A. Preliminaries, especially on waste as inversely related to needFootnote ¹⁸

Edward McCaffery discusses possible definitions of waste from the classical literature (especially William Blackstone and Thorstein Veblen), but none, I think, captures the core notion. McCaffery is clearly right to mark a distinction between dissipation (“pure loss of value,” with not even pleasure gained from the loss) and extreme frivolity (“selling the farm for a sack of beans”), and he is also right that they are related.Footnote ¹⁹ One seems to waste if one burns dollar bills or if one lets them loose in the wind. John Simmons marks another distinction: “waste includes not only holding without using, but frivolous destruction.”Footnote ²⁰ I am looking, in this section, for what makes these and all forms of waste related—that is, for the core notion. “Non-urgent, frivolous or excessive consumption”Footnote ²¹ won't do, since dissipation is none of these and since vacations, for example, are (usually) non-urgent but nonetheless not (necessarily) wasteful. Dissipation (or destruction) also cannot be the core notion, because excessive and useless consumption is not dissipation, because destroying fuel (etc.) is how it is used and thus not wasteful, and because destroying something that has no value cannot be a waste.Footnote ²² Nor is simple non-useFootnote ²³ the core notion since, as we will see in Section III.B, there are things we do not use but do not thereby waste.

Intuitively, we tend to think of waste as related to need. The idea is clear: if we did not waste, there would be less need. There is a positive correlation: more waste usually makes more need. While this is true, it does not mean that waste is “unmet need,” “a failure to meet a need,” or “the failure to use X to satisfy a need.”Footnote ²⁴ There must be conceptual space between the unneeded and the wasteful. We might not need to take a family vacation, yet taking the vacation does not seem wasteful in itself.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, needs may go unmet because of genuine scarcity rather than waste; and even when what is needed is present, there may be good reasons not to use it to satisfy the need.

That waste and need are (often) related seems clear, and will be an important consideration later. Even single persons can be said to waste things when they need them: for example, perhaps Harry is lost in the wilderness, freezing, and uses his last match to light a cigarette instead of lighting a fire to keep warm. Nonetheless, not all waste is a failure to satisfy a need. I can waste things I don't need (destroying the umpteenth car in my extensive collection for no reason), and it may be that no one needs what I waste (say the cars are all old clunkers). At the same time, it seems there are things we have that no one needs and that don't seem like a waste at all (Picasso paintings, for example) as well as things we have that no one needs that are a waste ($150 running shoes, for example, especially when it has been shown that they don't help as much as less expensive variants). Simply put, we can waste even when there is no need. There can even be waste on the proverbial island deserted but for one inhabitant.Footnote ²⁶ Even if the island produces more food than its one inhabitant can eat, some of us have the intuition that the inhabitant would be wasting foodstuffs if he carried them to the top of a cliff and tossed them into the ocean in a weighted bag so that they sank to the bottom.Footnote ²⁷ Something's being needed (by someone) seems not to be a necessary condition for its (possibly) being wasted.

Just as something might be wasted though it is not needed by another, something might be wasted though no one has an intention to waste it. That this is so can easily be seen. I may foolishly believe that I should invest all my extra money in the production of carcinogenic pills, believing that the return on my investment will be substantial. I would be wrong and will have wasted my money, without intending to do so. (Recall, though, that whether there is a moral injunction against such an act of waste is a distinct question.) That I do not intentionally waste my money does not mean that I do not waste it. In such a case, I am wasteful, even though it is not my intention. Indeed, not only can I waste without intending to, but I can also waste even when I have no intention whatsoever. I can waste time,Footnote ²⁸ for example, by failing to form any intention whatsoever. This is not unusual. If I watch in shock as my car rolls to the edge of a cliff and I form no intention, it will be true that I wasted time I could have used to try to prevent the car from falling over the cliff.

B. Waste as nonuse or underusage

Simmons and others note the importance of use in Locke's conception of property.Footnote ²⁹ Given that clear importance, we get a better start in defining waste by thinking of it as “the nonuse of something.”Footnote ³⁰ The intuition here is clear: when the apples spoil because they are unused, there is waste. Of course, we are not close to an adequate definition yet; there are many things we do not use that are not wasted. We don't use some rocks, for example, but we don't say we waste them.

Perhaps we should take care not to limit considerations of use to our use. The rocks may be used by insects as homes, for example. I think we can exclude such worries here; if we include use by insects (and bacteria, etc.), then there is likely nothing that is unused on the earth, and so this definition would not do, as there would be nothing wasted, which seems clearly false.Footnote ³¹ As I have already indicated, even if we exclude such considerations, this definition will not work, since there are things we do not use that we do not waste.

Perhaps I have already been too quick. After all, we sometimes hear people say that nature itself can be wasteful.Footnote ³² We might say the biological nature of humans is wasteful, for example, given the existence of spontaneous abortions. In such cases, it seems like the biological material that is the fetus is wasted.Footnote ³³ If an animal kills another animal but does not eat or otherwise use the whole carcass—as indeed happens—there is also, plausibly, waste. I think such claims are correct: nonhuman animals can waste, and, plausibly, nature as a whole can waste. My final analysis can accommodate such claims, but it is worth temporarily bracketing such thoughts.

The concern with waste as a moral issue suggests that wasting is an action done by an agent.Footnote ³⁴ Someone may waste paper, for example, but it is not the wasted paper that is of moral interest; it is the fact that the paper is wasted by someone. Footnote ³⁵ The waste we are interested in, then, seems to involve an agent's nonuse of something. But as we have already seen, it cannot be simply “an agent's nonuse.”

We might consider waste to be “an agent's nonuse of something designed to be used.” This avoids the problem of including things in the category of “waste” that are unused but which we have no use for (like some rocks). But this definition is not much of an improvement. At most, this is a type of waste, for we do use things that are not designed to be used (absent a theological story)—like wood from trees—and we may use them in such a way that seems wasteful. It seems wasteful, for example, to chop down a tree to enable planting a different tree one has a minimal preference for, and to simply burn the first tree (not for heat, but just to get rid of it). But, since the tree was not designed to be used (again, absent a theological story), this would not count as waste if this definition were correct.

A further attempt to refine the definition is to say that waste is “an agent's nonuse of something useful.” This improves upon the last definition, since something designed to be used is presumably useful, but the category “useful” includes more than just things designed to be used. There are two problems, though. The first is that it will be unclear how to determine if something is useful. A boulder in the wilderness does not seem useful, but if it could be made into gravel for a driveway, it might be useful. We would not want to say that our failure to use the boulder (as raw material for gravel) is wasteful. The second (related) problem is that something useful (whether designed to be used or not) can be used in multiple ways, and some ways will seem wasteful by comparison to others.Footnote ³⁶ Turning the boulder into gravel is one thing; using it in my backyard as a paperweight (say, to hold down a piece of paper with the number of my house on it) is another. This is not nonuse, but it seems wasteful. Sometimes using something in certain ways is wasteful.

The first problem just mentioned takes us from “an agent's nonuse of something useful” to “an agent's nonuse of something she should use.” The second problem takes us from that to “the agent's nonuse or underusage of something she should use.” This version of the definition, I think, is promising (though I will ultimately reject it).Footnote ³⁷ Since nonuse of something the agent should use is a form of underusage, the latter includes the former, so that this definition of waste is more simply written as “an agent's underusage of something she should use.” For further simplicity, we can say that waste is “the underusage of something one should use,” understanding implicitly that the underusage is that of an agent.

The definition of waste as “the underusage of something one should use” accords with Simmons's view that “Locke's real concern … must be with productive use (and waste), not [mere] spoilage.”Footnote ³⁸ It also captures part of the intuition behind Bernard Baumrin's claim that “to be wasted it [i.e., any object] needed to be made unavailable to others who might have made use of it,” and that “[t]o be made unavailable to others … a kind of thing (e.g., apples) must become so transformed as to cease to exist as a thing of that kind and with it all its possible uses as a thing of that kind [must cease to exist].”Footnote ³⁹ If an object is unavailable for use, it is underused. That others might have used it implies that there is a use for the thing (and thus plausibly implies that it should be used).

An objection might be raised here. Imagine wanting to use a tin can as a hammer to drive in a nail that has come loose on a cupboard shelf. This is not underuse, though it may be misuse. Footnote ⁴⁰ Some might nonetheless think it is a waste (or a wasteful use)—thereby arguing against the present definition. I think this is a mistake. I do not think we should say this nonstandard use of the tin can is a waste, even if we do want to say there is something wrong with it. What, after all, is wrong with it? One possibility is that the can used as a hammer might break open, spilling its contents, which would then be wasted. But the fact that the contents might be wasted with the nonstandard use of the can does not make that use a waste. Perhaps the nonstandard use of the can would, upon spillage of its contents, become a part of the wasteful act that is the spilling of the can's contents, but that does not mean the nonstandard use of the can is itself a waste. If the nearest hammer is in the garage and would take precious time to retrieve, then use of the can as a hammer might actually be efficient. Of course, storage of tools closer by may be more efficient, and leaving them in the garage may seem wasteful. This suggests what is intuitively accurate: waste and efficiency are (at least close to) antonyms.Footnote ⁴¹ This also supports the idea that waste is “the underusage of something one should use.” Underusage, I suggest, is a type of inefficiency.

Let's consider an example. A very rich athlete has built a large home for himself with an extremely large closet in it.Footnote ⁴² There are, I think, different ways that waste can be involved here. It may be that the closet itself is underused by the athlete. This is plausibly waste: the athlete may have another, smaller closet that he overuses instead of storing stuff in this larger closet. (Perhaps it is further from where he usually is with stuff that he normally stores.) He may think to himself, “I should use the large closet more—it is far better designed for storage,” but he may not work up the will to bring the stuff to the large closet. (Perhaps he could end this waste by being more strong-willed.) Alternatively, the athlete may be extremely organized and efficient and may realize that the small closet suits his purposes better; he may think that there is a different use of the space the large closet takes up that would be significantly better than the current use (as a large closet). Under this alternative description, what is really wasted is the space in the home and not the closet itself. (Perhaps he could end this waste by redesigning this area of his home so as to create an office or entertainment room for himself.)

I suspect, though, that what many people consider waste in this scenario is different from either of the two possibilities just discussed. I suspect it is not the waste of the closet itself or of the space in the house, but the waste of the resources used to build the closet that is most disturbing. That is, I suspect that when some people consider the closet “a waste,” they are speaking indirectly; they really mean that it was a waste of resources to make a closet like that for one person. The real concern is that the resources used to build the closet could have been better used—perhaps to build a small home for an impoverished homeless person.

Consider, now, the closet example with reference to our working definition of waste: “the underusage of something one should use.” If this definition is right, the athlete could be speaking correctly if he claimed the closet was a waste because he could not make good use of it—it would be underusage of something (the closet) he should use.Footnote ⁴³ The athlete could also be speaking correctly if he claimed the space used for the closet was wasted—it would be underusage of something (the space in his home) he should use. What about the final claim of waste—the possible waste of resources to make such a large closet for one person? The question is whether there is underusage of those resources. Is it underusage to build such a closet? I am sympathetic with those who say yes, but I am not certain. Another example will push the intuition.

Consider the rich heiress who buys a $3,000 dress, wears it once, then hangs it in her closet to be forgotten and buys another for the next occasion, and repeats the process indefinitely.Footnote ⁴⁴ We might say here that the heiress is underusing the dress and also that the resources that went into creating the dress were underused. Again, I am sympathetic with those who would say such things and would thus say there was waste here. What should be clear from both this example and the parallel use of waste in the previous example (the waste of resources in building the closet) is that the normativity in the definition of waste now under consideration is not only in the second part, where we explicitly say that the item in question is something “one should use.” (I take it to be obvious that whether one should use the building materials to create the closet is a normative question.) The normativity is also in the first part, where we reference “the underusage of something.” If that is an accurate understanding of waste, we will need some standard to determine if a particular use is underusage, or proper usage, and this standard will be normative.Footnote ⁴⁵

Our current working definition of waste is “an agent's underusage of something she should use.” There is an obvious worry about this sort of definition: it says nothing about the agent who is doing the wasting. If I underuse an apple, letting it spoil, I am the one wasting it. If I run water for no reason (or for the mild pleasure of hearing it), I am the one wasting the water. In other situations, though, it may be that the one underusing an item is not the one doing the wasting. Put differently, the agent causing the underusage may not be the same as the agent who could make more or better use of the resource in question. If, for example, my leaving my water faucet on causes you to be unable to use water (to clean something, say), it may be your underusage (or the combination of my minimal use with your complete lack of use) that is the problem, though I am the cause of it. In such cases, I am the one who wastes—by making it so that you cannot act to use the water. Clearly, you do not do anything wrong in this scenario. Equally clearly, you do not waste the water—you do not even have the chance to waste the water, because of my act. The conclusion to be drawn here is that waste cannot be simply “the underusage of something one should use,” though it could be “the causing of the underusage of something one should use.” While it is ordinarily the case that the agent underusing X is the agent who causes the underuse of X, they need not be the same agent.Footnote ⁴⁶

There is a final and, I think, fatal problem in much of the foregoing approach to defining waste. I have been discussing waste as underusage, but there are clearly times when overusage is as problematic as underusage and seemingly for the same reasons.Footnote ⁴⁷ Simple examples will make this clear: someone who shampoos her hair five times a day uses too much shampoo; someone who never writes a word using less than two inch lettering uses too much paper; someone who pours so much balsamic vinegar on her salad that a half inch remains in the bowl when the salad is gone uses too much vinegar; and so on. In all of these cases, the issue is overuse. It is tempting to reply that these are actually cases of underusage of the money needed to buy the items in question (shampoo, paper, balsamic vinegar)—since the agents involved could have gotten more for their money with better use—or that they are cases of underusage understood in a more detailed way (the balsamic vinegar remains in the bowl, perhaps, because it is underused; in all cases, less value is gotten from the uses than could be gotten). While there is something right about such a reply, it is ultimately unpersuasive. Perhaps money was underused when the shampoo was purchased, for example, but the shampoo itself was wasted and not underused. It seems like we would say both that the person involved wasted her money and that she wasted the items specified—and not because she underused what she poured (say) but because she overused. So the current definition of waste cannot be right.

One further refinement of the current definition is possible to try to improve it: waste may be “the causing of the improper (under- or over-) use of something one should use.” This may be thought of as an improvement over the previous definition, as well as an improvement over another definition we noted in passing: simple misuse. Neither strikes me as acceptable. They both simply push the difficult question back. Instead of asking “What is waste?” we ask “What is misuse?” or “What is improper use?” and the difficult work returns to haunt us. To some extent, the same is true of all definitions based on underusage, though the question with these is at least somewhat narrower (that is, “What is underusage?” is narrower than “What is misuse?” since the latter includes the former and more). “Misuse” and “improper use” are simply too vague. So we try a different path.

C. Waste as a process or the result of such a process

Recall that Locke tells us that “if either the grass of his inclosure rotted on the ground, or the fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of the earth, notwithstanding his inclosure, was still to be looked on as waste” and thus possibly not the property of the one who allowed it to perish. Causing the fruit to be underused is waste. But notice that if we define waste that way, when we say “the apples are wasting” we can only be speaking derivatively, since the apples are not causing their own underusage. Speaking precisely, we can say only that they are the product of waste. This is not really worrisome, but it suggests that we should extend the definition to include not only the act of waste but also the product. For reasons that will be apparent momentarily, we also do well to talk of the process of waste rather than the act of waste.

Suppose we define waste as “(a) any process wherein something useful becomes less usefulFootnote ⁴⁸ or (b) the result of such a process.” Such a process would usually be caused by an agent, but it need not be usefulness to the causing agent that matters, and there might be some cases where no agent (or no moral agent) is causing the process—all three points of which are in accord with things said earlier. Some such processes are natural, requiring no intentional being for their initiation. Nature can thus be wasteful (consider spontaneous abortions, as mentioned earlier). This definition also handles the last problem raised in the previous subsection—that of overusage. When our over-shampooer washes her hair five times in a day, she is engaging in a process wherein the useful shampoo becomes less useful. The fifth shampoo of the day simply does less good than the first (or is neutral or even bad, making the hair and scalp less healthy than they were), and the emptier shampoo bottle is less useful than it was with more shampoo in it.

That this definition handles overusage so well may provoke some worry about how it handles underusage. Consider our athlete's closet. We specified three ways that waste may be involved there: it may be that the closet itself is wasted by the athlete; it may be that the closet is a waste of space; or it may be that what is wasted are the resources used to build the closet. These are all handled straightforwardly. That the closet is a waste is clear: it is the result of a (building) process wherein some things—the space and the materials used—become less useful than they were; they would have been more useful if used to make a better-designed house or to build a small home for a homeless person. The same is true of the space misused in the home. Finally, the resources themselves were wasted because they were made into something (the overly large closet) less useful than they themselves were; again, they could have been more useful in a better design. Note also how this works in simple cases: if you absentmindedly throw away a perfectly good apple (or pharmaceutical, etc.), you initiate a process whereby something useful becomes less useful. The contaminated apple is now useless.

Of course, as currently formulated, this definition will not do. Most things we use well go through a process wherein they become less useful (or cease to be useful).Footnote ⁴⁹ When I eat my dinner, the foodstuffs are no longer useful (they no longer are). If I wear my favorite shirt often enough, it begins to form holes, becoming less useful. Presumably I am not wasting in either case. What matters in the sort of processes that we do consider wasteful, I think, is that potential is lost.Footnote ⁵⁰ When a useful drug is accidentally dropped into a toilet, it is a waste, because the drug had the potential, say, to cure an illness—and that potential is lost. When I wear my favorite shirt for the thousandth time, its potential is not lost; it has been used to its fullest (since its purpose is to be worn).

Not all lost potential is a waste. It may be that I had the potential to be a great salesperson, but chose to pursue philosophy instead. Even if I am not as good a philosopher as I could have been a salesperson, it would be odd to say that I wasted my salesperson-attributes. Nothing was wasted, because although I did not actualize one potential, I did actualize another in a way that offsets the loss. So what seems to matter is that potential is lost in a way that is not offset.Footnote ⁵¹ We must thus improve on the current definition of waste as “(a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful or (b) the result of such a process.” We can do so by incorporating a clause about the overall loss of potential (and in this way we can address the worry, noted above, about normal usage making an item less useful). We can say that waste is “(a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost, or (b) the result of such a process.”Footnote ⁵²

It may be thought that this latest definition can be shortened to “(a) any process that produces less benefit than is lost or (b) the result of such a process.”Footnote ⁵³ This is a mistake. I assume that we do not waste trees deep in the Amazon rainforest when we leave them untouched. As Benjamin Damstedt indicates, “one does not violate the waste prohibition by removing too little out of the common.”Footnote ⁵⁴ If the shortened version of the definition were correct, we would have to say we waste the trees—for there is (at least plausibly) a process in the rainforest example that produces less benefit than is lost (while there is no process wherein something useful becomes less useful). Granted, such a process is a negative process—the process of (or initiated by) our not using the trees—but this is arguably a process. What is produced from such a process (nothing)Footnote ⁵⁵ is, at least plausibly, of less benefit than what is lost (by not harvesting the trees, for example). Hence, without a clause indicating that such processes are excluded, the shortened definition will not do. Adding such a clause may make the definition satisfactory, but will also make it lose its advantage (brevity) over the unshortened version. To clarify the advantage of the longer version of the current definition over the shorter one: on the longer version, the trees are not wasted simply because they do not become less useful when we do not use them. The first clause—“any process wherein something useful becomes less useful”—is thus needed.

We have already seen that the current definition handles the athlete's closet case and the case where food or pharmaceuticals are thrown away. Consider now the case of the $3,000 dresses. The materials used to make the dresses were wasted, according to this definition, if they could have been used to create something from which more use would have been gotten—as seems likely. The dresses themselves would only count as wasted if, while they hang in the closet, their use value decreases. If it does not, they are not wasted—but, again, the resources used to make them were. The current definition also appropriately handles the case of normal usage—by means of the second clause, “produces less benefit than is lost.” The favorite shirt worn over and over (until it wears out) and the meal eaten are not wasted on this definition: far more benefit (the years of wear, or the nutritive value) is gained than is lost (say, usefulness as a rag, or as insect bait), so the process involved is not wasteful.

Throughout this section, I have been assuming that there are objective facts about use-value, and this warrants further comment. Unfortunately, I can only give the most rudimentary indication here of the objectivity of use-value.

I admit (for present purposes) that raw materials have no essential use. Hence, the objective use-value cannot come from the object itself. Some might suggest that if the value is not in the object itself, it must come from the individual who uses the object (presumably, but not necessarily, the owner) and that the use-value must therefore be subjective. On such a view, it might be said that the compulsive shampooer is not wasting shampoo, but merely satisfying her preferences. But we can admit that she is satisfying her preferences and still argue that she is wasting the shampoo, when we recognize that her preferences are not rational.Footnote ⁵⁶ What matters is that there is an objectivity to use-value even though the object has no essential use. On my own view, the objective use-value of an item is relational, determined by how well it could serve the purposes of moral agents. This means that if I use the dollar bill in my pocket as kindling for my fireplace on a warm summer's day (when the fire does me no good), I am getting less value from the dollar than I should—for it could serve the purposes of moral agents in significantly better ways. I might use it, for example, to pay my overdue electricity bill, or to buy (part of) a meal for a homeless person.Footnote ⁵⁷

Importantly, the fact that there are objective facts about use-value (if I am right) does not mean that interference will be warranted to attain that use-value. When such interference is warranted is a normative question I begin to address below (in Section IV).

D. A concern, three objections, an advantage, and a final refinement

There is an interesting concern about the current definition (indeed, it may apply to all of the definitions thus far considered). When Locke's less sophisticated followers largely ignore the spoilage proviso, it is because they think it too easily satisfied to be of concern. It is supposed to be easily satisfied because things can be sold, and money saved, so that there is no spoilage. Of course, once money can be saved, the possibility arises that it can be hoarded.Footnote ⁵⁸ Those who believe that resources were wasted in building a very large, and largely unused, closet for our athlete above may also believe that hoarding money is morally problematic. If some hoard money, after all, others may (supposedly) have to do without. Thus, hoarding, like waste, seems to be correlated with need—and thus is perhaps the same as waste.

I sympathize with, but do not accept, the view that a billionaire wastes her money if she merely lets it earn interest and does no (other) good with it. The problem with that view is simply that it seems she doesn't waste it at all—after all, the process it is involved with is that of earning interest and thus becoming more useful. I think this ambivalence is both common and sensible.Footnote ⁵⁹ I suspect some hoarding is waste and some is not. If the billionaire simply stuffs her cash in her mattress, it would be wasteful, since her action not only makes something unavailable that could be used but also results in the item hoarded being less useful (since, without interest, the value of the cash does not keep up with inflation). Such hoarding is thus wasteful according to the definition now on offer. However, other hoarding is not: if the billionaire puts her money into high-yield investments, thereby increasing its value, it does not become less useful. (Moreover, it is not unavailable in any real sense—it is invested, and thus available to those who can pay an acceptable return. That it is not available to you or me because the billionaire has access to better-paying borrowers is irrelevant.)

It might be objected that we should not consider only the billionaire's needs. It might be suggested that the money could be used to produce shelter for the homeless, to feed the starving, and to educate the illiterate, and that all of this clearly amounts to lost benefits that are greater, at least socially, than the interest she earns. There is something right about this, especially if we (foolishly, to my mind) ignore the fact that her investment is an investment and so enables something productive to be done that might be a greater benefit (suppose it is an investment in improved agriculture). What this shows is that what is wasteful will be indexed. What might not be wasteful to an individual may be wasteful to a society, and perhaps vice versa. In the current sort of case, the hoarding may be wasteful from a societal perspective, but not from the individual's perspective.

The idea that what is wasteful will be indexed fits well with the view, expressed at the end of the last subsection, that the objective use-value of an item is relational. The maximum objective value achievable with any item will be that which best satisfies the most purposes of moral agents. Of course, individuals will have their own purposes, some of which can only be satisfied if someone else's are not—even when the other's purposes are (in some sense) more important or more extensive. Given that, an individual may rightly think that someone else's use of an item is wasteful while the other person rightly thinks it is not. In each case, the purposes considered are one's own, leading to opposing conclusions about the sort of value created. Consider this example. It is perfectly reasonable for me to think Thelma wastes the filet mignon when she feeds it to her dog Fido—because my purposes (and those of others) are more important to me than Fido's. Still, Thelma might rightly think she does not waste the steak, since her purpose is to make Fido happy and she fairly weights that purpose more heavily than my purposes.

A different example might help make the indexing point clearer.Footnote ⁶⁰ Consider the destruction of a great work of art by a collector who somehow gets tremendous joy from the destruction.Footnote ⁶¹ Such destruction is not wasteful from the perspective of the collector (who gets great benefit), but it is wasteful from the perspective of the society that loses the artwork with no benefit. The point is simply that whose purposes are taken as primary will determine what is considered wasteful, and, in many cases, there are reasonable differences regarding whose purposes are primary. To say that “waste is indexed to P” is to say that P's purposes are taken as primary in that evaluation. That waste is indexed, though, does not mean that it is subjective. In the art destruction case, it would be an objective fact that, indexed to the art collector/destroyer, there is not waste, and it would be an objective fact that, indexed to (the rest of) society, there is. It may also be that one of these perspectives is objectively more important than the other, or that one is of no moral value (or is of disvalue).

Recognizing that waste is indexed allows us to answer another objection: namely, that when I supposedly waste money, it does not itself become less useful and so I cannot be actually wasting it. If I spend, say, $300 on an ordinary umbrella, the storekeeper has $300 which is not less useful than it was before I (mis)spent it. Hence, it might be said that there is no waste. Yet surely I did waste.Footnote ⁶² What we should say, I think, is that, indexed to the shopkeeper, there is no waste, but indexed to me, there is—I could have gotten far more for the $300 than the umbrella. (Alternatively, we can say that I wasted my resources—which includes, but is not identical to, the $300.) Importantly, though, we can also say that it is (or is not) wasteful from an all-things-considered perspective. That is, all things considered, (a) a process wherein something useful becomes less useful to all who could possibly make use of it, and that produces less benefit (to all of them) than is lost (to all of them), or (b) the result of such a process, is wasteful from the broadest possible perspective.Footnote ⁶³ None of this, I think, is problematic for the conceptual issue; it may raise worries for the moral issue.

There is one final objection to my conceptual analysis worth considering here. A critic may want to say that for an item X to be such that it can be wasted, it must be that X can rightfully be used.Footnote ⁶⁴ Including such a condition allows us to say that trees deep in the Amazon are not being wasted (even if we otherwise adopt the definition discussed in Section III.B above; as I have already indicated, on the current definition they are not being wasted whether or not we include a clause about rightful use). The trees are not being wasted, the critic would presumably say, because no one has a right to use them. I think this is misguided. It is certainly clear that I can waste something I have a right to use. I have a right to use the dollar in my pocket, but I can tear it up and drop it in a sewer drain, for example. It is also clear, though, that I can waste something I have no right to use. I can steal your car and use it as a doorstop, say. Clearly a waste. I can go into the Amazon rainforest and burn trees for fun. Again, clearly a waste.

How does the current definition fare with regard to the sort of case just mentioned? If waste is “(a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost, or (b) the result of such a process,” then it is clear that I can waste your car (to which I have no right)—perhaps by blowing it up for fun, thereby making it into a useless charred wreck. The same is true of the trees in the Amazon. It is also the case that according to the current definition, nonuse of trees deep in the Amazon is not a waste—for, as previously noted, the trees are not becoming useless or less useful. (This is perhaps comparable to the nonwasteful sort of hoarding.) Perhaps if we allowed a tree disease to destroy all of the trees, it would be a waste, but that is a different matter (perhaps comparable to the wasteful sort of hoarding).Footnote ⁶⁵

The current definition has, it should be noted, another advantage over the previous definition—“the causing of the underusage of something one should use.” That definition (and its immediate predecessor) was doubly normative: determining what underusage is and determining what we should use are both normative issues. The current definition—“(a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost, or (b) the result of such a process”—by contrast, only involves normativity, if at all, in determining usefulness. The usefulness of an item might be determined in economic terms, perhaps by drawing on talk of opportunity costs and cost/benefit analyses. Alternatively, as I have already suggested, usefulness may be understood in terms of how much the item aids human flourishing or pursuit of the good.Footnote ⁶⁶

Exactly how to flesh out the usefulness of an item is, I think, of the utmost importance. I also think, though, that how it is fleshed out will depend on who is doing the fleshing. This brings us back to our recognition that waste is indexed. When the art collector destroys the work of art for pleasure, he obtains a benefit: his own pleasure. From his perspective, his destruction of the painting is not a waste. For society at large, by contrast, there is a great loss: the sum of the pleasures others would have had if the work had not been destroyed, along with the educational value (and the like) that is sacrificed. Given all of that value, a museum might offer to buy the painting to prevent its destruction (which would be a waste from the societal perspective). The public might be asked to contribute funds to aid the effort to prevent the destruction. The collector, though, may so value the pleasure he receives by seeing the painting destroyed, that no monetary amount would alter his choice.Footnote ⁶⁷ There are other cases like this.

Consider a sacred object or place, such as Shiprock in northwestern New Mexico, which plays a special role in Navajo culture. What Shiprock is good for—its usefulness according to Navajo cosmology—is precisely to play this special role. Using it for any other purpose, or at least any purpose incompatible with or destructive of that role, would be a waste indexed to the Navajo. For example, if it were discovered that uranium (or a chemical that cured cancer) was abundant within this distinctive rock formation, there would surely be a move to mine it. From the Navajo perspective, mining Shiprock would be a waste, since it would destroy this sacred site and no other benefit compares to what would be lost.Footnote ⁶⁸ By contrast, from the perspective of those eager to gain from mining, the only waste (if any) would be to leave the formation untapped. Certainly, indexed to them, mining is not a waste: it would be a process wherein something basically unused becomes very useful and a process that produces tremendous benefit with little loss (to put the point more extremely than it need be put).

I do not pretend to know how to determine, from an all-things-considered perspective, whether there is waste in such cases or not. I think it is clear, though, that we would not be warranted in simply assuming that the benefit to be gained from mining outweighs the loss incurred by doing so. Such an assumption would entail that waste is simply inefficiency, something like “the production of less benefit than is lost”Footnote ⁶⁹ (where benefit and loss are understood in a purely instrumental or economic sense).Footnote ⁷⁰ Throughout this essay, though, I have been trying to clarify the concept of waste in a value-free way, without endorsing any particular substantive claims as to whether this or that activity (e.g., mining or not mining Shiprock) amounts to waste. To simply assume that instrumental monetary value should carry the day violates this goal. We should thus refine the definition of waste one last time.

I shall understand waste as “(a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost—where benefit and usefulness are understood with reference to the same metric—or (b) the result of such a process.” This refinement of the previous definition merely makes clear that the indexing matters and that we should not build into our definition of waste any prejudice in favor of one metric of usefulness (or value) over others. In the case of Shiprock, the metric used by the Navajo would be that of the sacred, blessed, consecrated, spiritual, etc., while the metric used by those believing it should be mined would be that of money or energy (or, best-case scenario, medical cures and promotion of life). Given the different metrics used, there is no surprise that the two groups come to different conclusions about the question of waste.Footnote ⁷¹ Fortunately, in many cases we actually face, we have a common metric with which to consider the question.

A. Dismissing two lines of argument

First, it might be suggested that waste is immoral because it involves some sort of harm to oneself.Footnote ⁷³ The idea here is that if I waste my resources, I will be less able to preserve myself or advance the pursuit of my goals. While I think there is something important in this line of reasoning, I do not think it can be the full story, for several reasons. First, whether it is true that waste makes me less able to preserve myself is contingent upon circumstances. If I happen to be born super-rich, my waste will not cause me harm (unless it occurs on a tremendous scale). The rich can waste with ease because they have much more than they need. Second, it is not clear to me that there is such a thing as “harm to self.” Following Joel Feinberg,Footnote ⁷⁴ I would admit that I can hurt myself (i.e., I can set my own interests back), but not that I can harm myself (i.e., I cannot wrongly set my interests back). Since non-wrongfully setting back someone's interests is not immoral, this argument can only provide a prudential reason not to waste. It is a prudential reason I take to be of obvious importance—wasting (often) makes life worse for oneself—but is also of limited domain. (This prudential reason is unlikely ever to be of import to the super-rich.)Footnote ⁷⁵

A second route that might be pursued is what we might call the “disgust argument.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Watching a gluttonous super-rich individual slothfully remain idle while using resources in wasteful ways strikes many of us as disgusting. Some might want to take such a feeling—or the fact that humans have always had such visceral reactions—to suggest that wasteful behavior is immoral. The problem with this sort of argument is familiar. Historically, people have found many perfectly moral things disgusting. Some wanted miscegenation to be illegal because they thought it a disgusting practice and thus immoral. Homosexuality and same-sex marriage are more contemporary examples, as is cloning. Arguments against these practices tend to be of the sort that “we must recognize that we feel disgust for a reason,” without providing much in the way of fleshing out what such a reason would be.Footnote ⁷⁷ I take such arguments to be of no moral value with regard to those questions, and thus I give them no weight when it comes to waste. Nonetheless, I share the visceral reaction against waste. Therefore, I move now to what I take to be a more promising argument.

B. Framing the discussion in terms of toleration

In his Two Treatises (II.31), Locke says that “nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy,” but at I.39, he says that “a right to destroy anything by using it” is “the utmost property man is capable of.” These two statements seem initially inconsistent, but if we read the first as “nothing was made by God for man merely to spoil or destroy,” the inconsistency vanishes. On this reading, the first statement means that we have no right to destroy anything by wasting it; the second means only that we can destroy property if doing so is part of (non-wastefully) using it. This is how John Simmons interprets Locke; he explains that “the right to destroy what one has property in is at least often a constituent part of property, but this is not a right to destroy the thing frivolously. We have a right to destroy things we own only in our use of them for ‘the comfortable preservation of (our) beings’ (I, 87).”Footnote ⁷⁸ This seems the best reading of Locke. It also seems plausible in its own right.

Recall that we have defined waste as “(a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost—where benefit and usefulness are understood with reference to the same metric—or (b) the result of such a process.” Although there may be some normativity built into this definition—in the metric of benefit and usefulness—most of the normative work is left to be done. It is not obviously or necessarily the case that waste is always immoral, so normative work is needed. Moreover, in cases where there are competing metrics, determining which metric should control will require extensive normative work.

One way to pose the bigger question here is in terms of jus abutendi—the right to waste. Footnote ⁷⁹ If property includes jus abutendi, then just as I can practice throwing knives in my own yard, so long as I am not throwing them at you, I can practice throwing them at my wall even if doing so will destroy them. Similarly, our Misanthropic Apple Farmer might insist that since he is harming no one and the apples are his, no one has a right to interfere with his letting them rot, his sinking them in a weighted bag in the ocean, or his using them as fuel for a giant and useless bonfire. Yet some of us want to at least consider if interference is permissible here.Footnote ⁸⁰

One way to frame the normative question, then, is in terms of toleration: When should we tolerate waste, and when should we not? This way of framing the normative question about waste sits between two other ways that are perhaps more popular: When is there a moral duty not to waste? And when does waste limit property? The question of toleration is related to the first of these others since, arguably, we should tolerate when people satisfy their moral duties, and we can only question whether we should not tolerate when a duty (e.g., not to harm another) is not being met. The question of toleration is related to the second alternative way to frame the normative concern since, arguably, when we do not tolerate waste, we effectively limit property. If someone wastes her own goods, and we allow the state to interfere with (not tolerate) the waste, we effectively say, “You do not have the right to waste what you own,” which means ownership is limited and does not include the right to waste (jus abutendi). The question of toleration is not equivalent to either of these other questions, however. It is not equivalent to the question about a moral duty not to waste, since sometimes we do tolerate when duties are not met. It is not equivalent to the question regarding property for two reasons. First, the limitation of property involves only questions of waste with regard to what one owns (or otherwise takes oneself to own), and the question of toleration, here, is broader: Should we tolerate your waste of your own goods, your waste of unowned goods, and your waste of other's goods? Second, the moral question of toleration is also broader in a different way: it includes not only concern with what government may justifiably interfere with, but also concern with what individuals and nongovernmental groups may justifiably interfere with—and, presumably, it is only justifiable governmental interference that sets a conceptual limit to property. That is, where property is a legal institution, it is law that sets its limits, not actions by other individuals. If a child takes her sibling's radio because she cannot tolerate the music he plays, she does not limit what counts as his property but only limits his use (i.e., the radio still belongs to him). By contrast, when the government makes cocaine illegal, it makes it the case that no one can have property in the narcotic (i.e., when the police officer confiscates it, the holder is not wronged). Similarly, then, my decisive failure to tolerate your waste may involve taking something from you, but it leaves the taken item your property (I legally wrong you), whereas if the government decisively (and justifiably) fails to tolerate waste, it sets a legal limit on what can be held as property.Footnote ⁸¹

My use of toleration to frame the normative question is not accidental. I use it because I am interested in the possible property-limiting nature of waste, as well as the broader question of when toleration is required (though I consider neither at length here). I also use it because it provides a ready model within which to consider when waste is most problematic. In particular, it provides a model to determine when interference with an individual's waste is permissible and when it is not—even if waste is bad in the latter sort of case.

An initial possibility to consider in determining when interference with an act of waste is permissible is economic: interference might be thought permissible when the waste involves a substantial economic loss for society. This is, in large part, the path Lior Jacob Strahilevitz takes.Footnote ⁸² On his view, when there is only minor economic loss, even postmortem waste should be permitted (he discusses the ritual burying of the dead with jewelry). As an argument for including a limited jus abutendi in property, I think Strahilevitz's argument is quite persuasive. It does not, though, settle the question of when nongovernmental interference is permissible or whether toleration is required. That is, it does not answer the question about the morality of waste (nor was it intended to).

As I have discussed elsewhere,Footnote ⁸³ interference is morally permissible when harm is done or credibly threatened. This is John Stuart Mill's basic view, his harm principle:

Following Feinberg, I understand a harm to be a wrongful setting back of interests.Footnote ⁸⁵ The question I now address, then, is when waste constitutes a wrongful setting back of someone's interests. If we define waste as “(a) a process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost—where benefit and usefulness are understood with reference to the same metric—or (b) the result of such a process,” then when does waste wrongfully set back someone's interests? The basic idea is that if a specific instance of waste violates the harm principle,Footnote ⁸⁶ it exceeds the normative limits of toleration and thus makes interference morally permissible. We can then say that people are not at liberty to act in that way—they have at least a prima facie duty not to act in that way. But when is that?

C. Getting the question straight

The question of toleration that we are concerned with here is threefold: must others tolerate (1) your waste of your own goods, (2) your waste of unowned goods, and (3) your waste of others' goods? The third part of the question is easily dismissed: if you have permission to waste someone else's goods, the question is the same as if you owned the goods yourself; if permission is not present, theft is involved and takes precedence. In any case, what is wrong with wasting someone else's goods without her consent is as obvious as what is wrong with stealing: it wrongfully sets back her interests in maintaining her property. Hence, the question of toleration here really centers on two subquestions. The first question is whether (i) ownership includes jus abutendi in such a way that it cannot be immoral to waste what one owns, or (ii) such waste is immoral but must be tolerated, or (iii) interference in such waste is permissible. Answering this question requires determining when the presence of waste overrides the presumption that a person may do with his belongings as he wishes without interference. When, to put the point bluntly, is the jus abutendi—the right to destroy or waste—morally overridden?Footnote ⁸⁷ The second question is about the waste of unowned goods (perhaps unownable goods) and can be dealt with along with the first.

What is wrong with wasting one's own goods or unowned goods (whether the goods are in an unclaimed natural state or whether they have been discarded by their previously rightful owners) is far less obvious than what is wrong with wasting someone else's goods. Some will insist either that one cannot (i.e., by definition) waste one's own goods or that one has a right to waste one's own goods, so that it cannot be wrong to do so. If the definition of waste I have offered is accepted, the first objection falls away. It is obviously conceptually possible to waste what one owns if my definition is correct. One might, for example, light one's last match and forget to use it to ignite a much-needed lantern, allowing the match to burn out as one watches in a daze. Surely, this is a process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost (with benefit and usefulness understood with reference to the same metric). Wasting one's own goods is thus conceptually possible. Can it be wrong to do so? Here, it might help to remember that saying it is wrong to do something does not mean either that it is illegal to do it or that it should be illegal. It is not the case that the government should interfere in every moral wrong (for example, the government should not interfere when one person lies to another, unless the lying constitutes fraud). It is moral wrongness alone that we are discussing here, not legal wrongness or the morality of the law. With that qualification on the table, it should be easier to see that it is at least plausible to say that one can wrongfully waste goods that one owns—even if one has a right to waste those goods. It is not, after all, always good or morally neutral to exercise one's rights; nor is it the case that one never has a right to do what is wrong.Footnote ⁸⁸ Upon leaving a restaurant, one might have a right to pour ammonia on one's leftovers in front of a starving homeless person, but it is surely at least plausibly immoral to do so.

D. The answer (?)

The Millian-Feinbergian framework of analysis easily explains the wrongfulness of wasting others' goods (as I have already indicated). It may also help us deal with the possible wrongfulness of wasting one's own goods. In the rest of this section, I sketch what I take to be the most plausible line of argument to defend the immorality of waste.

The argument begins by recognizing that it is bad if a person starves.Footnote ⁸⁹ In some cases, of course, it might be the all-things-considered best thing if one person starves (say, rather than a hundred people starving), but that does nothing to alter the fact that it is bad if a person starves.Footnote ⁹⁰ This follows from what we can call “the suffering principle”: suffering is bad (analytically true) and prima facie justifies interference (to thwart it). Though the “prima facie” in the principle is important and the warrant to intervene is defeasible, Peter Singer would claim that “if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.”Footnote ⁹¹ Failing to do so is, on his view, a wrong. The intuition behind this sort of view is clear: it is bad if people suffer; it is not bad if we save them; thus, if we can save them without moral cost, we ought to. While this view rests on a plausible and perhaps obvious claim—that suffering is bad—it has difficulties, and I reject it below in favor of the Millian-Feinbergian line. What does that view tell us here?

Clearly, when people starve, their interests are set back (from the baseline of not starving, which they clearly have an interest in). Thus, if we allow them to starve, we allow their interests to be set back. What remains an open question is whether allowing their interests to be set back is morally comparable to setting them back oneself or is in some other way wrongful. In short, the question is whether an omission of this sort is wrongful.Footnote ⁹² Only if it is, would we have a case of a harm and thus a case where interference is permissible according to this analysis.

James Rachels presents a persuasive case that, at least in some instances, allowing suffering is morally equivalent to causing it.Footnote ⁹³ His examples make the point. In the first example, Smith drowns his baby cousin in order to inherit a sum of money, while Jones merely lets his baby cousin drown (when he can easily save him) in order to inherit money. Jones seems blameworthy in much the same way that Smith does, even though Jones “merely” lets the cousin die. In another example, a Down's syndrome baby with an intestinal blockage is allowed to die after birth; the blockage could be easily removed to save the baby, but the parents decline to have this simple procedure performed because they only want a “normal” child. The parents seem no less guilty than if they refused to allow the child nutrition. Feinberg discusses another case, wherein B has a heart attack and reaches for medicine that would save him; in one version, A pushes the medicine out of B's reach, and in another version, he simply refrains from pushing it within B's reach (because he wants B to die).Footnote ⁹⁴ While some may quibble with Rachels and Feinberg about the judgments made in these cases, the general point stands: at least sometimes, it is as bad—and wrongful—to allow someone to suffer or die as it is to cause them to suffer or die. The case where we choose (perhaps extreme) waste rather than saving the starving person is arguably of this sort. Pouring ammonia over perfectly edible leftovers, rather than letting the starving person eat them, seems to be like this. That is, it seems to be an allowing to suffer that is as blameworthy as a causing to suffer. In this sort of waste, at least, there seems to be moral wrongness. Of course, this is an extreme case, and other instances of waste may not be wrong.

Remember that to waste something is to begin a process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost—where benefit and usefulness are understood with reference to the same metric. If one wastes food or the resources to buy food, one makes the food or resources less useful than they could be. The food would be more useful if we gave it to the starving person, thus preventing him from starving; other wasted resources would be more useful if we used them in a better way, so that we had more ability to provide food for the starving. The fact that more or better use could be gotten from the resources, however, does not mean that there is immorality here.

Importantly, there are times when preventing waste involves significant cost. I may occasionally have to throw out spoiled food. This does seem wasteful: I engage in a process (say, leaving the food in the refrigerator instead of the freezer) wherein something (the food) becomes less useful and where less benefit is produced than is lost. Nonetheless, there are costs to the sort of vigilance that would be necessary to prevent every instance of such waste. In such cases, it is hard to imagine that the waste is such that interference is permissible—even though there are starving people who could have used the food. This is nothing unusual; it follows simply from the fact that “ought” implies “can.” That I cannot always prevent the waste means that I am not obligated to do so.Footnote ⁹⁵ Of course, there are cases of waste that we can avoid. Such cases, wherein one wastes one's own goods but could (easily) avoid doing so, would presumably be of the sort that the avoidance of the waste could allow for the prevention or cessation of the suffering of another. Such cases are at least plausibly immoral.

In order for a particular case of waste to be immoral, it is clearly not enough merely that someone claims there is waste. So too, and more importantly, it is not enough that the instance be one of waste indexed to someone other than the actor.Footnote ⁹⁶ The art museum cannot simply claim that the art collector is wasting the Picasso painting when he sets out to destroy it and expect the mere claim to justify interference. Nor is such destruction immoral or interference-warranting simply because the art museum is correct that, indexed to it, the destruction would be an instance of waste. Similarly, when the restaurant patron pours ammonia on his leftovers rather than offering them to the homeless person, it is not enough that the homeless person claims there is waste or that he is right that there is waste indexed to him. The art collector's interest (no matter how perverse) in destroying the painting may matter. Similarly, if the restaurant patron gets joy from contaminating his food, that joy may matter. I also think it should matter in both cases that the actors have the characters they do—characters lacking in virtue. I will not pursue that line of inquiry here, but because the perversity of the characters may make these examples less illuminating for our purposes, I will use another.

Consider, again, Shiprock. Suppose Big Pharma wants to mine the formation for the cancer cure it holds. It stands to profit financially; cancer victims stand to profit medically. The benefit gained from both perspectives is clear; indexed to Big Pharma or to cancer victims, mining the formation is not waste. Indexed to the Navajo, though, it may well be. We cannot simply assume that the value of mining to Big Pharma or to the cancer victims outweighs the value of not mining to the Navajo, or that the former value matters in a way that the latter does not. Surely, if we are going to say that there is an immorality here, it should be that there is waste from the all-things-considered perspective. That is, if waste is to be considered immoral, it must be waste that is (a) a process wherein something useful becomes less useful to all who could possibly make use of it, and that produces less benefit than is lost (again, to all of them)—where benefit and usefulness are understood for each of them with reference to their own single metric—or (b) the result of such a process.Footnote ⁹⁷ As I have already indicated, in cases such as Big Pharma versus the Navajo, determining whether there is waste all things considered will be a difficult task. This does not change if we assume that Big Pharma owns the formation.Footnote ⁹⁸

Unfortunately, there will be cases of waste significantly like Big Pharma versus the Navajo. Someone might, for example, want her house destroyed when she dies because she cannot bear the thought of anyone else living there,Footnote ⁹⁹ but her neighbors and township may want the house sold and left standing to maintain the community. Indexed to the owner, there may not be waste in the destruction of the house; indexed to the others, there may be. These cases will all be difficult if we remain neutral between the parties and their metrics (as I think we should). I cannot here offer a means of adjudication. However, cases where there is a single metric for all of the involved parties (some of which cases may involve only one party) should be somewhat easier to adjudicate. In those cases, if there is waste from the all-things-considered perspective—taking into consideration the loss that would be incurred if the waste were avoided—it is plausibly immoral.

If one accepts that it is morally wrong to allow suffering (which is also a setback of interests), then what was said above is as true of wasting unowned goods (when such is easily avoided) as it is of wasting one's own goods (when such is easily avoided). If I find a stash of canned foods in an abandoned 1950s-era bomb shelter (supposing the food still maintains its nutritional value), and I decide to blow up the cans for some minimal amount of fun, I waste the food. I take the presumably unowned food (assuming the abandoned shelter has no legitimate owner)Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and use it in a process that removes its usefulness and produces less benefit (in the explosion I create) than is lost. The lost (nutritional) usefulness could be used to save a starving person.

There is, in the foregoing discussion, an empirical claim that should be made explicit: the claim that there are starving persons. Given this empirical claim, the conclusion is limited: so long as (1) there are starving persons, and (2) allowing starvation when one can easily stop it is wrong, it follows that easily avoidable all-things-considered waste which results in an inability to prevent starvation is morally wrong. Since there are starving persons, the conclusion that we have a duty to avoid waste should be accepted if one accepts that we are blameworthy if we let someone suffer in this way. Indeed, if avoiding the waste is costless and the saving of the starving person immediate, there would seem at least as much of a duty not to waste (in such cases) as there is to save the mythical child drowning in the pool that can be saved with a turn of the arm.

Obviously, what has been said thus far supports, at best, only a limited duty not to waste. If there were no starving people (or people otherwise in need of help that could be provided were it not for waste), there would be no duty not to waste, according to the above argument. More importantly, in a case where one was not blameworthy for letting someone starve when one could prevent it, there would be no duty not to waste. This happens more regularly than might be thought. For example, I could eat half of my dinner and give the rest to the homeless person outside the restaurant, but I choose to eat it all (not quite, but almost, gluttonously). Some might think that in a case of that sort, there is a duty not to waste and, indeed, a duty to provide half the meal to the homeless person. After all, Singer might suggest that doing so does not require “anything morally significant” compared to the very bad thing that can be prevented.

Others have shown significant difficulties for Singer's view.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The challenge has to do with incentives and unintended consequences. The basic idea, put starkly, is this: If we aid those who are starving, we provide an incentive for others to appear to be starving. Worse, if we aid those who are starving now, we may encourage the birth of more people into conditions of starvation.Footnote ¹⁰² Providing for those who are starving has moral hazards. Of course, it may be insisted that we cannot avoid having “dirty hands.” Still, if providing for those who are starving now is likely to bring it about that there are twice the number of starving people later—an empirical question—that would be a bad thing. In that case, wasting foodstuffs (or other resources that can be turned into foodstuffs) may be a better option than saving these things in order to provide for those who are starving. While this clearly does not support a duty to waste, it does disallow the hoped-for support for a duty not to waste.

While Singer's principle seems mistaken once one considers the broader impact of following it, Rachels's claim about allowing sometimes being as wrong as doing seems to stand. The claim, modified for this discussion, is that sometimes one is as morally blameworthy for allowing another to suffer (by starving, for example) as one is for causing another to suffer. Even assuming that the possible unintended consequences of preventing the suffering could not in any way be bad (because of a decree from God, say), this claim is of limited help with regard to a duty not to waste. While we likely agree that one must save the mythical drowning child when one is sunning poolside and can almost effortlessly reach over to pull him out of the water, cases of waste will not (usually) be that costless or that immediate. At best, then, Rachels's claim only helps support a substantially limited duty not to waste.

A fuller argument for my Millian-Feinbergian analysis would require a discussion of the proper baseline from which to consider whether one sets back the starving person's interests. That is, we would need to determine what level of interest-fulfillment counts as the starting-point from which our action or inaction is judged to have set back the interests of the suffering (starving) individual. Four possibilities suggest themselves: (a) where the person is now—starving; (b) a minimally acceptable level of welfare; (c) where the person would be if not for the fact that he is now starving; and (d) where the person would be if not for the way the world is set up. I suspect the relevant baseline is (a). If that is right, though, when I waste and thereby refuse to help alleviate the suffering of the starving person, I do not set his interests back: he simply is in a bad way to begin with, through no action of mine. I do not harm him by not helping, and thus I have no duty to refrain from wasting so that I can help him.

Let us briefly consider the other candidate baselines. Option (d) is of no help here, since there is no way to tell how well off the suffering person would be if the world were set up differently. The world could be set up in a variety of ways that would leave more people suffering (and suffering in worse ways than those who now suffer). Option (c) is also of no help, since it merely asserts that the baseline is “not where we are” without indicating anything more: it says what the baseline is not, not what it is. Option (b) is obviously the best hope for strengthening an argument for a less limited duty not to waste, but it is an unlikely baseline from which to consider if one sets back another's interests. If (b) is accepted as the appropriate baseline, then even helping someone can be seen as harmful if it does not bring him above the accepted minimum; any action, even one that helped the other person, would “wrongfully set back interests” if it resulted in the other's rising to anything less than the minimum.Footnote ¹⁰³ In such cases, we would have to say there was both help and harm, and while it may be that one act can be both helpful and harmful, we would then need further discussion to determine what combinations of help and harm are acceptable. The fact that the help and harm are, as it were, on the same scale, though, seems to make such judgments unnecessary; if one fails to bring the sufferer above the accepted minimum, one harms him (or leaves him in a harmed condition), and that justifies interference. This simply leaves too much room for interference. Perhaps further argument could show that this view is mistaken, but to me it seems sound.

Progress in defending a less limited duty not to waste may be possible. Talk of starving others may obscure a central fact we considered earlier: waste is correlated to need. This is not a conceptual necessity, as we saw in Section III.A, but it is an important consideration nonetheless. What is obscured, then, in considering others is that it is need in general that may go unmet when we waste, not just the need of others. Indeed, it may be our own need. Most of us accept that we have a moral duty to preserve ourselves when possible, but even if this is not accepted as a genuine moral duty, it is surely a matter of prudence. We should not waste because when we do, we risk our own preservation. Indeed, “the waste restriction is a natural complement to the principle of self-preservation [since] … [i]f we waste the resources we have appropriated, then we are not investing labour in them to preserve ourselves.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As others have indicated, Locke argues that we have a moral duty to labor, and he surely would not encourage wasteful labor over productive labor.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Helga Varden, for example, indicates that “the spirit of the waste restriction is that labour subject to the proviso gives us an enforceable right and duty towards one another to pursue productive uses of the resources.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Being productive rather than wasteful has clear instrumental value in aiding self-preservation.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Intrinsic moral value might also be aided in being productive rather than wasteful.

If one adopts John Simmons's Lockean view that labor should be understood as “a kind of purposive activity aimed at satisfying needs or supplying the conveniences of life,”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ one is led to conclude that waste is morally unacceptable. On that sort of view, Locke is concerned to prevent property from causing harm. (Indeed, he tells us that “it would always be a sin, in any man of estate, to let his brother perish for want of affording him relief out of his plenty.”)Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Hence, Locke's first proviso forbids appropriation that leaves others worse off than they would be without that appropriation because it is wrong to leave others in a harmed condition.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Of course, there are different sorts of harms; as I have previously suggested,Footnote ¹¹¹ some harms are only infringements of autonomy, while others include theft or battery. Infringing upon autonomy, which is intrinsically valuable, is interfering with an agent's purposive activity, infringing upon her right to self-government. This can be done in various ways, including not allowing her what she needs to self-govern—including subsistence.Footnote ¹¹² Hence, on the Locke-Simmons line, our treatment of our property “must do no ‘harm’ or ‘prejudice’ to others,”Footnote ¹¹³ which it does if it “denies others an opportunity equal to one's own for self-preservation and self-government.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Put more simply, “If I waste what others would otherwise use, I deny them the opportunity of productive use (and show that I do not respect them or their projects). Since their right is to make property by their labor in whatever fair share of the common they choose, I infringe their right by precluding their choice of the goods I waste…. Waste harms others, even in conditions of relative plenty.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ As just discussed, the argument here is not only about the instrumental value of productivity (especially as opposed to waste) for self-preservation; it is also about disallowing hindrances to the intrinsic moral value of autonomy. Of course, there is no denying the instrumental disvalue of waste where self-preservation is concerned: “[W]aste is clearly contrary to the best (i.e., most efficient) preservation of humankind.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

E. Suggested normative principles

What we should conclude now is that the moral problem with waste (if there is such a problem) is related to need (generalizing from the need for food). Taking need to be that which is required for the preservation of life (or, perhaps, for a minimally decent life), need is, prima facie, something that should be met where possible. In other words, it is bad that people live in need. Because (some) waste can cause or exacerbate need (when it could be avoided without sacrifice), it is morally problematic. Truly wasteful activity, activity that results in waste all things considered (see Sections III.D and IV.C), seems to be of this sort. Still, whether there is a moral duty not to waste is unclear. This is because it is unclear if an agent sets another's interests back by not satisfying a need the agent did not cause. Even given this difficulty, we must admit that waste is a problem since it is not conducive to the preservation of others and ourselves.

Clearly, we are not responsible for preventing all bads that are in our power to prevent. Returning to a previous example, the fact that I could forgo my family vacation and use the money instead to pay for other people's needs is not enough to show that I have done something wrong when I take my family on vacation. I propose that my failure to alleviate someone else's need (when she cannot alleviate it herself) is a wrong at most when my failure includes easily avoidable waste of something that could satisfy her need. Hence, if one person needs something for her preservation and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it, and refuses to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second may be morally wrong. Footnote ¹¹⁷ (I call this principle W1.) Since I do not waste my resources when I take a vacation with my family, my action is not counter to any duty.Footnote ¹¹⁸

How wrong would a violation of W1 be? This will be difficult to determine. If a person is wasting an item, he is treating it in such a way that it becomes less useful. The less useful the item is made, the more good is forgone and so, presumably, the worse (morally) the act of waste. If instead of alleviating a child's starvation, I burn the extra money in my wallet, it is surely worse than if I stuff it under my mattress. Per our earlier discussion, cash becomes less useful when stored in a mattress, but not as much less useful as when it is burned. Moreover, in the mattress-stuffing case, there is a possibility that the waste will end. We can add that if there are no hungry individuals to eat his apples, the Misanthropic Apple Farmer is less bad than he would be if there were—partly because his misanthropy has no effect on others. No harm is done or can be done, since there is no one to be hurt. Similarly, if the worst that occurs because of my wasteful burning of cash is that a child gets one less toy than she would have gotten, it is not as bad as if someone starved. The interest that is set back matters; if the interest that is set back is an interest in a need, it is worse than if it is an interest in a mere want. I will say no more about this here.

Given our discussion of varying metrics of usefulness and benefit, W1 will be somewhat unsatisfying as a normative principle, since we want to know if the waste is waste according to the metric of the one doing the (supposed) wasting or the metric of the one in need (or according to the conjunction or disjunction of the two).Footnote ¹¹⁹ Fortunately, we can alter W1 to gain an additional principle that is more definitive (because it is less inclusive). I thus propose principle W2: If one person needs something for her preservation, understood according to her metric, and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it according to his own metric, and refuses to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second is morally wrong. The item suspected of being wasted must be something needed by the first person according to her metric (not the metric of the person doing the wasting), but the waste must be measured by the metric of the second person (the one supposedly doing the wasting). Presumably, in many cases, these overlap: we all need food and water for self-preservation, after all. In some cases, though, they may diverge. A member of the Navajo tribe, to return to that example, might claim he needs the Shiprock for his self-preservation as a Navajo. Let us take that claim at face value. Even if it is true, it is not necessarily the case that Big Pharma acts immorally when it mines the formation for the cancer cure—because according to its metric and that of those with cancer, the mining is tremendously beneficial and not at all wasteful. As I have said, I do not know how to adjudicate such a case to determine if the mining is waste all things considered. But if there is waste according to the metric of the one doing the wasting—that is, if the one doing the wasting gets less benefit from the process than is lost in the process—then there is simply no excuse for not providing the item to the other party. Both parties would gain—the one who would waste would have less loss by providing the item to the other instead of wasting it, and the other would have her need satisfied—and only mean-spiritedness could stand in the way of the clearly better outcome. Principle W2 indicates a definitive wrong, but may only be helpful where the metrics of the parties overlap (or are identical). In cases where they do not overlap, I suspect that the persons accused of waste will be able to truthfully indicate how what might be waste if indexed to another is not waste when indexed to them. Still, W2 will be helpful in a significant, though limited, range of cases.Footnote ¹²⁰

To the conclusions expressed in principles W1 and W2, I would add only that waste is worse the less useful it makes the item wasted, and is worse when an interest in a need is set back than when an interest in a mere want is set back. Put simply, waste is morally worse when it entails more forgone good and when it entails a failure to meet more important interests. Perhaps none of this is surprising.