“the circumstances of justice obtain whenever persons put forward conflicting claims to the division of social advantages under conditions of moderate scarcity.” - John Rawls, The Theory of Justice
Human Control over the Circumstances of Justice
In his book, "A Theory of Justice", Rawls claims that people in the Original Position are aware of the circumstances of justice - the more or less equivalence of people, the scarcity of resources, and the potential for cooperation among people to yield a more utilitarian (or maximin) distribution of resources.
Rawls' contribution to contemporary political philosophy cannot be understated, and his book has motivated some excellent counter-points (my favorite being Sandel's "Liberalism and the limits of justice"). However, one quirk about this forum of modern philosophy of justice that has always monkey-wrenched by biological gears is the assumption that "conditions of moderate scarcity" exist outside of human control. In reality, we consume the resources on which we depend and we or our cultural memes (from attitudes on consumption and travel to the material objects such as computers and iphones themselves) reproduce and consume resources, and that consumption of resources leads to scarcity. You don't have to be Malthus to know that we live in a finite world, and consequently our growth becomes limited by the scarcity of resources; as living things, we engineer the circumstances of justice, and so much of this modern political philosophy falls short by failing to inspect the dynamics of resource consumption and, consequently, the human socio-political control over the circumstances of justice. Incorporating ecological and economic realities into our discussion of political philosophy can help us better understand how to maintain a high quality of life in human society by, at times, preventing the scarcity of resources that leads to intense, conflicting claims over the division of what few resources remain.
The Consumption of Resources: From Unrecognized Liberty to Bitter Justice
Liberty reigns in the abundance of resources, and often we take those abundant resources for granted. You are free to breathe, because oxygen is so abundant, and so we don't even recognize a world in which breaths can be regulated to ensure a fair distribution of breaths. However, put a group of humans inside a biosphere on Mars, and one could envision a political agreement specifying the "fair use of energy and oxygen." Because we take for granted abundant resources, their consumption often goes unnoticed. During the westward expansion of the United States (into land controlled by Spanish and Native Americans), land was seen as so abundant that anyone could build a house just about anywhere. There was no need to be just in our allocation of land out West. Today, every square inch of land in the United States is owned, and its movement from one owner to another is often a matter of justice - transfer of land to the federal government can be unjust for cattle ranchers, transfer of an empty lot to a real-estate mogul can be unjust for poor people who liked to use those empty lots for recreation. The previous abundance of land led to homestead policies that rewarded the consumption of abundant land for economic growth (this is currently happening in Siberia).
In ecological systems, living things produce an abundance of babies. In economic systems, an abundance of a resource makes it cheap and thus more easily utilized for the production of other resources which are scarce. If the resources are non-renewable, or renewed more slowly than they are consumed, these ecological and economic forces deplete the supplies, yielding fewer resources per-capita. Slowly but surely, previously abundant resources become scarce and, barring an improbable equal distribution of resources, there will inevitably be some inequality in the ownership of coveted resources. When the resources improve the ability of an organism or company to acquire resources, the inequality can perpetuate itself (well-fed lions are more capable predators; rich humans are better able to get degrees, connections and jobs, big companies have more money to expand and buy up new resources). Thus, humans, given the liberty to do so, will reduce the abundance of desirable resources - land, animals, power - until we become limited by scarcity. Barring political agreements to limit liberty despite the perceived abundance of resources, human ecological/economic systems will drive resources to scarcity and perpetuate inequality, thereby engineering the circumstances of justice.
Political Dynamics in the conversion of Abundance to Scarcity
The arguments for continued liberty and depletion of resources are that the resources are abundant and we need them now. If we get the resources now, we make money, and if we don't, then the our competitors will and we will lose. This tragedy of the commons makes it very difficult to protect resources until they become scarce enough for us to feel the tragedy. We did not notice a tragedy of the commons in the use of wild game until the buffalo and elk were nearly driven to extinction, and now, for fairness, constituents must pay large prices and submit to a draw for the possibility of receiving a hunting permit. We did not notice the tragedy of the commons in the emission of CO2 until record droughts, floods, snowstorms, heat waves, and melting of polar ice caps caused major human and economic harm and now, for fairness, we are in the process of signing agreements to ensure a just distribution of CO2 emissions across nations. We did not notice the tragedy of the commons in the world's fisheries until whales or other fish begin to make precipitous declines. The same stories played out for the use of lumber, land, fresh water, ores, and more: Resources abound, they are consumed until their scarcity is felt, and then by mutual coercion we agree to limit our consumption.
While it is reassuring that human political systems often limit the use of resources to ensure their preservation when they hit the wall of apocalyptic scarcity and the threat of revolt, it does not always worked because some resources that might be limiting or invaluable in future economies are currently non-limiting and, consequently, their preciousness is not felt. An example could be the species that are going extinct - they may contain medical clues that enable us to solve pressing global epidemics or food shortages later. Another example is space - the more people we have per-capita, the greater the risk and intensity of pandemics, and currently, we are filling space on the planet without any regulations on human reproduction motivated by epidemiological risk. Our political systems react to some resources - those whose combined contemporary importance and scarcity currently motivate a more just allocation - but are apathetic to resources that may be important in the future.
Furthermore, our political systems are apathetic as to whether or not the quality of life would be better with more resources. What if all of the world's 7 billion people would be happier in a world with 1 billion people - each person could have seven times the amount of personal space, seven times the probability of being drawn for a hunt, seven times the allowable catch from a fishery, and seven times the amount of water, not to mention less pollution in the air and water... or, if the same amount of pollution, then it comes with greater liberty to pollute without repercussion.
Temperance
These facts - the human-engineered scarcity of resources and the potential for a higher quality of life with more resources per-capita - motivate a precautionary temperance. Temperance - moderation, self-restraint - is the oft forgotten virtue in American political discourse. Temperance involves a restriction of liberty to preserve an abundance of resources and, with it, a quality of life that does not necessitate a bitter and emotional struggle for a just division of scarce resources. Temperance, in many cases, requires voluntarily restricting our liberty to prevent the circumstances of justice. Temperance is motivated by a desire to preserve a life of moderate liberty, made possible by an abundance of resources, by restricting only our ability to use the resources in excess. We do this because we know that the self-imposed limitations on our liberty now, when resources abound, will be far preferable to the bitter restrictions of liberty imposed by the struggle for a just division of those resources.
Temperance is a tough sell. It's hard to tell people to stop cutting down trees when there is still a forest, especially (in the words of Daniel Pauly) when the lumberjack and hikers have a shifted baseline of what is a "good" size of the forest. While the shifting baselines and relativity of human happiness blurs the lines about what is an objectively "good" amount of abundance for a high quality of life, it does not invalidate the existence of an optimum (which, granted, may change with evolutionary time). Yes, a kid raised in New Delhi will, statistically, have a much greater tolerance of high population densities than will a person raised in Alaska. However, if we were in charge of being mankind's zookeeper, we would agree that there is an appropriate sized habitat for producing the most admirable and healthy specimens. Too sparse of a habitat and humans will be lonely, too dense of a habitat and humans will be angry and diseased. Somewhere in the middle is an optimal habitat for humans, where most humans will grow up content, with sufficient abundance to carve out their own lives - if they want cities, they can move together with other humans to cities, and if they want space, they can move to the wilderness where there is space. Sometimes, the resource wants and needs of a human vary depending on the stage of life, e.g. some mountaineers in their reckless youth want vast wilderness and remote mountains to climb... so they can talk about it in cities when they are older. So, our lumberjack at the forest may have a shifted baseline, as may the people in the discussion about whether or not to stop cutting down trees, and so they may not realize that that forest is small, only those who, by their nature, disposition, and stage of life, yearn for open space will feel the claustrophobia of a small enclosure. The lumberjack's daughter could grow up, read stories about vast forests of the past, shift her baseline back to a historical level, and feel saddened by the state of the world.
Many people in my generation feel like the lumberjack's daughter. There are no blank spots on the map, no unclaimed swaths of land, no giant herds of bison, no dodos, declining rainforests, depleted fisheries, polluted air, polluted streams, a changing climate and no place where you can, like the frontiersmen back in the day, horse-back ride with a gun and fishing rod, earning your food the old-fashioned way and camping by clean rivers as you travel the West or, like the Native Americans (who, for historical accuracy, fought each other for resources), had abundant herds of elk - ten times the number of elk available today. Our generation grows, as human specimens, on public lands set aside for recreation where we can horseback ride, set aside for conservation where we can chop down trees, and set aside for preservation where we can see species not yet extinct. These lands were major victories by forces of temperance like Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt who thrived as humans and wanted future generations to thrive with wild things and vast, majestic places. However, our use of these lands is not governed by the same liberty felt by Leopold, Muir and Roosevelt, but instead is regulated by agreements, necessitated by the scarcity of these resources. We can only chop down so many trees by our permit. We can only camp for so long before over-staying our welcome. We can't hunt species that are sufficiently rare because their habitat is scarce and their populations threatened. At its best, these agreements give us a sense of responsibility and an obligation to give a good world to the future generations, but, at its worst, these rules confine us to circumstances of justice that would not exist had our ancestors been more temperate.
It could be worse. We could've waited decades until imposing rules and regulations on land, water, air, and game management , leaving us with smaller habitats, fewer game, dirtier air and water, and more people. However, looking forward, we can see many cases where resources are declining and future generations would benefit from our temperance, and modern political philosophy can help us recognize these cases by pushing the discussion of politics in America away from a bimodal justice vs. liberty tug of war and instead incorporating what we know about resource consumption through ecology and economics. When we see how humans engineer our own circumstances, we see that liberty, justice, and temperance are all intertwined - to preserve some liberties for future generations, we must be just and impose rules and regulations to preserve abundant resources before they become critically scarce. The "circumstances of justice" as described by Hume and Rawls are not facts of life, but instead they are often engineered by unrestrained liberty. Hume notes that justice may come at the expense of "nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances" such as benevolence (Sandel gives the example of a friend who insists on paying back, and being paid back, every penny lent, causing one to wonder the terms of the friendship). In American discource, justice and liberty are often seen as at odds - requirements that people be fair to the poor infringes someone's liberty to be selfish - but in some cases where liberty consumes resources and engineers scarcity, justice can empower temperance and restrain those liberties of excess in favor of 'nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances'.
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