Abstract
Markets have, of course, always had their critics. And though the past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented global resurgence of market advocacy and the rapid dismantling (through privatisation and deregulation) of commerce-restricting legal provisions in countless countries, there is one policy area that has emerged as a formidable redoubt from which those critics have proved particularly difficult to dislodge. Notwithstanding the singularly abysmal environmental record of the Eastern European command economies, it seems to be widely accepted — even by Mrs Thatcher — that environmental values must be statutorily insulated from determination and allocation by competitive market forces. The world must be forced to be ‘greener’ than sovereign consumers apparently would allow it to be. Why?
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Notes
Cf. Hillel Steiner, ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma as an Insoluble Problem’, Mind, 91 (1982) 285–6.
Of course, adherents of justice principles can and usually do acknowledge that there are also moral duties of an instrumental kind. It is in this sense that moral codes containing justice principles are ‘pluralistic’ whereas utilitarian codes are not. Cf. Hillel Steiner, ‘Reason and Intuition in Ethics’, Ratio, 25 (1983), 59–68 and An Essay on Rights, (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming) chs IV and VI.
Cf. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), Part Four.
For an account of the formal conditions restricting the number of such places see Hillel Steiner, ‘The Structure of a Set of Compossible Rights’, Journal of Philosophy, 74 (1977) 767–75 and An Essay on Rights, ch. III.
Cf. Jeremy Waldron (ed.), Nonsense upon Stilts, (London: Methuen, 1987) ch. 3.
Cf. W. N. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions, ed., Walter Wheeler Cook, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1919);
H. L. A. Hart, Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) chs VII and VIII;
Carl Wellman, A Theory of Rights: Persons under Laws, Institutions and Morals, (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985);
L. W. Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Steiner, An Essay on Rights, ch. III.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) pp. 290–1; though Rawls then proceeds to dismiss this appearance of inequity and to propose a principle of (enforceable) ‘just savings’. My explanation of why his theory of justice thereby ascribes rights to future persons is that it fails to take adequate account of the formal features of rights.
Adam Smith long ago observed the dependency of procreative decisions on prospective living standards (wage levels) when he remarked that ‘the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men’; An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. I, (eds R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, W. B. Todd) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) p. 98. See also Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) ch. 9.
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© 1991 Michael Moran and Maurice Wright
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Steiner, H. (1991). Markets and Law: The Case of Environmental Conservation. In: Moran, M., Wright, M. (eds) The Market and the State. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21619-2_3
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