Can Libertarians Solve the Pollution Problem?

As others have noted, pollution is a hard problem for those libertarians who endorse some version of rights absolutism—roughly, the view that rights (typically self-ownership and property rights) carry infinite moral weight such that they’re never outweighed by competing moral considerations such as welfare. I’ve summarized the problem elsewhere:

When I drive my car past my neighbor while he retrieves his newspaper, some particles of pollution will undoubtedly invade his lungs. I've therefore trespassed against him and violated his right of bodily integrity. So if we're being strict about enforcing rights, we may not drive cars or ride buses. Indeed, we're barred from operating hospitals, water purification plants, farms, and pretty much everything else under the sun. Some deontological libertarians embrace this reductio ad absurdum and support prohibiting pollution outright. But this view is, in a word, absurd. Pollution prohibition would grind the world to a halt, killing billions of people in the process.

I’ve seen three main attempts to carve out an exception that would permit some pollution to avoid this problem:

(1) Permit trespassing if it doesn’t cause harm to the property owner. Emitting a few particles of pollution that settle in your neighbor’s lungs or yard has no impact on their welfare, so it should be permitted.

(2) Permit trespassing if it doesn’t undermine the property owner’s autonomy. Emitting a few particles of pollution that settle in your neighbor’s lungs or yard doesn’t interfere with their freedom to live their life according to their own plans and principles, so it should be permitted.

(3) Permit trespassing but require that the trespasser compensate the property owner. Maybe emitting a few particles of pollution that settle in your neighbor’s lungs or yard does amount to a wrong, but it should be permitted as long as the polluter provides adequate compensation.

Here’s the problem: libertarians who are tempted to endorse one of these principles to solve the pollution problem would almost certainly reject its implications for other cases.

Meet Tress, the considerate trespasser. She occasionally enters your unlocked house to nap on your very comfortable couch while you’re away. Before she leaves, she’s careful to ensure that everything in your house remains exactly as it was before she entered.

I assume that most deontological libertarians would claim that Tress’s trespassing is impermissible. However, they can’t explain why the trespassing is impermissible if they help themselves to one of the three replies above. Let’s take a look at each one:

Permit trespassing if it doesn’t cause harm to the property owner. Tress’s trespassing is harmless in the sense that it doesn’t cause you pain, cost you money, make you sick, etc. Now, you might think she harms you simply because you have a desire not to have your home invaded, a desire that’s frustrated by the trespassing. But this reply undercuts the solution to the pollution problem. If your neighbor simply has a desire not to have their lungs or yard invaded, then imperceptible pollution counts as a harm.

Permit trespassing if it doesn’t undermine the property owner’s autonomy. Tress’s trespassing doesn’t undermine your autonomy either. That is, you remain free to live your life according to your own plans and principles even though she occasionally naps on your couch. Remember, Tress is a considerate trespasser. She is careful to never trespass when it might interfere with your plans. Maybe you’re thinking that the trespassing does undermine your autonomy. You could have, at least in some sense, a plan that your couch remain undisturbed while you’re away from home and so the trespassing amounts to interference after all. Here again, this reply undercuts the solution to the pollution problem. If part of your neighbor’s life plan is that their lungs or yard remain undisturbed, then imperceptible pollution would involve undermining their autonomy.

Permit trespassing but require that the trespasser compensate the property owner. Suppose Tress asks your permission to nap on your couch while you’re away on vacation, but you don’t grant it. Deontological libertarians wouldn’t permit Tress to do it anyway as long as she compensates you afterwards. Rather, Tress should be prevented from staying in your house in the first place. (Of course, if Tress does it anyway, she’d owe you compensation).

To sum up, these proposed solutions to the pollution problem don’t look like they’re going to work.

I should note that the issue of trivial rights infringements isn’t simply a problem for (certain sorts of) libertarians, as I wrote here:

If this objection works against self-ownership libertarianism, it also works against a number of rights-based liberalisms, like Rawls’s. Rawls says that rights of bodily integrity and personal property are among the basic liberties which cannot be infringed except for the sake of other basic liberties. When my car emits a particle of pollution that settles in my neighbor’s lungs, I infringe her right of bodily integrity. When I pull into a stranger’s driveway to turn around when I’ve made a wrong turn, I infringe his right of personal property. But surely emitting a particle of pollution or using someone’s driveway for 10 seconds should be permissible.

Of course, if you endorse some version of consequentialist libertarianism, you can easily solve the pollution problem. But even if you aren’t willing to join me there, you should at least reject rights absolutism of any sort—libertarian or otherwise.