Blame Allocation

The life cycle of a material item has many side effects. The good side effects include wages, sense of purpose in one's labor, and added cultural value. We have a ubiquitous system for allocating the good side effects of material items to people: it's called the market economy. Whatever one thinks of this system, one can't deny that we do pay a lot of attention to whether it's being fair or not. The question of how to allocate the negative side effects of items, however, seems to be largely overlooked. That is why we can hear things such as:

"I bought the ticket last minute and the plane was going to take off either way, so that shouldn't count towards my emissions."

"Hitchhiking doesn't contribute to emissions."

"Our paper mill uses 10% twigs and other wooden debris which is neglected by the rest of the industry, so that is very environmentally friendly."

Consumption-side blame
Now, let's try to be more quantitative about statements like these. First, let's bundle all negative side effects together, whether it be carbon emissions, waste water, agricultural runoff, or industrial pollutants, and just call it all emissions. What we want to do is to look at the economic incentive behind emissions. An airline doesn't run daily flights from Copenhagen to London for the laughs. The idea for allocating blame for emissions from e.g. a flight is to assign it proportionally to whoever paid for it. That does mean that first class is blamed more than economy class. Not everyone in economy class is blamed equally either: frugal people who found cheap tickets take less blame. Those that paid shipping for cargo on the plane also get some. This makes sense in this case because we know that there is a causation between the income of an airline on a certain route, and how frequently they choose to schedule it. And since airlines have small margins, this is also quite elastic.

However, as I do know a bit about airlines, I know that they would never ever release the information about how much they sell all their tickets for. So our chances of actually measuring this in reality are small.

Why even measure the blame in the first place?
We can think of blame for environmental badness as any moral resource. Humans do have a preference for minimizing harm to others and their surroundings. In general, people are willing to trade off other preferences for things that have a higher moral value. One place we can see this is in the labor market. Occupations that are perceived as having a high moral value are often underpaid, in relation to their required effort and responsibility. I am thinking of nurses, teachers, and police officers [1]. This is evidence that people are willing to trade off money for moral value, and in no small degree, either [2]. So, I believe that if we do a good job of properly assigning moral value to different activities, in a way that is perceived as proportionate and correctly targeted, then people will indeed make palpable sacrifices and efforts in response.

The problems with consumption-side blame
Testing the payment=blame model on the examples above, we see that the hitchhiker actually gets off scot free! At least as long as he doesn't pay the driver anything. And even if he did, we can probably assume that the driver's preference for driving over other modes of transport is not affected much by the off chance of picking up a hitchhiker. So that doesn't seem to be a big problem for our model.

One obvious problem is that not all markets are free and elastic. Suppose we have a monopoly market, where the supplier uses unnecessarily wasteful methods. In the payment=blame model, the consumers would get the blame for the monopolist's bad practices. Another problem is that the consumption-side blame by definition ignores the supply side. Supposing that willing pilots were very hard to find, prices would increase and air travel would decrease. So those who spend considerable effort to become good pilots do indeed have some effect on the amount of flight emissions, and that is not covered by this model.

This will have to be continued.

[1] These jobs are also notably in the public sector (in Sweden). How much of the underpaidness can be attributed to that?

[2] One effect of this is that when something happens that reduces the moral value of a profession, then that social thing may have very severe economic consequences. This could be for example a scandal, or the spread of the idea that the teacher's job is not to instruct students directly.