How Law Changes the Environmental Mind: An Experimental Study of the Effect of Legal Norms on Moral Perceptions and Civic Enforcement

This paper examines how different legal instruments affect people's moral intuitions and willingness to engage in social enforcement in the field of environmental law. These instruments vary in terms of their governance technique, the process through which they were enacted, and their allocation of enforcement responsibilities. Their effect on citizens' moral evaluation and emotional reaction to corporate polluting behaviour are examined, based on an experimental survey of a representative sample of 1400 individuals in Israel.
Our findings demonstrate that their design influences people's level of moral and emotional resentment when faced by environmentally problematic behaviour, as well as their motivation to engage in private enforcement. The design of the regulatory instrument could thus generate biases in social reactions to polluting behaviour, irrespective of its actual ecological adverse effect. We analyse the moral and psychological mechanisms which underlie these effects and explore their various policy implications.     

Motivating Environmental Action in a Pluralistic Regulatory Environment: An Experimental Study of Framing,Crowding Out,and Institutional Effects in the Context of Recycling Policies

In designing a recycling policy, the regulator must choose among multiple instruments. Our study seeks to address the linkages between the choice of regulatory instruments and institutional frameworks, people's intrinsic motivation, and various attitudinal measures. We examined the behavioral repercussions of several instruments that are used widely in recycling regulation, using an experimental survey on a representative sample of the Israeli population (N = 1,800 participants). Our findings suggest that the design of recycling policies should be sensitive to the framing effects of varied regulatory instruments and to the interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on the desirability and efficacy of the law. In particular, we point out the potential regulatory advantage of using deposit schemes over other instruments and of using private organizations as regulatory agents. Drawing on these findings, we discuss the potential value of using differentiated regulatory policies to provide incentives for recycling in societies characterized by broad heterogeneity in levels of intrinsic motivation.     

WMD: The Career of a Concept

The danger posed by “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) was the Bush administration's chief justification for invading Iraq. Amid the din of the chorus that ceaselessly repeated this phrase in 2002–2003, hardly anyone stopped to ask: what is “WMD” anyway? Is it not a mutable social construct rather than a timeless, self-evident concept? Guided by Nietzsche's view of the truth as a “mobile army of metaphors [and] metonyms… which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,” we present a history of the metonym WMD. We describe how it was coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1937, and subsequently how its meaning was “transposed” and “enhanced” throughout Cold War arms negotiations, in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and in US domestic law. We also discuss how, in the run-up to the Iraq war, “WMD” did not merely describe an Iraqi threat; it was rather “embellished poetically and rhetorically” in ways that produced and inflated the threat.