A little over a year ago, I published a short essay on libertarianism and pollution at Libertarianism.org. Today I have a new one. It’s much longer – about 8,500 words as opposed to the original 1,200. And it’s much more comprehensive in its survey of the existing literature.

The idea behind the original was simply to follow up on some arguments that David Friedman and Peter Railton had previously made, showing that libertarians who hold certain absolutist positions on property rights or on the Non-Aggression Principle have difficulty accounting for the permissibility of minor acts of pollution.

Libertarians want to say that we have an absolute or near-absolute right to prevent others from physically interfering with our property without our consent. You can’t take a nickel from my pocket, even if I would never miss it, and even if for some reason you desperately need it (perhaps you’re a nickel short of being able to afford a life-saving drug). But this seems to imply that most pollution involves the violation of rights. If you violate my rights by crossing my yard without my consent, then surely you also violate my rights by dumping your garbage on it. And why should it matter whether the garbage consists of large chunks of vegetables and dirty diapers, or microscopic bits of particulate matter? Or noxious fumes? Or even loud noises or bright lights?

Taken to its extreme, libertarianism seems to suggest that any act of pollution, no matter how trivial, constitutes a violation of rights. But the prohibition of all pollution – air, noise, light, and sound – appears to be incompatible with human social existence.

That’s a problem.

The new paper sets out this problem with a bit more precision, and surveys some attempts by Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and Eric Mack to avoid it. It concludes that none of these attempts are entirely successful, but notes that they exhibit a surprising degree of consensus on the ultimate goal: a principle of “live and let live,” as articulated by Baron Bramwell in the 1862 case Bamford v. Turnley. I suggest that future research in this area would do well to further explore both the theoretical underpinnings of this principle, and its application to more difficult questions of environmental pollution such as those involved in global climate change.

Eventually, this essay is going to be published in the Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics. And I’m hoping that people will find it a useful reference, and perhaps a helpful impetus to classroom discussion. In the meantime, though, I’ve got a while before the final version is due, so whatever feedback readers might care to offer is more than welcome.

It’s a really interesting issue, and there’s still a lot of work left to be done on various aspects of it – especially as pertains to questions involving libertarian rights and the imposition of risks. But there’s also a lot of really good and underappreciated work already out there. Ed Dolan has published several excellent papers, and has another one in the pipeline. And Dan Shahar has several good papers and a bucketload of fascinating ideas on this topic, from which I benefited tremendously in conversation.