Waste, again

Isn’t that just the same normative element repeated twice? Whether it’s “under-usage” depends on how much it should be used. (So the analysis might be reworded simply: “Using something less than one should.”)

That definition seems plausible to me. All I have to offer is the following consideration. So for the dress case, I’m assuming we could describe the wasteful situation in this way: “the heiress’s under-usage of something the heiress should use.” And that seems true. But, further, it might be that what makes an act wasteful is that the resources in question were under-used by you and someone/anyone else (e.g., “you should clean your plate, there are starving children in China”). So the definition as stated might not quite capture that, if the “we” refers to each person individually. I’m trying to think of a case where there is something that is of literally no use to anyone else but you don’t use it, to test the concept of waste. Maybe you have a drug that has been formulated to work only with your DNA for curing you of a disease no one else has. You don’t take any and throw it away. This is presumably “the under-usage of something you should use.” Would we naturally say you “wasted” the drug? If so, is that “waste” in the same way that the heiress has wasted money or clothing that could have been put to good use by someone else?

If I leave the kitchen tap running 24/7 because I find the sound of running water mildly aesthetically pleasing when I enter the kitchen,* am I under-using something I should use or over-using something I shouldn’t use for that sort of purpose?

[*I owe this example to someone other than Deval Patrick.]

First time poster, yada yada. Some thoughts, if that’s what you’re looking for:

1. I wonder how it could be that we could under-use something of which we are in possession. When she buys the dress, are you suggesting that she buys not an item (to do with as she sees fit), but rather the right to employ that item in previously-agreed-upon ways.

2. What if the heiress pays $3000 for the dress MISTAKENLY? Say it’s worth $1, but she messes up and pays $3000 (think emperor’s new clothes)–did she waste the $3000, or did she waste the dress?

3. If the former (she wasted the money), then you open yourself up to all sorts of questions about monetary value, as opposed to focusing on, say, raw materials and their availability or something.

4. And what if the dress is ugly? What if it gets stained? What is it’s for Halloween, say, and the $3000 is going specifically towards that evening’s experience?

5. What about over-usage? Say I get a shirt from Salvation Army for $1, and I wear it 100 times, and it was already worn 100 times–that shirt’s been overused, right? If we’re going to make normative claims about this, then is over-use as bad as under-use? How could it not be? “Waste” sounds bad, but why couldn’t we call over-use “abuse” or something like that?

I do under-use all the running water, perhaps, but I don’t know if it is running water that I should use in some other way. Rather, I should have used only a small portion of it to fill the kettle, make the soup, shower, etc.

Andrew, it seems to me that the process of “going normative” on the concept of waste (in the ways you have and are under pressure to do more) is appropriate and inevitable. But I wonder about what it says for the conceptual role for waste. My impression was that you were thinking it could be used as a tool to afford normative leverage on e.g. arguments pertaining to appropriation, ownership, distribution, etc. But the richer the normative resources required to go into it, the less leverage it affords, and the more it needs. In other words (and to switch metaphors), I’m concerned that it is going to turn out to be downstream of those important issue, rather than upstream of them, where it could do some good. Do you think those worries can be headed off?

Perhaps you could say that waste occurs when the under-use of something that should be used is caused. Thus, in the running water case, I am causing the under-use of a resource by other people, i.e. they’re not getting to use the water I am wasting. It’s not that I am under-using it myself, although I’m the one doing the wasting. So the wasting is the causing of the under-use rather than the under-use itself. Usually the person doing the causing is also the person actually under-using, as when you don’t eat your vegetables, but I don’t suppose this is always the case.

I’m wondering about the “should use” condition too. Can it be the case that we can waste a resource by causing its under-use, when that resource could have been used to good effect, even if it is not the case that it should have been used to that effect? Or, slightly differently, can you know that you are wasting X when you don’t know whether there is any use one should make of X, but you do know that there might be a use one should make of it?

I feel like the under-use formulation is missing part of the point, and maybe our ordinary language notion of waste is really capturing (intuitively) two different concepts. Let’s call them “destruction” and “hoarding.” (The sense of the distinction should need no explanation.)

Making that distinction gives us a good way to make sense of, e.g., how Locke handles his proviso — why is it not wasteful to hold on to money, but it is wasteful to hold on to the products of land? Well, Locke says, because the latter rots and the former doesn’t. So we’re concerned about destruction not hoarding in that case.

But perhaps in other kinds of cases we’re really concerned about hoarding. Suppose our society is on a small island, and I buy, fence off, and leave fallow fully 99% of the land. I’m not *destroying* the land — it doesn’t rot (neither does the $3000 dress, for that matter), but I am failing to make any use of it in what seems like an objectionable manner.

It might be that we can analyze this sort of case to death until it all collapses back to one dimension — for example, perhaps when I’m letting the land lie fallow, I’m not just hoarding it, but I’m also failing to create the housing or food that could come from it over that time — I’m destroying its potential. Or perhaps the dress is depreciating, or falling apart such that I’m wasting its use for others (by the time I die, it’ll be full of moth holes, so I’ve destroyed its usable life). (That last is perhaps usefully captured by Simon’s causation tweak.) But do we really want to make that kind of convoluted move?

Another distinction that might be useful is between waste that violates a duty to oneself and waste that violates a duty to others. The paradigm case of the former might be failing to develop your talents, and the latter, probably Locke. That might give a little more traction on the $3000.00 dress — would we be concerned that I flushed my money down the toilet, or that I competed in the marketplace for the dress, raising the price of similar dresses (and material, and the tailor’s time, etc.) by some epsilon, leading the marginal other buyer to have to settle for a lesser dress, etc.?

I could cause other people to under-use water they should have to use by doing something other than wasting it, e.g. by using more than my fair share of water to wash dishes, irrigate the hydrangeas, etc. This doesn’t strike me as wasteful if other people are just going to use the water to wash their dishes, irrigate their hydrangeas, etc.

We may be back to misuse then. Perhaps: “to waste X is to cause X not to be used for any purpose it should be used for”? I think this would cover both the cases of destruction and hoarding Paul distinguishes. But it’s still very gappy.

I agree that “waste” is normative. I am lead to something like the following, which brings in part of Andrew’s conception but adds to it:

X is wasted when it is possible to rightfully use X to achieve some adequate amount of goodness and X is not being so used.

This definition needs an account of “rightful use” and a specification of “adequate amount of goodness,” and thus is subject to the kinds of concerns raised by Mark LeBar, above. It is doubly normative (on authorization to use X and the goodness threshold for avoiding waste), but in a way different from Andrew’s definition.

The reason I think we need the “rightful use” bit is that it seems that something cannot be wasted if is wrong to use it. We could imagine someone saying that nearly all the trees deep in the Amazon are being wasted—after all, no one is putting them to any use whatsoever. But if it has been decided that no one has the right to put the trees to use, my conception of waste lets us say, as I think most of us would want to, that the trees are not being wasted.

Here’s another consideration in favor of the rightful use part. Suppose we cash out “adequate goodness” as a percentage of possible goodness (we might use the same method for figuring out “under use” on other’s definitions). We might set this at say, 50%. That is, if X is being put to use in a way such that it produces less than half the goodness it is capable of producing, then X is being wasted. Now suppose Person A owns X, and that X has the capacity to cause 10 units of goodness for Person A. Suppose further that Person A is making full use of X; she’s getting all 10 units of goodness out of it. Of course, there are other persons in the world, and we can imagine that X would have the capacity to cause 30 units of goodness for Person B, were X to be transferred from A to B. With only the “adequate goodness” part of the definition, X is being wasted. But I think most of us would want to deny this. Most of us would want to say that X is not being wasted (and certainly that A is not wasting X—though that is a different point). This suggests, I think, that something like “rightful use” is part of our concept of waste.

I think Justin is right that the use of X needs to be permissible in some way. That suggests the original formulation may have been wrongly phrased in terms of something we should use. We can, I think, waste things that we could use.

Also, I’m not sure what the larger project is, but I do share Mark’s worry that this normative definition may be doing the work. It’ll become trivially true, for example, that you ought not to waste anything - the dispute will be over whether any particular usage qualifies as waste.

Not to go back on my earlier worries, but Paul’s post suggested to me the idea that maybe we can find the common thread to both destruction and hoarding (as well, perhaps, as problematic over-use and under-use) by thinking somehow of the opportunity cost of a use. Maybe waste occurs simply when these costs are out of whack (an exercise left for the reader is how to quantify that). The dress is wasteful when one considers, not the usage of the dress itself, but the opportunity cost of that deployment of $3000. The running water has opportunity costs both for me (I could be using it for some constructive purpose) and for others (if I shut off the tap, that water would be available to others, so I’m imposing an opportunity cost on them). If everything landed jelly-side up, that would be a tidy way of synthesizing the intuitive problems involved in both these worries.

One other nice thing about thinking about things in terms of opportunity costs: it makes clear how concerns about waste are to some degree orthogonal to claims about property rights. You might even think about property rights as ways of insulating ourselves from having the goods we work on and need immune from distribution according to opportunity cost. If (per impossible) we were to have the latter, we’d have very difficult conditions in which to act on the world. So property rights play a part in securing agency precisely against some regime of minimizing opportunity costs. But then, perhaps, when that insulation is too effective (as in the cases we’ve been considering), the costs imposed on others start bothering us, and we’re up and running with your worries. But what that is — and so a specification of what counts as waste — might not be available without loading in all sorts of normative considerations as to how to perform that balancing.