Rights, Reasonableness, and Environmental Harms

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Notes

1. It is worth noting, as an aside, that libertarianism's problem with respect to pollution is not unique to libertarianism. The element of libertarian thought that is causing a problem here is its insistence on the idea that each individual possesses an inviolable right to bodily integrity. Other morals views that embrace this idea, even if they reject libertarians' views on property in external resources or laissez-faire economics, will still face the same problem with respect to pollution.

2. Murray Rothbard (Rothbard 1982) comes close to endorsing this idea, but tries to attach it to the common law distinction between trespass and nuisance in a theoretically unsustainable manner. See (Friedman 1992).

3. The most promising work to date in this respect is (Mack 2015).