ABSTRACT
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Environmental Justice
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the following case. Let us imagine one world exceedingly beautiful. Imagine it as beautiful as you can; put into it whatever on this earth
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you most admire-mountains, rivers, the sea, trees, and sunsets, stars and moon. Imagine these all combined in the most exquisite proportions so that no one thing jars against another but each contributes to increase the beauty of the whole. And then imagine the ugliest world you can possibly conceive. Imagine it simply one heap of filth, containing everything that is most disgusting to us, for whatever reason, and the whole, as far as maybe, without one redeeming feature. Such a pair of worlds we are entitled to compare: they fall within Prof. Sidgwick's meaning, and the comparison is highly relevant to it. The only thing we are not entitled to imagine is that any human being ever has or ever, by any possibility, can, live in either, can ever see and enjoy the beauty of the one or hate the foulness of the other. Well, even so, supposing them quite apart from any possible contemplation by human beings; still, is it irrational to hold that it is better that the beautiful world should exist, than the one that is ugly?lO
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Environmental Justice
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1. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), ch. 5. Mill defines justice as equivalent to the performance of 'duties of perfect obligation', which presupposes 'a wrong done, and some assignable person who is wronged' (p. 47). This is close to my wide conception of justice (see below) in that it rules out obligations to non-human animals and obligations to 'nature'. However, the requirement that there should be assignable persons who are wronged would rule out the possibility of behaving unjustly with respect to future generations, since they can scarcely be regarded as assignable.
