Should Polluters Pay For Polluting?

Thesis: If polluters are harming the environment, the pollution is a moral danger to the ecosystem and should be resolved. If polluters can pay economic compensation for their disruption of the environment, this will not necessarily resolve the problems of the environment. Three authors in this essay offer different perspectives on the issue of making polluters pay, their explicit views of this subject are not observably mentioned in their work, just different positions for and against the idea. As the authors give different reasons for why or why not polluters should pay, they all mention a moral issue is attached to this discussion. I plan to analyze the authors’ readings and interpret their writings for purposes of this essay.

From a moral standpoint, if polluters are harming the environment, the pollution is a real danger to the environment and should be resolved. Although polluters can pay compensation for their disruption of the environment, this does not necessarily resolve the environmental issues affecting our ecosystem. While three authors offer different perspectives on this issue of making polluters pay, their explicit views are not observably mentioned in their work, mostly just different positions for and against the idea. I plan to analyze the authors’ readings and interpret their arguments in this area of discussion.

The first author’s reading I will analyze is Mark Sagoff’s publication, the economy of the earth. Although Sagoff’s writings are helpful to our understanding, they ultimately do not speak explicitly about the main question being answered about whether or not polluters should pay. In Chapter 3, he speaks about the allocation and distribution of resources and how people have incompatible preferen...

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...ems of the environment. The analysis and interpretation of these readings is interepreted to justify the thesis of this argument.

Bibliography Page

Dryzek, John S. 2005. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. 2nded.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

- This source was helpful in defining green taxes and the reasons why it could help pollution and vice versa.

Goodin, Robert. 1994. “Selling Environmental Indulgences.” Kyklos 47(4): 573-596.

- This source was helping in giving an analogy to the thought of selling sin and selling the environment.

Sagoff, Mark. 2008. “The Allocation and Distribution of Resources.” In The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law, and the Environment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 50-73.

- This source was helpful for defining standards of who gets what resources and

how they will be distributed.