Mark Bryant Budolfson
Princeton University, Northern Arizona University
Thursday, November 6th, 2009
Here is an intuitive idea: If you know that a course of action would be costly to you and completely futile, then you aren't required to take that course of action. I argue that this intuitive idea is true when properly understood, and that it has a number of important consequences for example, it implies that you are under no obligation to lower your carbon footprint, to stop eating meat, or to do many other things that liberal conventional wisdom claims that you have an obligation to do.
However, at the same time, I argue that our government has an obligation to enact policies to lower pollution and protect animals from abuse, etc., partly because we as individuals lack the corresponding obligations. I argue that all of this has important consequences for political theory, as well as for the more practical question of what our government should require of us, and what the scope of our government should be.