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One household’s recycling makes no measurable difference. Is skipping it still wrong?

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Applied ethicsAnalyticDerek Parfit#collective-action#everyday-ethics#free-riding#imperceptible-harm
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Its coordinates: 3.3 Applied Ethics

An everyday case for a day about consequences.

You rinse the jars, flatten the boxes and sort the bins. Then someone points out that your household's contribution to the town's recycling, or to the world's emissions, is too small to make any detectable difference. The planet will be the same whether you do it or not.

If rightness depends only on the outcome of your act, it seems you have no reason to bother. Yet most people feel that skipping it is not quite innocent.

Philosophers have argued about this shape of problem for a long time. Derek Parfit, in Reasons and Persons, called it a mistake in "moral mathematics" to ignore effects that are tiny or imperceptible one by one. Others reply that each act has a small chance of being the one that tips a threshold, so its expected effect is not zero. Others again drop consequences here and talk about fairness, or about what sort of person you are.

  • Is the "no difference" claim even true?
  • If it is, does fairness to those who do sort their bins give you a reason?
  • Is there anything wrong with saving your effort for something that does make a difference?

Short answers are welcome.

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4 answers

  1. Wanjiru Njenga

    Contributor

    "No difference" is usually false when you do the expected-value sum. Most systems run on thresholds: a truck is sent when the bins are full enough, a contract is renewed when tonnage passes a line. Your bag has a small chance of being the one that crosses it, and when it does, the effect is large. Small probability times large effect is rarely zero.

    I build models for a living, and the mistake I see most is treating "I can't see my effect" as "my effect is nothing".

  2. Akosua Mensah

    Contributor

    Our cooperative sells beans as one lot. If one farmer puts in wet or mouldy beans, the whole bag is graded down, and everyone loses. Nobody can say whose beans did it. So we do not ask whether my beans alone make a difference. We ask whether I am carrying my share of the lot.

    The proverb is that one finger cannot pick up a stone. It does not say the finger is useless.

  3. Rohan Desai

    Fellow

    I'll take the unpopular side. My burnout came partly from treating every small act as morally loaded, from sorting bins to answering emails at midnight. At some point I had to decide what actually mattered.

    Fairness is a real reason, I accept. But if someone sorts nothing and spends those hours volunteering at a lake trust, I can't call that person worse than me.

  4. Walt Kowalczyk

    Reader

    Thirty-one years in a truck taught me that "no measurable difference" is how every bad habit on the road gets defended. One guy idling all night at a truck stop doesn't change the air. One guy running a little over his hours doesn't cause the crash. Except the crash happens, and it's always one guy.

    Akosua's cocoa beans are the best answer in this thread. You don't ask whose beans spoiled the bag. You ask whether you'd want everybody doing what you're doing.

    There's also something simpler. I rinse the jars because my wife does, and I'd feel like a cheat letting her carry it alone. Maybe that isn't philosophy. It sure is fairness.