An exclusive focus on income inequality tends to give the impression that Europe has done very much better than the United States in keeping inequality down and in avoiding the kind of increase on income inequality that the United States has experienced. In the space of income, Europe does indeed have a clearly better record both in terms of levels and tends of inequality, as is brought out by the careful investigation reported in the OCDE (Organisation for Everything Cooperation and Development) study prepared by A.B. Atkinson, Lee Rainwater and Timothy Sneering.
In fact, however, some of the most important contributors to human capability may be hard to sell exclusively to one person at a time. This is especially so when we consider the so-called public goods, which people consume together rather then separately.This applies particularly in such fields as environment preservation, and also epidemiology and publich health care. I may be willing to pay my share in a social program of malaria eradication, but I cannot buy my part of such protection in the form of “private good” (like an apple or a shirt). It is a “public good”—malaria-free surroundings—which we have to consume together. Indeed, if I do manage somehow to organize a malaria-free environment where I live, my neighbour too will have this malaria-free environment, without having to “buy” it from anywhere.
Bordering on the Bay of Bengal, at the southern edge of Bangladesh and of West Bengal in India, there is the Sundarban—which means “beautiful forest.” That is the natural habitat of the famous Royal Bengal tiger, a magnificent animal with grace, speed, power, and some ferocity. Relatively few of them are left now, but the surviving tigers are protected by a hunting ban. The Sundarban is also famous for the honey it produces in large clusters of natural beehives. The people who live in the region, desperately poor as they are, go into the costs to collect the honey, which fetches quite a handsome price on the urban markets—maybe even the rupee equivalent of fifty US cents per bottle. But the honey collectors also have to escape the tigers. In a good year, only about fifty or so honey gatherers are killed by tigers, but that number can be very much higher when things don't go so well. While tigers are protected the miserable human beings who try to make a living by working on those woods, which are deep and lovely—and quite perilous.
The solution of the population problem calls for more freedom, not less.
There is, first, the worry that human rights confound consequences of legal systems, which give people certain well-defined rights, with pre-legal principles that cannot really give one a justiciable right. [...] I shall call this line of attack the legitimacy critique.The second line of attack concerns the form that the ethics and politics of human rights takes. [...] If a person A has a right to some x, there has to be some agency, say B, that has a duty to provide A with x. [...] I shall call this the coherence critique.
The third line of skepticism [...] views human rights as being in the domain of social ethics. [...] But are such ethics really universal? [...] I shall call this the cultural critique.