An admittedly outlandish conservation question.

[triangleman]

There is a chemical company doing work in a small island nation in which all inhabitants share the same lake as a water supply. As luck would have it for this chemical company, they were able to purchase the land from the island's republican government.

As chance would further have it, the company is entirely owned by a dying businessman with no family or close connections, it does not matter to him whether any PR fiascos will occur due to his island operations, he will be dead by then and the business will pass down to some functionary he privately does not care about.

His plant is designed to produce the last of a kind of widget which will soon become obsolete. The market makes the most profitable move to open this factory for a period of time and then shut down. The highest earnings can also be made by taking advantage of the island's nonexistent environmental regulations.

During the plant's operation it becomes a major enviironmental risk due to toxic sludge being dumped into the lake.

What is the ethical status of the following two scenarios -

1) The government passes a law enforcing strict environmental regulations on private land that were not needed before hand

2) The government participates in crony capitalism and simply starts buying bottled water (at prices the countries poor can not afford) resulting in a group of poor poeple sabatoging the plant, maing it inoperable but killing no one.

3) The government chooses to simply nationalize the lake, resulting in the plant shutting down

[softwareNerd]

1) The government passes a law enforcing strict environmental regulations on private land that were not needed before hand

In this country, if someone injected poison into another person's bottles of water would the law prosecute for attempted murder or murder?

[Nicky]

The answer to the problem of someone violating someone else's rights by polluting is the same as the answer to the problem of someone violating rights through other means: passing laws that will punish anyone who will do it. In this case, the answer you left out is 4. Arrest the one criminal, shut down his plant, and leave everyone else alone. Why would you need laws interfering with other businesses?

Your argument for keeping a close eye on every business (through regulations) because "what if one guy does something bad" is not a new argument, it's the same argument used in favor of fascism all the time. And it can also be applied equally to any other crime, not just crimes committed by businessmen.

Let's say someone is dying and doesn't care about what happens next, so he kills his wife. Or kills some other people. Would you suggest that the government should then post a policeman into everyone's house 24/7, as a response? If not, then why single out businessmen?

P.S. A regulation usually involves not only the banning of a crime, but also a system of checking up on all businesses (either through forcing them to report their book-keeping to the government, or creating a bureaucracy of inspectors and permits for every action a business may take).

If instead you just mean that the island should pass a law making it a crime to dump toxic chemicals into the lake, that is fine. That's not a regulation, that's a legitimate law.

Edited October 19, 2012 by Nicky