Historically, critics of capitalism have had a great deal to say about the defects and social ills that afflict capitalist society and correspondingly little to say about how alternative institutional arrangements might solve these problems. One can only speculate about why this has been so. One reason might be a simple matter of priorities. Bertolt Brecht once said that when a man's house is on fire, one does not inquire too closely into alternative arrangements for shelter. The analogy between capitalism and a burning house may seem overwrought today, but in the dark days of the Depression of the 1930s it probably seemed more apt. Another explanation for the scant attention paid to alternatives to capitalism has to do with both the factual and ideological beliefs of capitalism's critics. If one believes (as, for example, Marx and Engels did) that the existing order would be destroyed by a mass movement, that new institutions would be constructed by the people in a democratic spirit, and that furthermore all of this would be a good thing, it would be unwise and counterproductive to try to spell out exactly where history is headed. After all, a genuine mass movement has little use for self-proclaimed prophets of history. Finally, men and women of modest intellectual pretensions might be humbled by the prospects of trying to spell out in any detail social institutions that should exist or might exist but are not as yet found anywhere in the world.

We have long been accustomed to thinking of democracy as a major selling point of Western institutions. That a set of political institutions should be democratic is widely regarded as the sine qua non of their legitimacy. So widespread is this belief that even those whose institutions do not look very democratic to us nevertheless insist on proclaiming them to be such (though the number taking this gambit dropped dramatically around the end of 1989). Meanwhile, an adulatory attitude toward democracy has arisen in many quarters, and many theorists have taken up anew the idea that if democracy is the way to go in political institutions, then it must also be the way to go in “other” areas, notably in economic and social institutions. So there has arisen a call for “economic democracy” — which is taken to mean, especially, that the “means of production” should be managed by their constituent workers in concert rather than by some few who own, or act for the owners of, those enterprises. Robert Dahl, in his influential Preface to Economic Democracy, sums it up nicely when he proclaims a “stronger justification” for worker participation: “If democracy is justified in governing the state, then it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises; and to say that it is not justified in governing economic enterprises is to imply that it is not justified in governing the state.”

Suppose you are on a commercial airplane that is flying at 35,000 feet. Next to you sits a man who appears to be sleeping. In fact, this man has been drugged and put upon the plane without his knowledge or consent. He has never flown on a plane before and, indeed, has no idea what an airplane is. Suddenly the man awakes and looks around him. Terrified by the alien environment in which he finds himself, he searches for a door or window from which to make an escape. As luck would have it, he is seated right next to a window exit and he begins to pull the handle that will open the window. You are aware that opening the window exit at this altitude will cause the cabin to quickly depressurize and that this man, you, and probably several other passengers will be sucked out the window to your deaths. You desperately want to stop him from opening the window. Now assume that for some reason it is impossible to prevent him physically from performing the deadly act. Your only option is to rationally persuade him to leave the window exit alone. You cry out to him and, with both hands on the handles, he turns to face you and waits to hear what you have to say. What sort of argument would you make?

In ordinary circumstances, human actions have a myriad of unintended and often unforeseen consequences for the lives of other people. Problems of pollution are serious examples, but spillovers and side effects are the rule, not the exception. Who knows what consequences this essay may have?

This essay is concerned with the problems of justice created by spillovers. After characterizing such spillovers more precisely and relating the concept to the economist's notion of an externality, I shall then consider the moral conclusions concerning spillovers that issue from a natural rights perspective and from the perspective of welfare economics supplemented with theories of distributive justice. I shall argue that these perspectives go badly awry in taking spillovers to be the exception rather than the rule in human interactions.

I. Externalities

Economists have discussed spillovers under the heading of “externalities.” To say this is not very helpful, since there is so much disagreement concerning both the definition and significance of externalities.

At present, Third World countries owe over one trillion dollars to the developed Western nations; much of the debt is held by the leading international commercial banks. The debt of six Latin American countries alone — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela — is over $330 billion, of which $240 billion is owed to commercial banks. Let us immediately narrow our focus to loans made by the major international commercial banks to Third World governments. We shall not be concerned with government-to-government loans, or private-party-to-private-party loans, or with debt owed to the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. The bank-to-government loans — the so-called “sovereign loans” — are the most economically troublesome and morally interesting. The largest lenders, at least with respect to the Latin American countries, are the American banks Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Bank of America, Manufacturers Hanover, and Chemical Bank. About fifteen Third World countries have serious debt problems, including the largest: Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.

The existence of a meaningful distinction between economic rights and “other rights” has been a cornerstone of constitutional law for the past sixty years. During this period, the federal courts consistently have taken the position that Congress is free to abuse citizens’ economic liberties, but is not permitted to interfere with such other, noneconomic “rights” as freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.

David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement is an impressive — indeed, daunting — exercise in contractarian moral and political philosophy. The primary purpose of his treatise is to explicate practical rationality as constrained maximization and morality as compliance with these constraints. Gauthier offers an account of which constraints on straightforward utility maximization each rational individual will be prepared to accept and comply with on the condition that other individuals also will accept and comply with them as well as an explanation of why compliance with those constraints counts as morality. However, although Morals by Agreement is in the great tradition of Hobbesian moral and political theorizing, Gauthier's morality by agreement does not begin with the Hobbesian state of nature. Gauthier does not start by envisioning a Hobbesian war of all against all which has been generated by rational individuals, each pursuing his own maximum utility, and then asking what constraints on this no-holds-barred utility maximization would be mutually advantageous and therefore mutually rational.

In contemporary market societies, the laws (generally speaking) do not place individuals under enforceable obligations to aid others. Perhaps the most striking exception to this broad generalization is the practice of conscription of able-bodied males into military service, particularly in time of war. Another notable exception is the legal enforcement in some contemporary societies of “Good Samaritan” obligations — obligations to provide temporary aid to victims of emergencies, such as car accident victims. The obligation applies to those who are in the immediate vicinity of the emergency and who can supply aid of great value to the victim at small risk and tolerable cost to themselves. The fact that not all contemporary societies have enacted such Good Samaritan laws underscores the point that the general rule is that individuals are under no legal obligation to help others. According to some moral views, this legal situation approximately accords with the moral fact that persons who have not voluntarily incurred obligations to aid others should not be coerced into tendering such aid. Moreover, it is worth noting that these two prominent exceptions to the tendency of legal systems to eschew enforcement of positive obligations to aid others are plausibly in everyone's ex ante interest and not notably redistributive in intent.

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads as follows: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.” I shall refer to the right postulated here as “the right to an adequate standard of living” or “The Right.”

It is, perhaps, a propitious time to discuss the economic rights of disabled persons. In recent years, the media in the United States have re-ported on such notable events as: students at the nation's only college for the deaf stage a successful protest campaign to have a deaf individual ap-pointed president of their institution; a book by a disabled British physicist on the origins of the universe becomes a best seller; a pitcher with only one arm has a successful rookie season in major league baseball; a motion-picture actor wins an Oscar for his portrayal of a wheelchair-bound person, beating out another nominee playing another wheelchair-bound person; a cancer patient wins an Olympic gold medal in wrestling; a paralyzed mother trains her children to accept discipline by inserting their hands in her mouth to be gently bitten when punishment is due; and a paraplegic rock climber scales the sheer four-thousand-foot wall of Yosemite Valley's El Capitan. Most significantly, in 1990, the United States Congress passed an important bill – the Americans with Disabili-ties Act – extending to disabled people employment and access-related protections afforded to members of other disadvantaged groups by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

All advanced societies maintain a commitment to equal educational opportunity, which they claim to implement through a public school system that is charged toprovide all children with an education up to a state-enforced standard. Indeed, what public schools do, even in the best of circumstances, is to provide all children with a more or less equal exposure to educational inputs (teachers, books), rather than to guarantee them equal educational attainment. Children, as the schools receive them, differ markedly in their docility — due in part to innate ability, but perhaps due more to the economic status and cultural practices of their families. Many, including myself, believe that the task of schools should be to provide some measure of equal educational attainment among students of heterogeneous talent and background. Schools should devote more educational resources to students who require them in order that they be educated to an acceptable standard.