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You are the head of the McDowell County Commission in West Virginia. Your county has been hit hard by poverty over the past few decades due to the decrease in coal production. ABC Coal Company that still operates a large mine has applied for a permit to construct a large coal-generated power plant. The plant will mean 1000 jobs and the taxes it will generate will allow the county to revive many social services that have been lost in recent years. The sort of plant that will be built is a conventional 500 megawatt plant that will consume 1.4 million tons of coal a year (from ABC’s own mine). The problem is a new clean air and water act passed by Congress that will come into effect in 14 months. The new law sets limits on soot, smog, acid rain, toxic air emissions, and metal trailing, including arsenic, mercury, chromium, and cadmium. The tree huggers contend that these metals cause cancer and that the resulting air pollution will cause respiratory ailments and lead to global warming. The new plant as designed will not meet the new Federal guidelines.

ABC wants the environmental impact study fast tracked with a board of sympathetic scientists. ABC has even provided you with a confidential list of these scientists. They will produce a report in 3 months that will allow the permit to be issued in 6 months and ground breaking in 9 months. Any ongoing permit-approved projects have been grandfathered out of the new clean air and water act. The plant could be operational in 18 months. Your next election is in 22 months. There is one county commissioner who is against the project. He says that jobs are important, but so is the health of the environment. Your own father died of black lung disease at the age of 59. You are sensitive to the concerns for clean air and water, but people need to live. How could you turn down ABC and look your poverty-torn constituents in the eyes?

Analysis

The prudential perspective from the head commissioner’s vantage point has several elements. His or her job is in jeopardy if the power plant is not built. Being the head commissioner is crucial to this individual’s worldview perspective. This slant of the prudential viewpoint would be to get the ball rolling as soon as possible. The clock is ticking in order to achieve the “grandfathered status.” You must have a permit in hand and in the process of construction to get this. Thus, you should act immediately.

If we expand the prudential slightly there are more angles to consider. For one, the air quality in the county would become lower. This might hurt your slightly asthmatic daughter. It might also lower your own and your family’s life expectancy. However, though your father died early, your grandfather (who did not work underground) lived to be 80! Black lung is a miner’s hazard. Topside, the air is so much cleaner than down below (especially before they had the modern ventilation systems) that you are inclined to discount this risk as theoretical, but not practical. This would include your thoughts about other county residents.

If we look from the perspective of ethical non-cognitivism, we have to isolate the culture of coal mining in West Virginia. This is an arena of people with a strong sense of individualism. They want to be able have a decent job so that they can take care of their families. The current economy has eroded these possibilities while not replacing them with others. Under this shared community worldview the most important outcome is jobs. The new plant promises jobs. The new plant should be built.

Virtue ethics (here interpreted as anti-realist) would suggest that the key character trait fortitude is most important here. Generations of West Virginians have had to surmount incredible odds in order to put food on the table and raise their families. Men in the mines have had to endure great pain, and so have their spouses who have had to struggle with little in order to keep life moving forward. When faced with the downside of a little air pollution that (even if the science is right) will shorten life only by a few years, the historic character of the people in the region is strongly in favor of building the power plant. After all, the downside is minimal compared with life underground. You will not get black lung from the light pollution of the power plant.

Contractarianism would center on what sort of laws and societal social contracts exist. In individually oriented West Virginia the scale is slanted toward each person in the county. If you build the plant and the people sign up for the jobs, then is that not an indication that the people want this outcome? If they were against it, they would just stay at home.

Ethical intuitionism might side with either position according to the sort of moral maxims brought forward, and how they are popularly received.

Utilitarianism would be forced to focus on the general happiness. But whose happiness? Will it be the happiness of the county? Will it be the happiness of the state? Will it be the happiness of the country? Will it be the happiness of the world? And once this is determined, then the subsequent question is what is the time frame? Are we talking about 3 years, 30 years, or 300 years? The answer to the utilitarian calculation may be different according to how one parses the population to be examined and how one understands the relevant time frame. Under most of these scenarios (given a time frame of at least 50 years and a scope that covers the wind dispersement of a majority of the pollutants and heavy metal contaminants) the risks will outweigh the benefits (even for the county involved). Therefore, utilitarianism will reject the building of the power plant.

Deontology (since Kant) has been very keen to think of duties in terms of thought experiments that create models that are universal in scope. In the current example, the operative question might be: “What if every county in America were to build a conventional coal-powered energy plant?” Could we do so without logical contradiction? Here we tread in uncharted territory. According to most scientists, if every county in the United States built such a power plant the amount of pollution (both air and heavy metals) would be so great that people would begin dying in high numbers, causing high social and political unrest. High social and political unrest is called anarchy. Anarchy is the breakdown of government. There would be no cohesive society under this description. Therefore, the model is inconsistent. Inconsistent models are illogical. All illogical models are to be rejected. Therefore, deontology would create a prohibition against building the power plant.