The Chapman imperative:
act as if you were going to live to be five billion years old

Dr David Chapman

David Chapman has come up with a Kantian-style ethical imperative for the late twentieth century, as detailed in the following extracts from his comments on the Pearce Report ('Blueprint for a Green Economy' by David Pearce, Anil Markanya and Edward Barbier, published by Earthscan Publications Ltd, 1989, L6-95).

Pearce favours taxes on non-renewable resources, and gives a formula for deciding what these taxes should be. The formula implicitly accepts that we should use up all of a given resource, and then move on to use up some substitute which is less convenient to use or more expensive to extract. Therefore the only questions to be answered are: how slowly should we use up the resource, so as to delay the eventual cost of having to change over to the worse substitute, and what level of tax would get it used up at this rate?

'We should therefore use up resources as we would if each of us were expecting individually to live (in averagely good health, etc) for 5 billion years'

However, I think that a different approach needs considering - that of fair shares between the generations. We should decide what would be a fair share of the reserves of each resource for us to use, and what should be the share for future generations, and levy a tax high enough to get our consumption down to this amount. In deciding what our share should be, we should bear in mind that it will be possible for human beings to exist on this planet (providing we do not destroy it) for about another five billion years. We should therefore use up resources as we would if each of us were expecting individually to live (in averagely good health, etc) for five billion years.

However, this does not mean that we should use up only one five-billionth of the reserves each year, for several reasons: much greater reserves might be discovered in future; substitutes might be discovered, or new production methods or styles of life which do not need the resource at all; also, much more efficient ways of recycling the resource might be discovered, so that less is needed. But it is clear that with this approach:

(a) We should use up resources much more slowly than we do now, or than we would with Pearce's formula;

(b) We should have a much higher resource tax, one sufficient to get our consumption down to this desired level; and

(c) It would be most effective to tackle this problem on an international basis, seeking global agreement on minimum resource taxes of the appropriate level.

David Chapman, Democracy Design Forum, Coles Centre, Buxhall, Stowmarket, Suffolk IP14 3EB (tel 0449 736 223).

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