I wish I had something really interesting to say about waste, but my brain is tired from writing term papers right now.

I wonder if you’ve heard of this organization? http://freegan.info/
They have a unique waste-related philosophy and are actually living it. See especially the section on “Freegan Activities and Practices.”

Best,
Pam

All of that aside, here is the cite for a paper I just finished. It’s not on Locke, but it is on waste:

McCaffery, Edward J. “Must We Have the Right to Waste?” in New Essays in the Legal and Political Theory of Property, ed. Stephen R. Munzer. Cambridge: CUP, 2001, 76-105.

Basically, he says that modern, bundle-of-rights theories always include a right to waste/destroy one’s property. But this doesn’t make sense, and isn’t ultimately justifiable (he advocates a consumption tax to discourage it). To prove the point, he distinguishes a couple of kinds of waste: dissipatory (the object loses value) and nonurgent consumption (LeBron James’ house). Modern property systems do a good job of preventing dissipatory waste by (essentially) making property rights permanent: since my property passes to my estate, I have an incentive to use it well; if it ceased on my death, I’d have an incentive to use it up. However, the same move - giving me plenary rights over my property - practically invites nonurgent consumption (if I had to hold the property in trust for some future owner of it, I wouldn’t be able to spend it frivolously). So solving the problem with one kind of waste worsens the problem with the other.

Anyway, it’s a pretty interesting paper, and it gives some great policies to toss in front of one’s classes: ban the estate tax, but have a heavy tax on all income not saved.

What a pleasant surprise to discover this thread! I’m actually nearing completion of a long-ish paper on intellectual property law that tries to use Locke’s waste proviso to mobilize Locke against strong IP claims (rather, than is customary, to say that he’d be in favor). I end up arguing that waste can be conceptualized as production that cannot, in principle, be used to satisfy demand. Since Locke pretty clearly thinks that there is almost always going to be demand for goods, this works out to be a proviso with some teeth. Thus, three conditions for waste: (a) there is irrevocably unmet demand, (b) the goods to satisfy that demand already exist, and (c) property claims prevent satisfaction of those demands.

For example, if a patent rights holder refuses to sell its AIDS anti-retroviral medicine to at a rate that people in developing countries can afford, and people die as a result, then there’s a Lockean claim with waste. Put slightly differently, and perhaps a little crudely, when Locke talks about hoarded apples spoiling, the problem is that the product loses value before it can be utilized. If people die because IP rights holders hoard their product, then the situation is analogous. More generally, anticommons scenarios, like the patent law literature talks about, would also seem to be candidates.

With any luck, I’ll be able to have my paper up on ssrn in a few weeks, if that line of argument strikes you as interesting or useful. In the meantime, there’s a law review paper that makes some headway in this direction:

Benjamin G. Damstedt, “Limiting Locke: A Natural Law Justification for the Fair Use Doctrine,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2003), 1179-1221 (arguing that the spoilage proviso mandates the need for a strong fair use right).

Thanks to everyone who has posted references to other articles…

Matt’s earlier point about objective vs. subjective wants should have been a dead giveaway, but I can’t see how you can avoid taking a position on whether what does the normative heavy lifting is satisfaction of desire, or pleasure, or some objective list of goods, or eudaimonia, or what have you. It seems to me that different positions on those questions might well not only generate different judgments as to waste, but different accounts of the wrongfulness of waste, since they usually carry with them substantially different justificatory considerations, which surely will bear on the waste issue.

I think you have your hands full, Bucky, but for that very reason it’s worth doing.

Some excesses simply seem to me to be morally wrong. Not all, I think–unlike Simon. I’ve been sloppy with the examples I’ve chosen–in part because I don’t have a position about this yet. I can say that although it may bother me, I am less bothered by some athlete having a 2 story closet (or “a $3000 dress or suit [worn] only once before buying another”) than I am by cultivated crops going to waste merely because the (presumed) owner of the land enjoys watching them rot. To take a simple example: if Sam has an apple orchard and decides to let the apples fall to the ground and rot, I think he does something (at least) morally problematic if he prevents passers-by from picking up and eating some apples before they rot. (I am inclined to think Locke would also be bothered by such cases, but as I said, I am not concerned with that claim). There is, I think, some connection to need here, but what it is I am unsure of (if no one has any need for the apples, Sam is less bad, I think). It may be that the most I can legitimately say is that Sam is suberogatory (whether there be someone whose need for sustenance is being thwarted by him or not). Even that, though, needs defending and I want to see if I can defend it–or a stronger negative moral assessment.

Mark’s points about needing to consider the institutional backgrounds strike me as important. I think, though, that before I can say anything about that, I need to know what counts as waste. Were Native Americans really wasting (as I think Locke claimed) the land before European settlers? Does that justify the Europeans taking the land? To answer such questions we need to know what waste is.

I suppose I should note to all that what Simon has hinted at is true: I am, more or less, a libertarian (of some sort anyway). I believe that the poor people in private property systems are generally better off than the poor in other sorts of systems. And I do think that in such systems wealth inequality is inevitable. And I am OK with all of that. This may seem completely inconsistent with my worry about waste. Perhaps it is, but I am not yet convinced.

I think I’ve had my intuitions about waste as long as I’ve had intuitions about the importance of private property and the need for limited government. I want to see if they are compatible–and if so, how. Perhaps this is a dangerous path for me to take: perhaps I’ll end up determining that waste is morally unacceptable and incompatible with the sort of political system I have long endorsed. If so, I will have to revise the latter. But first, I need to see where the arguments take me. I am now–thanks to all of this discussion–even more eager to work on this paper than I was before. So, thanks!

Now, my egalitarian impulses lead me to have all kinds of problems with this (the whole discussion leaves me crying out for Veblen, if not Marx) but I don’t really think excess as waste is a problem for Locke.

I’ve also long thought that Money offers a conceptual solution for the Waste problem, even if waste will still exist. I’m going to eat no more than one of the four pears in my kitchen that are about to turn, but that doesn’t mean the creation of money has failed and you can all barge in and start eating pears without my permission. Money provides a conceptual solution through it’s permanence and with the existence of markets, and I’ve always understood Locke to think that’s good enough. If there’s some residual waste in a commercial society, I don’t think that necessarily works against him.

OK: Waste and need seem to be related in some inverse way. But not everything we use but don’t need is wasted. I’d say:
1a. I can waste things I need (stupidly; I can die soon thereafter wasting them). So also: 1b. I can need things I (or someone else) wastes.
But:
2a. I can waste things I don’t need (destroying the umpteenth car in my collection for fun). So also: 2b. it may be that no one needs what I waste.
Indeed,
3a. There are also things we have that no one needs and that don’t seem like a waste: Picasso paintings, for example. I also think 3b. there are things we have that no one needs that are a waste: $150 running shoes, for example (esp. when its shown that they don’t help as much as less expensive variants).

A thing’s being needed (by someone) won’t be a necessary nor a sufficient condition for its (possibly) being wasted.

I think, by the way, that Mark is right about (simple) utilitarians and waste. But I can’t endorse that view. Morality is a messy business; theories that make it seem neat and clean are usually wrong. So, I also think Mark is right that a conception of waste that does normatively interesting work is going to be tough to specify and to defend.

Sorry its taken me a long while to add anything here. That is, though, the beauty of a group blog–there has been quite a lot of activity! So…

First: thanks to Ari and Matt for those references!

Next: Simon–yes, this may have anti-libertarian sorts of implications. I’m more inclined (as you might expect) to think it will push me toward a left-libertarian sort of view (I rather like Otsuka’s libertarianism, for example). Still, you might be right: it may be “something you really oughta kinda not do” (I’d prefer to say, following Driver, “suberogatory”) rather then property-limiting. In any case, I want to see where the arguments lead. I’ve had strong intuitions about waste for as long as I’ve had libertarian inclinations (which, so far as I can tell, is since I could think).

And Next: I think Matt’s response to Mark is right. Surely not everything we use but don’t need is waste.

It will probably be a while before I have anything too exciting to say about the topic, but this helped a bit, so thanks!

This leaves it an open question whether we should understand the importance of a want in a subjective or objective sense. LeBron might really really want the two-story closet. Most of us probably think he won’t really get as much pleasure from it as he thinks he will, and this might be part of our intuition that it is a wasteful expense. But one could grant that he’ll continue to receive satisfaction from the closet for a long time and still hold that this satisfaction isn’t enough to make the want-satisfaction important enough to count as non-wasteful. It’s an objectively unimportant want, even if it’s of tremendous subjective importance to him.

I’m not endorsing that position, mind you. Just pointing out that there’s both room for and a need for a bit of complexity in the solution to this problem.