Meantime, as to the Summers memo: his statement wouldn’t be philosophically interesting (or would only be trivially so after, e.g., Rawls, Sen, Williams) if he was just identifying the value of their health with the value of their labor on the market. He realizes this, as is evidenced by his statement:

“The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.”

Given his other remarks, on, e.g., price elasticity for clean environment, you could very easily interpret this as saying: “Look, it sounds coldly utilitarian and sinister. But while it may be utilitarian, it’s in the favor of those getting ‘dumped’ on—their net transfer of wealth is going to be out of all proportion to their decreased welfare (and most likely their welfare, even accounting for negative effects of pollution transfer, will improve).

Now, he could be wrong and I could be overly generous—and I’m certainly not leaving out the severe criticism to be made from stance of “we’ll decide what trade-offs they make”—but I think it’s not a wholly evil statement & can see how it touches on everything from distributive justice (Rawls’ ‘basket of goods’ on multiple levels) to fundamental problems with our intuitions about utilitarianism.

Well, I will tell you that what they offer is a careful balanced and reasoned critique, not a rant, and that they use the core considerations Summers raises to explore the relationship of different values in public policy. Just to reassure you here’s a quote from page 20:

“The uproar caused by the memo suggests that many people are not willing to accept its conclusion. But this may be a thoughtless first reaction. Why shouldn’t the World Bank encourage migration of dirty industries? Since the argument is logically valid….”