Environmental
Dumping. Mats Wingborg, Gotlandsgatan 67, 116 38 Stockholm, Sweden,
telephone (home) 08-6438467, telephone (work) 08-7022396
This
paper is a brief overview of some major moral issues of applied ethics related
to the question of environmental dumping:
Expansion
of world trade and worsening regional and global environmental problems have
increasingly put trade and environmental interests on the global agenda.
Competition is global and intensifying, bringing a new level of insecurity to
developed nations. Economic liberalization could be used to weaken social and
environmental protection of workers competing for jobs in a more 'laissez-faire'
international environment. Corporations are playing one group of national
workers off against another in an effort to minimize costs and remain
competitive. It could therefore be argued that a degree of both social dumping
and environmental dumping already has taken place.
Is
it desirable and is it possible to prevent environmental dumping? Or is every
kind of prevention a threat to the free global trade and therefore a mistake?
(One usual argument is that free trade is an engine of economic growth.) Or is
environmental dumping a kind of prisoners' dilemma situation and therefore not
possible to prevent without an implementation of a global environmental clause
involving an interlinkage between trade and environment (but even if that's
desirable, is it not politically impossible?).
An
opposite view is that a world with free trade, without any global regulation, in
the long run also will be the best for the environment. Arguments for these view
are among others:
-
As income
grows, the average citizen will be more willing to offer resources for improving
the environment.
-
Technologies
that are less environmentally damaging are developed in countries with stricter
environmental regulations, and trade is a good way to diffuse these
technologies.
Unfortunately
there is not much of empirical data to turn to in order to answer this
questions. Therefore decisions in these issues are decisions under uncertainty.
Another
moral issue has to with responsibility. Under which circumstances has the global
society (ILO and WTO) or the governments or the corporations or the consumers
the major responsibility for environmental dumping? And who is to be blamed if
something goes wrong? Moral philosophy does not have the answer to all these
questions, but as I intend to show it can at least help us to ask them in a more
precise way and to explore different possible answers.
Go to:
Table of Contents of the 1997
SRA-Europe Conference
Program of the 1997 SRA-Europe Conference
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