Have you ever wondered what makes litter litter? Probably not, unless you are a philosopher – we worry about what makes anything what it is. Here is an extended reflection on litter – the first chapter of my book, Thinking while Walking: Reflections on the Pacific Crest Trail, which is available on Amazon.
If you start hiking the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail (hereafter, the Trail) at its southern terminus, the guide books suggest you let the border patrol know first – unless you want to get buzzed by a helicopter. The trail begins a few feet from a fence that separates the United States from Mexico. Turn left, or right, and you see an endless undulating line of rusty corrugated steel panels, each bearing its own painted number. The numbering has the look of ineptly applied graffiti, even though it is official. That, together with the panels themselves, gives the whole structure a brutal look that conveys a defiant disregard for the natural setting it cleaves in half. In front of the barrier there is an unpaved road which throws up dust every time a border patrol truck, checking for intruders, zooms by. Flimsy chicken wire discourages crossing the road if you were tempted to start trekking north from the actual border. Even sticklers have to content themselves with starting a few feet north at the terminus marker for the trail. Until recently the marker was of a piece with the fence. A rotted amalgam of large wooden posts, engraved with information about the elevation and the distance to its twin, 2,650 miles north, next to Manning Park on the Canadian border.
It was recently replaced with a gleaming new marker that thumbs its nose at the squalor around it.
To get to the southern terminus by car from San Diego, you drive due east for about an hour, climbing from sea level to about 4,000 feet along interstate 8, then turning off to take the S1 twelve miles to Campo. A few miles before the turn off you see traffic going west stopped at a border patrol check point on the interstate at a choke point where the highway passes between mountains on each side. It is designed to catch border crossers trying to get to the coast, and points north, where they have a chance to find work and blend in.
Campo is a small dusty town of about 3,000 people in a broad flat valley bounded to the north by the Laguna Mountains that climb to 6,000 feet and rolling hills in all other directions. The center of town is no more than a convenience store, along with a railroad museum, surrounded by older modest ranch houses that look well baked by the sun. Drive south, and you pass a border patrol compound and a (now closed) juvenile detention facility. The paved road through town turns to gravel as you head south past the Castlerock Ranch and Camp Locket, “home of the annual Campo round up.” Gravel turns to sand as you drive the last few hundred feet to the marker.
For those heading north on a through hike, full of expectation of the “wild”, the start from the marker offers a counterpoint. Look up and you see high voltage wires. Look left or right and you see the giant pylons that carry them stretching to the east and west. Look north, and beyond Campo the valley is dotted with haphazard evidence of human activity – horses in enclosures and grape vines. Look up to the mountain range further north and you can see the blades of wind turbines barely turning in the midmorning stillness of a cloudless day.
And so it begins, but begins with confusion. There is no trail that starts at the terminus marker itself, just a section of rutted road. But go down that road and there are two battered orange cones off to the left and a small path heading off into the brush. It is not for about 400 feet that you know you are on the trail when you meet the first of what will be thousands of reassuring markers sporting the Pacific Crest Trail logo.
The trail snakes close to the road back to Campo. To the left you see nature, to the right the beginnings of the town. But on both sides of the path you see the leavings of others: a flashlight battery, a packet of Skittles, a crushed water bottle, a Walmart plastic bag, a deflated party balloon, a cup, and an empty bag of Doritos chips. Who left these here? Hikers? People crossing the border? It’s hard to think of them as left by hikers, if only because they are so close to the starting line. Do hikers ever litter? Well maybe sometimes – but right at the outset? Yet why would people crossing the border carry party balloons?
I am always puzzled by the vehemence of my reaction to litter in rural settings. I used to think it was driven by moral outrage. Moral outrage in the sense that to litter was to act selfishly without regard for others who would walk after you. What you were experiencing would be diminished for them because of your actions. But then I mulled over a thought experiment in which nobody followed where you walked, but the litter remained. Maybe the pathway would be closed by a bolder or a massive landslide. The litter would still be there, but nobody would witness it. So what would be the harm? Part of the answer is that it is the act in itself that causes harm. Even without it, or anyone to see the litter, the act of littering is itself is one of defilement. Like urinating on a grave, even if all traces of it evaporate in an instant.
When I am on a trail I feel tempted to pick up the first piece of trash I see. It is a dangerous temptation to give into, because once I pick up that piece, it is hard to stop picking up others. When I can, it goes in my pockets – cigarette butts, bottle caps, bits of Styrofoam, candy wrappers, even broken glass. The rest I end up carrying – usually cans, bottles, food containers, plastic bags. The plastic bags are good to find because then I can carry more of the rest. But either way, I usually end up starring down at something I can’t fit in my pockets or the bags. So now I am forced to stop. Somehow having cleaned part of the trail makes leaving what is there seem worse. I begin to wonder, what was the point of starting if I can’t finish? Is a less littered trail that much better than a more littered trail? The litter intrudes on my experience of the “naturalness” of my surroundings. I experience that as an all or none matter. It isn’t as if my sense of intrusion is calibrated to the amount of litter I see.
And then there is the question of whether litter not strictly on the trail should count any less than litter on the trail. Suppose I completely cleaned the trail but left litter not on the trail in place. But that makes no sense. Whatever drives me to want to sanitize the trail is not about the trail itself. Hiking the trail is hiking the surroundings in which it is embedded, not just the trail itself. But wait! If I pick up litter surrounding the trail, how far off the trail should I do that? Sometimes I see something far off the trail and struggle with whether to make a detour to get it. If I don’t, I get caught in a sorites argument. (Sorites arguments date back to Greek philosophy and revolve around puzzles about terms that are vague in nature – like baldness. A man does not need to have no hair at all to count as bald. But there is no clear boundary between the number of hairs that are compatible with baldness, and the number that are not. With no clear boundary, adding one more hair to the head of a bald man is not going to make him count as no longer bald. But then add hairs, one by one, and you will end up with a bald man with a full head of hair!)
If I don’t get this piece of litter, then why not not leave another piece in place as well. For surely, if I can live with one piece of litter, I should be able to live with two. The difference between one piece and two pieces is not going to transform my attitude. But wait! If I can live with leaving two pieces of litter in place, then why not three? The difference between two pieces and three pieces is not going to transform my attitude. But …. . You see where this is going. In the end I ought to be indifferent to all the litter that was there in the first place. Still, if I am not, the same argument runs in the other direction. My disquiet about all the litter is not going to be dispelled by picking up just one piece of litter. Just one piece is not going to make for such a difference. But if not one, then why two? And if not two, then why three? And …. .
So, here I stand on the trail, frozen by indecision – to pick up or not to pick up. David Sedaris went one way, and now spends four to six hours a day at it.[ii] His problem is that what he cleans is his own neighborhood. As such his work is never done. You might think litter begets litter but that once pristine, people would be reluctant to be the first to sully nature again. But no such luck. Others undo Sedaris’ work every day, and he wakes up every morning to witness their work but, nonetheless, gamely embraces his Sisyphean lot. At least I avoid that as I don’t live on the trail. Mine is a once in a lifetime encounter. But now that I think about it, my sanitation project is going to be short lived. People are following me along the trail. And some of them are littering. If only I can force myself to remember the trail as I render it and use that to blot out images of how it will be.
But then there is the question of exactly what counts as litter.
I was driving in the Adirondacks and my passenger threw some orange peel out of the window. A local followed us and, when we stopped, dressed us down. She was worried about invasive species, which seemed a bit far-fetched when it comes to oranges thriving though the deep freeze of upstate New York winters. That said, orange peel does not bother me even if it is littered. Maybe it should. But it is natural I say. But it is not natural to the environment it is left in. But it will decay I say. But so will a paper wrapper. Besides, some natural things don’t decay, like chicken bones. If I came across the leftovers of a picnic, I’d feel impelled to pick up the paper plates but not the chicken bones. The “man-made” seems more out of place and grates more with the “naturalness” of the setting.
As I walk the trail I see what looks like litter and reach down to pick it up only to realize it is decaying bark from a eucalyptus tree. Some non-natural litter looks like part of the natural environment. And yet I am still not indifferent to it. Consider a thought experiment that the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei might realize: he manufactures perfect facsimiles of natural objects and places them in situ, replacing naturally occurring items one for one. One of Weiwei’s most famous installations was of millions of hand painted porcelain sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern.
Why should I feel any compunction to treat his art work in my thought experiment as litter? Why is a perfect facsimile of the original second best? Indeed, shouldn’t all I actually care about be that the facsimile holds at the phenomenological level. If virtual reality can be as good as the original, so good that I can’t tell the difference, then why should I care?
A Chinese online site offers copies of famous art. I tried it, twice, but the results were disappointing. It turns out that Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat is harder to paint than the Chinese thought. They got tripped up on the rendering of the hat. A copy of Ammi Phillips’ portrait of Henrietta Dorr is a less challenging assignment, but a perfect facsimile it is not. In the copy, her cheeks are rendered cherubic instead of wan. But what if they had been perfect copies? Should I have a complaint? My Vermeer was not made by the hand of Vermeer. But that is also true of many paintings of the period even if it may not be true of Vermeer. True, my Vermeer does not have the rich history of ownership of the other “real” Vermeer. I can’t look at my Vermeer and revel in the fact that it was owned (unlike the original) by Andrew Mellon. But that kind of reveling strikes me as succumbing to a desire that has nothing to do with the value of the Vermeer as art. If the copy is perfect, then its aesthetic value ought to be the same as the original, even if its historical value is not. One way to think of this is to see aesthetic value as purely presentist – it is just a property of the canvass, as it were, in contrast to artistic value which throws a much wider net to include the origins, or circumstances, of the creation of an object of art.
But if that is right, then why isn’t the same true of nature? Here is why. To be in nature is in part to indulge in the conceit that we can experience a world without us. I say ‘conceit’ because the world we are in bears the marks of our presence at almost every level. In the first instance, we have left our mark through hunting and fishing, and through settled agriculture. In the second instance, we have done so through industrialization and urbanization. But above all, we have done so by our sheer numbers. Moreover, the range and reach of our marks are close to universal, be it through species we have driven to extinction, or the contours of land we have reshaped, or the effects of changes we have made to the chemical composition of the atmosphere and with it, the oceans. But be all of this as it may, to be in nature still prompts the imagination of a world without us, a world before us. And, after all, for all of its fancifulness, some elements of nature do exist unchanged from long before we came on the scene. Just a few hundred yards from the border with Mexico on the Trail, look up to your left and there is hill strewn with granite boulders, some the size of cars. They have existed for millions of years. Now such a boulder could be replaced by a perfect facsimile, but the one thing that facsimile can’t capture (assuming I know it is a facsimile) is the life history of the original in the place where I see it. And reveling in the length of that life history is central to the conceit that underlies my act of imagination of nature before man. In any case, the one thing I can be sure of is that litter, in the straightforward sense of wrappers, bottles, cigarette buts, and the like, will interfere with my ability to even engage in an act of imagination about what came before us, even if that act has no chance of being veridical.
It is hard not to think of litter in ahistorical terms, beyond it being a feature of human. So it comes as a surprise to learn that the idea of litter is itself relatively recent, and has a history of its own. Litter, in the sense of “scattered oddments, disorderly debris” occurs first on in 1730, “probably from Middle English verb literen, “to provide with bedding” (late 14c.), … extended from the image of strewing straw.”[iv] Writing “In Defence of Litter,” Timothy Cooper defends the idea of litter in the modern sense as an early 20th century notion “as distinct from previous urban concerns with street-sweeping that can be traced back to every form of urban existence,” like the removal of dead dogs.[v] Instead, writes Cooper:
it was presumed that the “Litter Habit” was learnt by working people experiencing the new freedoms of public holidays and the pleasures of consumption, and who were unused to the ways of the countryside or careless to the civic well-being of towns.
I am not sure if that is really the case. Instead I suspect that the behavior has probably been constant through time. What has changed is what is discarded, and how we feel about it. The 20th century heralded the disposable packaging of products, be they for food, drinks, cigarettes, and so on. So even if people discarded things in the public space before then, the “unnaturalness” of what they threw away was not so salient.
As Emily Cockayne reports, citing the Old Bailey Session Papers in 1732, that citizens of London “needed to be reminded not to leave”:
Any Seacole ashes, Oyster-shells, bones, horns, tops of Turneps or Carrets, the shells or husks of any Peas or Beanes, nor any dead Dogs or Cats, offal of Beasts, or any other carion or putrid matter or thing, not any Ordue or Excrements of Mankind or Beast, nor any manner of Rubbish, Dust, Dirt, Soile, Filth, nor any other filthy or noisome thing whatsoever. [vi]
Not all obeyed. She reports that “[a]ccording to the burgesses of Westminster, butchers continually dumped the ‘soyle and filth of their Slaughter houses and hogsteys’ in the churchyard and nearby passage.”[vii] Meanwhile, “[t]he poorer citizen were also warned against splattering the contents of their [excrement] tubs on the bridge battlements.”[viii]
Along the Trail the litter stands out as out of place not just because of the material it is made out of, but because of the brashness of its colors, let alone the logos and print. After all, in an urban setting, nearly everything is unnatural, and much of it is full of brash colors and logos and print. Perhaps the more important change that took place in the 20th century was psychological. Maybe it is too pedantic to say that litter is not litter except insofar as we care about it; but at least this much is true, only to the extent that we care about it does it carry weight as a category of its own.
I live in La Jolla, California, no more than 25 miles from the border with Mexico. If La Jolla is relatively pristine and litter free, just across the border, Tijuana is the kind of city in which, at least in poor areas, vast expanses are coated with the detritus of urban life. Here the same litter you see on the Trail lies among much larger abandoned things: burnt out cars, rusted oil barrels, chunks of concrete, and large sheets of plastic. In this wasteland, the salience of the litter fades as it become subsumed into a larger framework of blight.
Of course, you can find the same blight you see in Tijuana in San Diego and across the United States, but its density, and prevalence, is much more of a common “Third Word” problem than you are likely to encounter in the developed world. Overwhelmed by such blight, it is easy to see why people who have to live with it day to day might be indifferent to the litter it includes. And if caring about it is a condition on litter carrying weight as a category of its own, then it isn’t even litter for them. But even if you reject this as overly psychologistic, it points to what may drive the psychology – litter only exists in the context of order and order is a luxury afforded by wealth. Moreover, this idea of order explains what makes litter different from advertising, even if they are equally gaudy and ugly. For the advertising is part of the order in terms of its place and presentation while, if anything constitutes disorder by being “out of place” in that context, it is litter.
But even if this sociological point is correct, it is not the whole story. We don’t think of littering as a behavior we do in our own private space that we control – it only exists outside the home in spaces we share with others. As such, its nature not only demands collective action to avoid litter, but is also vulnerable to outcomes that fail to reflect collective preferences. None of us may want there to be litter, but nonetheless it happens because of us, despite our own preferences. In all collective situations, we make ourselves vulnerable to exploitation by others. If I act for the collective good, will you as well? The altruists among us may not care, but for the rest of us, it rankles and prompts the thought that, if you don’t, then why should I? But even without this psychological barrier, there is a question about whether it is worth my acting if you don’t. Yet whether it is worth it is quite variable.
The matter is quite straightforward in a stable setting with agents who interact with each other on a repeated basis. Each has a chance to build up trust with the others such that if I don’t litter, you won’t. This is really an iterated version of game theory in which the players can’t (or in this case, don’t) communicate with each other. Each thinks that refraining from littering is only worth it if everyone refrains. Otherwise why bother? A half-littered field is not different enough from a fully littered field. What this means, from a game theory point of view, is that there are only two stable end points (or attractors) for the game – none of us litter or all of us litter. This conclusion deserves two caveats: a half-littered field may not be that different from a fully littered field, but a field with just one piece of litter may be different from both. In this case, if most of us don’t litter, we may tolerate a limited amount of littering by so-called free riders. Doing so allows partial compliance of non-littering to be stable as well. How much is an open question. In a pristine landscape, the first piece of litter, for me at least, extracts a very high price. And while the total disutility rises the more litter there is, the marginal cost of each additional piece declines very quickly. That is to say, once the pristine landscape is contaminated with any litter, more litter counts for less and indifference to even more quickly sets in. (Well, not quite, there is one complication to this picture. Litter research by Cialdini certainly reinforces the central idea here. “If you see a environment that is highly littered, you litter. If there is no litter, you are significantly less likely to litter.” But surprisingly, “If there is one piece, you are least likely to litter.” … “If you see one piece, it reminds you that most people are not littering here.”[ix] )
But things get more complicated without the assumption of stability. People hiking the Trail form communities on an annual basis. Even though they are not walking all together, those that start on the same day or so run into each other enough to create a stable group, along with the web presence created by each annual cohort of through hikers. And of course, beyond that, they are driven by a shared sense of commitment to keeping the trail “pristine” that makes them largely self-regulating. But for most of the rest of us, that is not the case. On any day on the trail, most people on it will be taking a short stroll – at least in places where access to it is easy and convenient. They will be strangers to each other and, walking at different times, may not even see each other. And even if they walk on the same section of the trail again and again, every time, they will do so with a new group of strangers.
If I drop a piece of litter on the trail, the next person, behind me, but out of my sight, will see it. She sees my litter and thinks, well, why not me too? And so it goes. Her littering is not going to affect me because I am in front of her. And the same is true for her. Those who litter behind her are not going to affect her. And so on. If we were the same group, that always hiked together, things might be different, especially if the order in which we hiked was random. The first to litter would have an incentive to avoid doing so to avoid seeing litter the next time he hiked, in case he was not at the head of the group that time.
But what about self-regulation? If those doing the through hike have it, why don’t we? Perhaps we should, but walk the trail near any trailhead and you will see that we don’t. Still, there is less litter on the Trail than elsewhere, and it bears wondering why. (Less, but far from none. A crew collected 530 pounds of trash along 720 miles of the Trail in 2016.) One reason has to do with our conception of the countryside in contrast to the city. To litter in the countryside is to contaminate what we imagine as pristine, however much it may, in fact, be a product of our own intervention. However much that may be, it is far from the totalizing transformation that we have achieved in urban settings. And this difference is important, for how we think of the countryside is very much a counterpart to how we think of the city, but that is not to say this relationship is stable.
In both Building the Dream and Moralism and the Model Home, Gwendolyn Wright provides a detailed social and cultural history of American domestic architecture, concentrating on the nineteenth century.[x] Beginning in about 1840, domestic, middle class architecture evolved from a distinct Puritan style into what we have come to know as the Victorian style. Victorian style itself was superseded in a slow transition to the modern home from the 1870’s to the second decade of the twentieth century. What is interesting is that each of these changes were not just a matter of change of architectural style, but they were also accompanied by a change in our view of the benevolence of the nature.
In New England colonial towns, a two-room house with loft bedrooms was common with a chimney dominating the interior space.[xi] For defensive reasons, the doors were strong and windows small and sparse:
[N]ature was not considered a gentle, inspiring force to be courted … The wall of the house was decidedly a barrier to the outside; there was no thought of continuity between the interior and exterior domain.[xii]
The change from this kind of housing to modern housing, via what we have come to know as Victorian style, can be characterized in a number of different ways. (What follows comes primarily from Wright’s Building the Dream.) In the period from about 1840 to 1910, changes in middle class housing coincided with changes in work patterns, home production, the organization of cities, as well as both notions of women and nature. In this process the construction of suburbs constituted a major event in the construction of culture, and while a transformation took place in the conception of nature from threat to benevolence, the openness and barrenness of grid development forced the housing itself to play nature’s role.
Writing about English society, Lenore Davidoff, Jean L’Esperance and Howard Newby remark on the construction of the rural idyll and its counter position to the “urban”:
It is a tribute to the endurance of this convention that even today, to many of us ‘rural’ has pleasant, reassuring connotations – beauty, order, simplicity, rest, grassroots democracy, peacefulness, Gemeinschaft. ‘Urban’ spells the opposite – ugliness, disorder, confusion, fatigue, compulsion, strife, Gesellschaft.[xiii]
Of course these associations are not unqualified with regard to all of nature. Davidoff et. al. are writing of the English countryside. But in the nineteenth century, in America too, nature became redefined in a counterpoint to the “urban.” At the same time, the development of manufacturing techniques, as well as distribution, made it possible for basic middle class housing to be built with extravagant embellishments. Ornate finishings, both inside and outside the house, could be ordered and added on to the basic structure. Ironically, economies of scale allowed for uniformities in production techniques which made it possible to produce variation in housing.[xiv] Variation allowed for irregularity in housing to be realized and irregularity became a metaphor for nature.[xv]
Home then was more than the physical locus of retreat from the world of capital and production. It became part of the dominant metaphor of nature, in contrast with that world:
… the natural home was to have the appearance of having grown up out of the Earth’s rugged and varied materials. Materials for the facade were chosen and put together in a way that was, in theory, imitative of nature’s complex juxtaposition of color and texture.[xvi]
However we view the countryside relative to the city, another determinate of littering cross cuts this distinction: whether we treat a space as something in which we have shared ownership. A sense of collective ownership creates two drivers that diminish littering. The first is purely individual. Collective ownership effaces the distinction between private space and public space, and allows for attitude toward the first to bleed over into the second. But it does something else as well. A shared sense of ownership creates a shared presumptive right that we are entitled to regulate each other – for after all it is our space. That the presumptive right is shared is important here, for if I see you litter, I will be more inclined to remonstrate with you if I can assume that you see it as my right to do so. That said, the idea of this social interaction is naive in its assumptions.
I grew up on a street in London with a split personality. Our side of the street, six-bedroom prewar houses exuded smug upper middle-class confidence. But the same houses on the other side of the street had given way to a large post war estate made up of eight six-story blocs of council flats. Occasionally litter would blow from “their” side of the street to “ours”. One of my most vivid childhood memories is watching my father pick up litter on “our” side of the street, only take it across the street to dump it on “their side”. His behavior struck me then, as it still does today, as profoundly mean-spirited. Mean-spirited because he could have just as easily put the litter in our garbage can as dump it across the street. What did his act signify to him? Because he lacked at sense of a shared space with our neighbors, he took “their” litter to be a contamination of what he took to be “his” space. To put it in his garbage can might be enough to undo the contamination. But to do that would not allow him to express his sense of outrage for what I think he took to be a violation of what he wanted to see as a regime of separation that would allow him to ignore their existence. And when the presence of litter prevented him doing that, dumping the litter on their side, allowed him to express his contempt for them.
I am stopped at a light and the driver next to me unwraps a pack of cigarettes and throws the cellophane wrapper out of his window. He wants to keep his car clean and tidy. He notices me watching him and gives me a brazen look as if to dare me. “What’s your problem?” it seems to say. I feel intimidated. Teenagers walking ahead of me eating candy throw the wrappers on the ground. I am tempted to pick them up and run after them. “Excuse me, you dropped this,” as if pretending to be helpful reuniting them with something of theirs they lost. But the idea that this charade will make them feel ashamed gives way to fear that they will threaten me.
In Germany, people don’t cross intersections on foot against a light, even if there is no traffic in sight. They obey the rules. But what is more, if you don’t respect the rules they cluck at you. They treat it as their business to bring you into line. For all I know they do the same when it comes to littering. But not here in the U.S.. People here are indifferent if you choose to cross an intersection while they wait for the light to change. We treat your choice as none of our business. But littering is our business, and yet here too we remain silent. Is it because we, like me, are intimidated or afraid? That may be part of it. But I think there is more to it than that. Even though the public space is just that, public, we don’t fully embrace that that is what it is. Instead we treat it as if it is a sort of no man’s land.
Well, but whose land is it anyway? “My land, your land,” says Woody Guthrie. Of course he meant it belongs to the people as opposed to the bosses, but the words have always carried a cavalier disregard, not just for the rights native peoples, but the idea of land as something not to be possessed in the first place, even if that possession is collective. Can public space be public without this idea of collective possession? Can I assert the right to remonstrate with you, when you litter in public, without leaning on the idea that the space is mine as well as yours, so I can have a say in what you do to it?
I was sitting in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem when a nun came up to me and dressed me down for, I am not sure what. I may have been slouching on a bench. Or even napping. Whatever it was, she considered it inappropriate behavior in that setting. She took the appropriate behavior in that setting to be, if not awe, respect. Of course, to her at least, the setting was not hers or mine, not ours, but God’s. And if respect was owed, it was respect to God.
I suppose that if you think that nature is God’s creation, we can think of our right to regulate others in his creation in the same way. Like the nun, our responsibility is to regulate each other, not because we share ownership of nature but, out of respect for he who created it. But what if I eschew reliance on God in this argument? Is there another way I can get to the same conclusion without relying on Woody Guthrie instead? Even if the land is not “my” land as much as it is “your” land, don’t I have a right that it not be littered, and hence don’t you have a duty not to litter it? But why do I have this right? Where does it come from? A well-known philosophers’ slogan is that rights are the conclusions of arguments, not part of their premises. To claim a right you need an argument to support it. Here is an argument you might think you could deploy to that end.
Imagine a society of solitary family units. Each hunts and gathers in their own space. And imagine that, because they live in a land of plenty, a garden of Eden, they want for nothing beyond what is in their own space. All is copacetic until they are expelled from Eden. Suddenly resources are scare, including space. People begin to live cheek by jowl, and in doing so they are forced to interact and even, perhaps, realize the value of cooperative action as a way to better all of their interests. As they do so, they come to realize that some shared rules of conduct are in all of their interests. In particular, everyone realizes that they want to maximize their individual freedom (be it of movement or speech) and they realize that they can only do so if they recognize it as an interest of everyone else. Hence they all realize that it is in their interest to recognize a duty of non-interference toward each other – even if the duty is constrained by the principle that your freedom is to be respected to the degree that it is consistent with the same degree of freedom for others.
So far there has been no talk of rights in my story. But a second slogan well-known slogan of philosophers is that rights and duties go hand in hand. They may be correlative, but in my story it is duties toward each other that generate the rights not the other way around. On this picture then, the reason I have a right for you not to litter because you have a duty not to litter. So far so good. But how does your duty not to litter constitute a duty of non-interference? That may seem too obvious to need argument – does it not interfere with my right to a litter free environment. But that begs the question. We were trying to explain why I have that right so we can’t rely on it here.
What if you want to litter and I don’t? What if you don’t care about litter and I do? Why should my wants trump yours? The mutuality of non-interference of actions, like freedom of movement, rests on the idea that this is a want we both share, but our exercise of it without restraint is not possible. We will each end up standing on each others toes. So we accept a limit on our freedom of movement to the extent that we would otherwise interfere with the freedom of movement of someone else. Nor do our wants have to be identical for mutual restraint to be in our interest. On the beach you want to listen to jazz on your boombox and I want to listen to gospel. You want to throw a Frisbee and I want to fly a kite. Mutual interest drives cooperation in the most mundane of settings.
But what happens when your wants and my wants are simply incompatible? I want to meditate in silence on the beach and you want to party with your friends. Now there is an asymmetry. Your actions interfere with your meditation, but not the other way around, unless I browbeat you into silence. Now one option here is to order our preferencesand say, silence should take precedence over partying, because, well why? Perhaps you will say silence is more natural, or a rowdy party is an intrusion on nature and so on and so forth. But this looks like differences in taste parading as moral values. And as with rowdy parties, so too with litter.
Instead, maybe it is plausible to think of mutuality not as a content specific relationship but a general rule of thumb that guides our actions. Today my action is incompatible with yours even though yours is not incompatible with mine. But tomorrow the tables may well be turned. And the day after, our actions may be mutually incompatible.
Still, what if I litter where I know others will never go – the thought experiment I broached earlier. I called that an act of desecration. If that is right, how is it captured by a principle of non-interference? I think the answer lies in asking what gives nature the standing that it can be the object of desecration in the first place. The easy answer here is to defend the idea that only we can give something such standing. That nothing has such standing in and of itself. I say that is an easy answer, but it is also a discomforting one. For what it does is render the value of nature as dependent on us, on its value to us. And we know that that can’t end well.
[ii] http://www.dispatch.com/content/blogs/theatre-talk/2015/04/david-sedaris-qa.html
[iv] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=litter
[v] https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/historyenvironmentfuture/category/litter/
[vi] Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: filth, noise and stench in England, 1600-1770 New Haven: Yale, 2007, p. 186.
[vii] Hubbub: filth, noise and stench in England, 1600-1770, p.189.
[viii] Hubbub: filth, noise and stench in England, 1600-1770, p.189.
[ix] Vivian Wagner, “Littering and Following the Crowd”, The Atlantic, Aug 1st 2014.
[x] G.Wright, Moralism and the Model Home, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980, and Building the Dream, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.
[xi] Building the Dream, p. 10.
[xii] Building the Dream, p.12.
[xiii] L.Davidoff, J.L’Esperance and H.Newby, “Landscape with Figures: Home and Community in English Society”, in A.Oakley and J.Mitchell (eds.), The Rights and Wrongs of Women, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, p.149.
[xiv] Building the Dream, p.100-102.
[xv] Moralism and the Model Home, pp.26-29.
[xvi] Moralism and the Model Home, p.28.