UTILITARIANISM APPLIED TO A REAL-WORLD PROBLEM Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council for President Barack Obama, wrote a memo in 1991 (while chief economist of the World Bank) claiming that the world’s welfare would improve if more of the waste of rich countries were sent to poor countries. Summers gave four arguments for this claim:
1. Clearly, it will be best for everyone if pollution is shipped to the country where its health effects will have the lowest costs. The costs of “health impairing pollution” depend on the wages lost when pollution makes people sick or kills them. So the country with the lowest wages will be the country where the health effects of pollution will be lowest. Therefore, with “impeccable” “economic logic” we can infer that it will be best for everyone if we dump our toxic waste in the lowest wage countries.
2. Adding more pollution to an environment that is already highly polluted has worse health effects than putting that same pollution into a clean environment where it can disperse. So we can reduce the harm pol- lution causes by transferring it out of highly polluted cities such as Los Angeles and dumping it into coun- tries in Africa that “are vastly under-polluted.” Doing so will make better use of those countries’ clean air quality, which we now are using “vastly inefficiently,” and it will improve “world welfare.”
3. The same pollution will cause more harm in a country where people have “long life-spans,” than in a country where people die young. When people have “long life- spans,” they survive long enough to get diseases, such as prostate cancer, that people who die young do not get. So pollution will cause more diseases such as prostate cancer in countries where people have long lives than countries where people die young. It follows that we can reduce the diseases pollution causes by moving pollution out of rich countries where people have long lives, and dumping it into poor countries where people die young.
4. Pollution can cause “aesthetic” damage, such as dirty- looking air, that “may have very little direct health impact.” Since the wealthy are willing to pay more for clean-looking air than the poor, clean-looking air is worth more to the wealthy than to the poor. So it should be possible for people in wealthy countries to find people in poor countries who are willing to trade their clean air for the money the wealthy are willing to offer. This kind of trade will be “welfare enhancing” for both parties.
Analyze This Argument
1. Explain which parts of the reasoning in this memo a utilitarian would have to accept and which parts a utilitarian could reject.
2. Assuming that the four arguments are correct, do you agree or disagree with the conclusion that those in rich countries should ship their waste to poor countries (perhaps by paying poor countries to take them)? Explain why or why not.