When did ‘ethical’ change its meaning from ‘morally right’ to ‘environmentally friendly’?
Newsnight for a year had a regular feature Ethical Man, about a journalist trying to live the ‘ethical’ life. This didn’t involve any thought about the morality of any particular action beyond its potential to benefit or harm the environment.
OK, now I admit I believe there’s no objective way of telling what’s morally right or wrong. (Since you ask, utilitarianism is probably the best system out there, but it’s impossible to appeal to its objective truth – or the objective truth of any such structure for making moral decisions.) But I definitely don’t think any behaviour can be described as ethical if you’re not at least thinking about what is or isn’t the most positive course of action in the broadest sense. Just doing what Greenpeace tells you is about as far from a decent definition of ‘ethical’ as I can imagine.
Talking of environmentalism, can someone explain to me why we don't have a carbon tax? Using carbon has external negative effects that aren’t priced into how much carbon costs. So price those negative effects in using a tax. People can then easily decide for themselves how much carbon to use, knowing that they are paying the true cost of their actions. And we’ll all use less of it while avoiding costly and ineffective product regulations, insane cap-and-trade schemes which give existing energy-intensive industries massive freebies, ridiculous ideas about individual carbon allowances, etc.
A fuller (and better, though US-focused) explanation is here.
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2 comments:
I agree re: carbon tax.
one interesting sounding flaw in trading schemes was put to me recently: that carbon can't really be an effective market because the end goal of the scheme is reduced emissions. that means the pirce of carbon has to rise. in such a predictable market a big rich polluter (e.g an oil company) can buy excess permits when the price is low - more than it needs for its current emissions use. then sit around and sell them on a few years later to smaller companies that need them for their far smaller and less consequential emissions. profiteering, in other words, with no net impact on carbon levels.
does that make sense?
Yes that makes sense. Though I guess you would still get the effect of the cap on carbon emissions, even if the big company ended up profiting out of holding on to the permits - because you still can't emit without permits. It's just that the company, rather than the state, will be extracting the maximum value from the permits. As things stand with the EU scheme, though, the big company will definitely profit either way because it's getting most of its permits for free. Subsidising inefficient/monopoly incumbents just doesn't seem the best way of reducing emissions.
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