Automobility, liberalism, and the ethics of driving

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 77-90

  Rajan, Sudhir Chella ^a  

^a TELLUS INSTITUTE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33947418947     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200729130     Document Type: Review

References (41)

1. "The Perils of Complacency," The Economist, 21 December 1996 (emphasis added).
2. James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).
3. Ralph E. Heimlich and William D. Anderson, Development at the Urban Fringe and Beyond: Impacts on Agriculture and Rural Land, Agricultural Economic Report No. AER803 (Washington, D.C.: USDA Economic Research Service, 2001).
4. Stacey C. Davis and Susan W. Diegel, Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 23 (Oak Ridge, Tenn: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2003).
5. Mark Delucchi, The Annualized Social Cost of Motor Vehicle Use in the U.S., 1990-1991: Summary of Theory, Data, Methods, and Results (Davis, Calif: ITS, University of California, Davis, 1997).
6. John Pucher, "Transportation Paradise: Realm of the Nearly Perfect Automobile? A Review of 'Driving Forces,'" Transportation Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1999): 115-20.
7. Kenneth R. Schneider, Autokind vs. Mankind; An Analysis of Tyranny, a Proposal for Rebellion, a Plan for Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 1971).
8. Reid H. Ewing, "Characteristics, Causes, and Effects of Sprawl: a Literature Review," Environment and Resource Issues 21, no. 2 (1994): 1-15.
9. Jane Holt Kay, Asphalt Nation: How The Automobile Took Over America, And How We Can Take it Back (New York: Crown Publishers, 1997).
10. Loren Lomasky, "Autonomy and Automobility," The Independent Review 2, no. 1 (1997): 5-28.
11. James A. Dunn, Jr., The Automobile, Its Enemies, and the Politics of Mobility (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998).
12. James E. Krier and Edmund Ursin, Pollution and Policy: A Case Essay on California and Federal Experience with Motor Vehicle Air Pollution, 1940-1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
13. Sudhir C. Rajan, "A Fine Balance: Automobile Pollution Control Strategies in California," in Melanie Dupuis, Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
14. Sudhir C. Rajan, "Climate Change Dilemma: Technology, Social Change or Both? An Examination of Long-term Transport Policy Choices in the United States," Energy Policy 34, no. 6 (2006): 664-79.
15. William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
16. Sudhir C. Rajan, The Enigma of Automobility: Democratic Politics and Pollution Control (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).
17. James J. McCarthy, Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Contribution of Working Group II to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
18. Global warming, of course, is the result of a combination of fossil-fuel burning activities, transportation being one of them. Including all such activities, the average resident in the U.S. generates about three times the greenhouse gas emissions of the average human, or eleven times the emissions of the average resident in the developing world. See http://earthtrends.wri.org.
19. Robert Vitalis, "Black Gold, White Crude: An Essay on American Exceptionalism, Hierarchy, and Hegemony in the Gulf," Diplomatic History 26, no. 2 (1988): 185-213.
20. Delucchi, The Annualized Social Cost.
21. Other significant costs not included in the analysis are the costs of "sprawl" and the non-monetary costs of the highway infrastructure generally, and the "security" costs (e.g., the Persian Gulf wars) of maintaining automobility in the U.S. on people elsewhere.
22. Delucchi, The Annualized Social Cost, p. 27.
23. John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty," in Mill, On Liberty (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 114.
24. Alan Gewirth, "Two Types of Cost-Benefit Analysis," in Donald Scherer, Upstream/Downstream: Issues in Environmental Ethics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 1990).
25. Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 26..
26. Gewirth, "Two Types of Cost-Benefit Analysis," p. 217.
27. Ibid., p. 221 (emphasis added).
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Edmond Toy and James K. Hammitt, "Safety Impacts of SUVs, Vans, and Pickup Trucks in Two-Vehicle Crashes," Risk Analysis 23, no. 4 (2003): 641-50.
31. Anil Agarwal et al., Green Politics (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1999).
32. Deryck Beyleveld, "Gewirth and Kant on Justifying the Supreme Principle of Morality," in Michael Boylan, Gewirth: Critical Essays On Action, Rationality, and Community (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
33. These questions are not unlike ethical issues relating to addiction that emerge in the case of smoking, although in the latter instance, "necessity" becomes more ambiguous given the levels of public support available for withdrawing oneself from the activity. See, for instance, Robert E. Goodin, "The Ethics of Smoking," Ethics 99, no. 3 (1989): 574-624. Nevertheless, such organizational resources are hardly even conceived of for automobility; in fact, funding for alternatives such as transit appear to be on the decline.
34. Mill, On Liberty, p. 127.
35. George Kateb, "The Resources of American Liberalism Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics," Political Theory 12, no. 3 (1984): 331-60.
36. John W. Meyer, "Myths of Socialization and Personality," in Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery, Reconstructing Individualism (Stanford, Calif.: University of Stanford Press, 1986).
37. Bonnie Steinbock, "Drunk Driving," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (1985): 278-95.
38. D.N. Husak, "Is Drunk Driving a Serious Offense?" Philosophy and Public Affairs 23, no. 1 (1994): 52-73.
39. Roberto M. Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
40. ibid., p. 4.
41. Social theorists have lately come to analyze automobility in recent years (e.g., Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift and John Urry, Automobilities (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2005), but their analyses have by and large focused on the phenomenon as a network effect, rather than its political dimensions.