Week 2 - Conceptions of Environmental Justice

Week 2 of study notes and interesting things from the FutureLearn course...

Why don't we all agree what is just and unjust?

We all have different opinions about what is and isn't right. There are different conceptions of justice such as:

• The view of nature and society that we hold
• Who we believe to be morally relevant subjects
• What dimensions of justice we hold to be important
• What principles of justice we apply to decide what is right and wrong.

There are three Western traditions of ethics. 

Duty based principles (deontological)

• Do the right thing. 

• Do it because it's the right thing to do.

• Don't do wrong things.

• Avoid them because they are wrong

Under this form of ethics you can't justify an action by showing that it produced good consequences, which is why it's sometimes called 'non-Consequentialist'. Someone who follows Duty-based ethics should do the right thing, even if that produces more harm (or less good) than doing the wrong thingUtilitarian (consequencialism)
Deontological (duty-based) ethics are concerned with what people do, not with the consequences of their actions.

Utilitarianism (consequentialism)

Consequentialism is based on two principles:

• Whether an act is right or wrong depends only on the results of that act

• The more good consequences an act produces, the better or more right that act

Utilitarianism states that people should maximise human welfare or well-being (which they used to call 'utility' - hence the name).

Virtue ethics (character based ethics)

Virtue ethics is person rather than action based: it looks at the virtue or moral character of the person carrying out an action, rather than at ethical duties and rules, or the consequences of particular actions.Virtue ethics not only deals with the rightness or wrongness of individual actions, it provides guidance as to the sort of characteristics and behaviours a good person will seek to achieve.

Environmental Justice struggles sometimes about seeing that justice is done in a context where there is a broad agreement about what justice is.

Justice pluarism

Pluralism is used in different ways across a wide range of topics. It denotes a diversity of views and stands rather than a single approach or method of interpretation.

 f we want to understand why different individuals or community groups make their decisions. What are the big traditions where the communities are coming from; we have to look at the context they are making these decisions.

"There may not indeed exist any identifiable perfectly just social arrangement on which impartial  agreement would emerge" (Sen 2009)

Love Canal Disaster

Love Canal was a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, located in the LaSalle section of the city. It officially covers 36 square blocks in the far southeastern corner of the city, along 99th Street and Read Avenue. Two bodies of water define the northern and southern boundaries of the neighborhood: Bergholtz Creek to the north and the Niagara River one-quarter mile (400 m) to the south. In the mid-1970s Love Canal became the subject of national and international attention after it was revealed in the press that the site had formerly been used to bury 22,000 tons of toxic waste by Hooker Chemical Company (now Occidental Petroleum Corporation).

Love Canal, along with Times Beach, Missouri, are important in United States environmental history as the two sites that in large part led to the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA). CERCLA is commonly referred to as "Superfund" because of the fund established by the act to help the clean-up of toxic pollution in residential locations such as Love Canal. It has been stated that Love Canal has "become the symbol for what happens when hazardous industrial products are not confined to the workplace but 'hit people where they live' in inestimable amounts."^[39]