Is Pollution Aggression?

[J. D. Stembal]

Have you heard of a concept called "Proportional response"?  If he was dumping stuff down your well to try and poison you, then that might be allowable, but if he's just causing destruction of property with his actions, how can you justify killing him?  That's like saying "Hey, you just stole my watch." then blowing his head off with a shotgun.

 

Escalating the violence is the same as initiating violence.

 

Have you read the whole thread?

 

The argument that is being made is that pollution is a form of biological aggression and thus a violation of the NAP, which means that environmental pollution is in the same moral category as rape, theft, murder and assault. The only problem is that no one has yet endorsed killing someone over pollution no matter how severe (nuclear waste was mentioned), so how can pollution be an initiation of the use of force? It cannot be in a category all of its own. It's either a moral violation or it isn't.

 

If you can't justify the use of ethical self-defense to stop pollution, then it isn't aggression.

 

Pollution is in the aesthetically preferable category. I like mercury, you like smog.

[AncapFTW]

Have you read the whole thread?

 

The argument that is being made is that pollution is a form of biological aggression and thus a violation of the NAP, which means that environmental pollution is in the same moral category as rape, theft, murder and assault. The only problem is that no one has yet endorsed killing someone over pollution no matter how severe (nuclear waste was mentioned), so how can pollution be an initiation of the use of force? It cannot be in a category all of its own. It's either a moral violation or it isn't.

 

If you can't justify the use of ethical self-defense to stop pollution, then it isn't aggression.

 

Pollution is in the aesthetically preferable category. I like mercury, you like smog.

Yes, I read the topic.  I also read the part where you suggested that causing a slight harm to a person or an area via pollution was on par with taking someone's life or seriously assaulting them.    Killing someone over a slight offense isn't "ethical self-defense", it's violent revenge.  Your life, or even property, wasn't put at severe risk by someone dumping used motor oil on your lawn, so, no, it isn't acceptable to kill them over it.  That would be the equivalent of killing someone for keying your car.

 

You said that no one could explain how it was a violation of NAP, and in the same post suggest that if it was, you should be able to violate the NAP because of it.

 

Any action can be a violation of NAP if it is purposefully use to harm another person.   Rain could be considered a violation of the NAP if Storm from X-men used it to wash away a person's house.  Giving someone a ham sandwich could be considered a violation of NAP if you knew they had a religious or health reason to not eat it and didn't tell them what it is.  So yes, polluting can be considered a violation of the NAP if you purposely use it to harm another person or their property.

[J. D. Stembal]

Yes, I read the topic.  I also read the part where you suggested that causing a slight harm to a person or an area via pollution was on par with taking someone's life or seriously assaulting them.

 

I did not make any such assertion or suggestion in this thread. Others did, however. Read the thread again.

 

I am arguing that pollution cannot be in the same moral category as the big four because it is a choice to have pollution or to not have pollution.

 

Otherwise, I agree with you about motor oil and keying people's cars. Rain, not so much. Involuntary manslaughter is a sub-category of homicide, which still applies even if the guilty party did not have specific intent to kill.

[Openeye]

 

 

I am arguing that pollution cannot be in the same moral category as the big four because it is a choice to have pollution or to not have pollution.

 

 

 

Sorry to just jump in suddenly but can you clarify what you mean here? Who's choice are we talking about the polluter or the one negatively effected by said pollution?

 

[J. D. Stembal]

Sorry to just jump in suddenly but can you clarify what you mean here? Who's choice are we talking about the polluter or the one negatively effected by said pollution?

 

 

It applies to both groups of people. Everyone has free will, and the freedom to choose. How does this question relate to pollution being a form of aggression?

[Mister Mister]

  I think this is a very complex topic, and would be a constant challenge to Law in a free society, subject to constant negotiation, unless/until technologies were developed that eliminated harmful pollution.  Some people have suggested that pollution is just aesthetic, not subject to ethics at all, but I don't think this is true.

  I think there are two categories of pollution that Law would have to address in a Common Law Society.  Pollution is not necessarily aggression but certainly some forms of pollution are aggression, and still others may not be done with malicious intent, but would create an obligation for the polluter to compensate property owners affected by the pollution.  In the same way that Keying someone's car is aggression.  Accidentally damaging someone's car is not necessarily aggression, but does necessitate compensation. 

 

 In the same way, dumping waste chemicals in a river on your property, knowing that water might poison others, is absolutely aggression.  Fertilizing crops and creating runoff that kills fish which other people rely upon, or clear-cutting forests which cause landslides which damage other peoples property, would create a legal obligation to make restitution to the injured parties.

  Would-be Polluters would have to make adjustments based on these kinds of rulings, and would likely buy insurance against these kinds of lawsuits, leading them to avoid these kinds of conflicts, or accept them as the costs of doing business.  So I think there would be plenty of room for Environmental Science and Law in a Free Society, but in a more rational and productive capacity.

[FreedomPhilosophy]

You have not answered the question, though. If I find you dumping waste (pouring your used motor oil on my lawn), can I use self-defense to prevent the crime by killing you as if you were raping, or murdering someone else?

Pouring on your lawn no, pouring deadly pollution down your throat, yes probably. As the other poster said, proportionate response.

[fractional slacker]

This one hits home. I have a friend that attempts to claim driving a car is, while very minor in degree, a violation of the NAP against future generations. My friend is a "climate change" evangelist. It causes strife between us.

 

Sorry, I haven't read the entire thread and someone may have already brought this up.

I reject the poison pill of pollution invalidating the NAP.  This argument is basically the secular version of original sin. If you consider life as optional, then yes you could argue pollution is aggression. If you are a misanthropic nihilist, arguing about the sin of pollution is your attempt to justify spreading misery.

[StylesGrant]

I'll offer a twist.

 

Pollution is good, power is good, environmentalism is good, but living your life on negations is not. 

 

"My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous...If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism."
-Michel Foucault

"Perhaps I should have said that Nature is politically incorrect. and ultimately everything that has been and ever will be is an extension of Nature. we are Nature. war is Nature. love is Nature. survival is Nature. when talking about meanness, one must even grant understanding to the human organism which exhibits it. everything that life does is an extension of the will to survive. there isn't really any meanness, only a misunderstanding about the best way to try to survive."
-Lindsay Zywiciel 

"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."
-Cormac McCarthy


"Power is not a commodity that can be possessed, and it cannot be centered in either the institution or the subject. . .We will never be entirely free from relations of power. . .Rather, resistance must take the form of agonism - an ongoing, strategic contestation with power - based on mutual incitement and provocation - without any final hope of being free from it. . .
As political subjects we must overcome ressentiment by transforming our relationship with power. To affirm eternal return is to acknowledge and indeed positively affirm the continual 'return' of the same life with its harsh realities. Because it is an active willing of nihilism, it is at the same time a transcendence of nihilism. We must acknowledge and affirm the 'return' of power, the fact that it will always be with us. To overcome ressentiment we must, in other words, will power. We must affirm a will to power - in the form of creative, life-affirming values."
-Saul Newman

 

 

Let me put this in terms. 

 

If you poison my child with coal ash and my water with fracking chemicals and my family gets sick with heavy metals from the water and coal ash, then yes they have committed aggression. If the government shuts them down and destroys the local town economy and I have to leave and go into debt, then the government has committed aggression. Typically, in reality, the regulatory standards and legal proceedings tend to argue many of these cases as 'neglect', not aggression. In fact, coal ash isn't even regulated as hazardous waste, its put into containment ponds for the industry to do as it sees fit.

 

There's virtually no way to escape pollution. You're swimming in it. You're blood will test positive for hundreds of things. Your child's will. 

 

The only real clear 'ends to a mean' de facto argument of culpable blame and aggression, are those accusations which can be levered against those who stand in the way of 'treating' a problem that cannot be avoided.

 

The people who lie in the medical system and create false diseases to describe what are pollution caused diseases namely. When the American Medical Association gets in the way of me trying to treat my wife for the heavy metal contamination from the coal ash, because they say there's no treatment, or they deny that her illness is caused by coal ash and fracking. When the IRS or some other federal stipulations or results of the monetary policy cause my company involved in renewable energy research to collapse or be banned. When the feds raid your local legal weed dispensary and cause you to have to drive 8 hours to the nearest one to get the only medicine you can treat your twenty year old son's epilepsy with. When the corporations who own the senators you refuse to vote for decide to create harmful subsidies and loop holes that give corporate welfare to the most polluting energy industries while penalizing renewable start ups. 

 

In everyone of these cases there are clear intents to engage in domestic intervention of trade on behalf of protecting special interests. In every case there is a war criminal, in tantamount. And then of course there is always the lies about research. Extreme censorship of academic journal's contemporary understandings of environmental health, technology, energy, and engineering. In every case there's a good reason to consider the NAP broken by the highest executives engaged in suppression and prohibition.

 

But I don't care about the NAP, of course, I'm not a purist, just a realist. And well, you know what happens to the war criminals that actually get sentenced. 

[AncapFTW]

I did not make any such assertion or suggestion in this thread. Others did, however. Read the thread again.

 

I am arguing that pollution cannot be in the same moral category as the big four because it is a choice to have pollution or to not have pollution.

 

Otherwise, I agree with you about motor oil and keying people's cars. Rain, not so much. Involuntary manslaughter is a sub-category of homicide, which still applies even if the guilty party did not have specific intent to kill.

"If pollution is a violation of the NAP (or UPB), then it would be justifiable to use the necessary level of ethical self-defense in order to prevent it, up to and including the killing of polluters. (Just like rape, theft, murder, and assault.)"

"If I find you dumping waste (pouring your used motor oil on my lawn), can I use self-defense to prevent the crime by killing you as if you were raping, or murdering someone else?"

 

Can you explain how those quotes aren't equating pollution to assault or murder?  They are both quotes from your posts.

[J. D. Stembal]

"If pollution is a violation of the NAP (or UPB), then it would be justifiable to use the necessary level of ethical self-defense in order to prevent it, up to and including the killing of polluters. (Just like rape, theft, murder, and assault.)"

"If I find you dumping waste (pouring your used motor oil on my lawn), can I use self-defense to prevent the crime by killing you as if you were raping, or murdering someone else?"

 

Can you explain how those quotes aren't equating pollution to assault or murder?  They are both quotes from your posts.

 

I have elaborated on the same point several times already, so this question makes no sense to me. Can you tell me exactly what is unclear about my position? I am rebutting the argument that pollution is the same as initiating aggression, not supporting it. I am taking the con position in the debate.

 

Clip from Fox News on Yahoo - http://finance.yahoo.com/video/why-does-epa-want-crack-213554973.html

 

The EPA funded a study on the carbon emissions from barbeques. In the future, could a SWAT team storm into my condo and kill me over the charcoal grill I sometimes use?

[A Madman Person Guy]

The EPA funded a study on the carbon emissions from barbeques. In the future, could a SWAT team storm into my condo and kill me over the charcoal grill I sometimes use?

 

Are you abandoning the concept of proportionality on purpose? Understand that I'm not asking this sarcastically; I'm genuinely wondering whether if you're trying to play Devil's Advocate here, but perhaps not putting it across as effectively as might be intended. I understand your mistrust of the behaviors and motives of the EPA, and the political ramifications that may come of driving the results of biased studies into paranoid policy, but...

[J. D. Stembal]

Are you abandoning the concept of proportionality on purpose? Understand that I'm not asking this sarcastically; I'm genuinely wondering whether if you're trying to play Devil's Advocate here, but perhaps not putting it across as effectively as might be intended. I understand your mistrust of the behaviors and motives of the EPA, and the political ramifications that may come of driving the results of biased studies into paranoid policy, but...

 

I did not introduce the concept of proportionality to the discussion. Should I have?

 

If men with guns show up because I am polluting (like they did when I was having a bonfire), and I ignore them or tell them to take a hike, what's going to happen to me? What's the best case scenario? What's the worst case scenario?

 

I've seen many replies, yet no one has attempted to answer my original question. "Is ethical self-defense justified to stop pollution?"

[A Madman Person Guy]

I did not introduce the concept of proportionality to the discussion. Should I have?

 

If men with guns show up because I am polluting (like they did when I was having a bonfire), and I ignore them or tell them to take a hike, what's going to happen to me? What's the best case scenario? What's the worst case scenario?

 

I've seen many replies, yet no one has attempted to answer my original question. "Is ethical self-defense justified to stop pollution?"

 

Here's an interesting thing; if you scream for a little over a year and a half consecutively, you'll have produced only enough sound energy to heat a cup of coffee. Also, the symptoms of asbestos poisoning show a median latency of forty-four point six years, and radon will take about fifteen years off your life, assuming you're in your 30s and you spend 70% of your time inside a heavily contaminated house, but only assuming you would otherwise have lived to 75. Meanwhile, your odds of dying while bicycling are on average 1 in 4,147.

 

I walk past people smoking on the train platform on the way to work; the smokers are taking the opportunity to light up now that there's talk of a ban on smoking in public spaces over here. I travel to work not in a car, due to the fact that it's uneconomical for me, but on the commuter train, where people communicate their flus and stomach bugs to me no matter how much I try and keep clean. I breathe in lots of ozone and some fumes at work, although I try not to. All these little elements of exposure will shorten my life expectancy. But I don't worry about them, because they're minor and marginal, and I am not a hyperbolic little prat.

 

Proportionality is the answer to this question. You're entitled to protest or try and do something about someone barbecuing on the back porch next door, if you're sitting with an open window and fearing for your health. Sure, it's justified. But generally, given what the risks and ramifications of smoke inhalation really are, the proportional response would hardly be noticeable. And here's the thing... are you really worried about your health? Or are you just being an irritable prick, complaining and throwing out a handy excuse?

 

Yeah, people are entitled to ethical self-defense to stop pollution. Most of the time though, that ethical self-defense should barely amount to them making a rude gesture if it is to be proportional, so they're going to have to save up...

[Donnadogsoth]

You have not answered the question, though. If I find you dumping waste (pouring your used motor oil on my lawn), can I use self-defense to prevent the crime by killing you as if you were raping, or murdering someone else?

 

If I'm dumping nuclear waste on your lawn, yes, you can shoot me, just as if I were assaulting you and feared for your life.

 

If I'm dumping used motor oil on your lawn, you can respond legally or even with main force to stop me, and if I then assault you and you fear for your life, you can shoot me.

 

"Pollution" ranges from farting in an elevator to poisoning a well, just as theft ranges from stealing a stick of gum to defrauding you of your house, so the valid response to both ranges is likewise a range from moderate legal action to death.