Ethics Test 2

Neo-Liberal Economics

• there should be as few constraints on the free market, trade, etc

• tend to see natural entities only as economic resources

• does not exclude environmental policies

  • only possible according to what humans value and what price they are willing to put on such policies within a free market system

• assumption that human needs are unbounded

Perpetual Scarcity

Earth’s resources are finite

one way to measure efficiency

demand Pareto Optimality

Pareto Optimality

his state of affairs is attained when no changes to the distribution of resources can be made without making someone worse off.

there is at least one person who prefers it to any (feasible) alternative and nobody who prefers the alternative to it

assumptions of Pareto efficiency

1. there is an implicit normative claim

   • scarcity of resources, ‘no redundancy’, aka don’t be wasteful

2. the satisfaction of human preferences is what determine the allocation of resources

3. the goods are substitutable

   • there is a price or set of equivalent goods

William Baxter

Optimal Pollution

1. humans are free to do as they please, as long as their actions do not interfere with the interests of other humans

2. waste is a bad thing

3. Every human being should be regarded as an end rather than as a means to be used for the betterment of another

4. Both the incentive and the opportunity to improve their share of satisfactions should be preserved to every individual

picturesque view

regards natural scenes beautiful only to the extent that they are like pictures, especially landscape paintings

involves:

• distancing

• framing

• a certain formal complexity of elements, and a safely uplifting spectacle

problems with picturesque

• makes us passive spectators w/o giving us any impulse to act to protect the beauty we perceive

1. acentric rather than anthropocentric appreciation

2. environment focused rather than scenery-obsessed appreciation

3. serious rather than superficial and trivial appreciation

4. objective rather than subjective appreciation

non-separatism

verdictive and dispositive