipped oracle of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century" What Karl Marx thought of Bentham

22. Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832) “Introduction to the principles of morals and legislation” (1789) Utility The greatest happiness principle The good is the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain.

23. Who counts? Animal rights Future generations Greatest good for the greatest number

24. Rawls’ critique of utilitarianism Rawls opposes utilitarianism The ends do not always justify the means

25. Summary Individuals and collectives Utilitarianism Rawls’ theory of justice

26. Public goods and externalities Nonrivalry Non-excludability Lead to social dilemmas

27. Social dilemmas Tragedy of the commons Open access regime Common property regime

29. Prisoners’ Dilemma Prisoner A Prisoner B Confess Deny ConfessDeny -3, -30, -6 -6, 0-1, -1

30. Social Dilemma Payoff Structure Prisoners Dilemma: DC > CC > DD > CD Assurance Game: CC > DC > DD > CD Game of Chicken: DC > CC > CD > DD

32. Incentives in Social Dilemmas Fear: DD - CD Greed: DC - CC Cooperators’ Gain: CC - DD

33. Social capital “networks, together with shared norms, values and understandings which facilitate cooperation within or among groups” (Putnam, 1993) Encourage cooperation and trust Reduce transaction costs and unnecessary bureaucracy

34. Fairness Fairness and theories of justice –Equality and need –Utilitarianism and welfare economics –Equity –Desert and context Fairness norms differ over time and place

35. Experimental economics Used to examine questions of social justice and distributive justice Used to study behaviour in social dilemmas –Social norms –Factors affecting cooperative behaviour

36. Social preferences Preferences are the ranks people allocate to material payoffs Social preferences refer to the ranks people allocate to material payoffs for themselves and others Self-interested people do not care about the behaviour of others Reciprocity (or reciprocal altruism) is a non-selfish behaviour that is conditional on the behaviour of others Altruism is an unconditional action to increase the payoffs of others, regardless of others’ actions and the consequences for one’s own payoffs

37. Fairness and chance Procedural fairness vs allocative fairness Equal allocations or equal opportunity? Level playing field U.S vs Homes in 1842

38. Self-serving bias Self-interest and self-deception Cognitive dissonance An unpleasant tension or disutility that may lead to either: –Reducing the self-interested behaviour –Self-deception

39. Binmore, Ken (1940 - Natural Justice (2005) Game theory and bargaining behind the veil of ignorance Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804) Rawls was operationalizing the categorical imperative Hume (1711-1776)

40. Game theory and evolutionary biology Hamilton, Maynard Smith, applied the language of game theory to evolutionary biology Enabled a study of the role of the family in the evolution of human morality. Game theory and the social contract –Vol 1: Playing fair (1994) –Vol 2: Just playing (1998)

41. Natural justice A social contract must be internally stable to survive. Needs to be efficient to compete with the social contracts of other societies. Reciprocal altruism The folk theorem

42. Fairness To be stable social contracts need to be equilibria to the game of life. Most games have many equilibria, so we face an equilibrium selection problem - efficiency Tragedy of the commons – 1000 goats is efficient 100 families with 10 goats each – fair outcome We care about fairness because it is evolution’s solution to the equilibrium selection

43. Egalitarian or utilitarian? What does the original position lead to? John Harsanyi – utilitarian distribution John Rawls – egalitarian distribution

44. References Ostrom, E. (1992). "Covenants with and without a sword: self-governance is possible." American Political Science Review 86(2): 404-417. Ostrom, E. (1998). "A behavioral approach to the rational choice theory of collective action." American Political Science Review 92(1): 1-22. Kollock, P. (1998). "Social Dilemmas: The Anatomy of Cooperation." Annual Review Of Sociology 24: 183-214. Putnam, R. D., with R. Leonardi and R. Y. Nanetti (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

45. Suggested readings Bentham, J. (J.H. Burns and H.L. Hart. Eds.) (1996). An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1996. B1574.B33 I5 1996. Daniels, N. ed. (1975) Reading Rawls : critical studies on Rawls' A theory of justice. New York : Basic Books. JC578.R39 Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. JC578.R38 Binmore, K. (2005) Natural Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. JC578.B54 2005 (SS&H at UQ)

46. Smith Moral Sentiments (1759) Wealth of Nations (1776)

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