“From each according to his[her] ability…”

This week I cannot help but think about the Marxist slogan “From each according to his[her] ability, to each according to his[her] need”. The slogan popped up as a response to my work comparing two different Argentinean environmental groups and their demands and suggestions for how to care for the environment, where one focus on individual responsibility through choice of transportation, recycling and use of electricity, and the other demands that the government enforces environmental regulations. The slogan came to my mind this morning after I read an abstract about equity in the allocation of responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or how the right to emit greenhouse gases should be allocated (Baer 2009). In the article Baer argues that the responsibility should be based on ability, or capability, to deal with the emissions, which pays attention to intra-national distributional equity. When applying this to the two Argentinean cases I compare, it means that it is not adequate to suggest that someone who doesn’t even have a car, chose public transportation instead of private means. This example about the relevance of suggestions for how to care for the environment may seem very obvious, or even ridiculous, but it is however a concrete example that was given at the Earth day in 2009 from several of the participating organizations. It probably indicates to whom the event was directed to, the middle and upper classes rather than the poorer segments, but it gives attention to how to distribute responsibility in a fair way.
In conclusion it is obvious that distribution of responsibilities and rights, and ideas about fairness, can be based on different ideologies, for example as indicated through the two sets of human rights categories (Political and civil vs Social, economic and cultural rights). To move from a national level, to the distribution of income within countries, seems like a fruitful approach when discussing responsibilities and rights since it pays attention to difference.

References:
Baer, Paul With Sivan Kartha, Tom Athanasiou, and Eric Kemp-Benedict (Forthcoming) “Greenhouse Development Rights: A Proposal for a Fair Global Climate Treaty”, Ethics, Place and Environment.