Unjust noise

Necessary noise

Noise shares some characteristics with other forms of pollution'. It invades an environment and is damaging and foreign to it. Pollution is bad for a number of reasons, among which are that it destroys or diminishes some good (some place of natural beauty or the health of a body of water, for instance), it harms people (through poisoning them or their food, for example), and it sometimes harms future persons. We tolerate pollution when it is a by-product of some important collective good (the production of energy, for example) and when the following counterfactual conditional statement holds true: if the good could be produced without the accompanying pollution it would, providing the cost of eliminating it was not so great that, on balance, the good produced would be outweighed. Noise is like other forms of pollution in these ways, except that noise does not affect future persons (at least, directly). However, it does diminish some good (the good of quietness) and the counterfactual conditional statement should hold (except, as I will argue below, in the case of reasonable noise').

The environmental justice movement and much recent writing on the fairness of the distribution of environmental goods has alerted us to the many ways in which minority communities and poor communities suffer an unfair burden of environmental harm.8 While this literature makes a highly convincing case for this conclusion the philosophical premises on which these justice claims are made seem to me to be under-theorized.9 Furthermore, as far as I know, the general problem of noise is not one of the topics taken up in this literature, except for a recent paper establishing the disproportionate noise burden that a largely poor Hispanic community suffered from activities at a local airport (Sobotta, Campbell & Owens 2007). But, once again, establishing the fact of a disproportionate burden is only the first step in arguing for its injustice.

Necessary noise, then, is the noise necessary to realize some collective, public good. Obviously, necessary' here denotes the amount of noise required to bring about the collective good and no more. The measure of necessary noise will be the least amount of noise required to bring about the collective good in question. Necessary noise can thus be defined as unwanted but necessary sound'. Now, it would be easy to leave the argument right here and claim that, provided the good in question outweighs the bad consequences of the noise, necessary noise is just noise. This would be a straightforward consequentialist argument that merely summed utilities and subtracted disutilities. However, I think that the question of justice requires that we look also at the distribution of the burden of noise as well as how noise affects citizens' rights, freedoms and capacities. Once we do this, then more interesting and challenging questions arise. It would be useful to begin here with an example.

Airport activities are a significant source of public noise. In most countries regulations control the numbers of take-offs and landings, the time of day that these occur as well as the type of aircraft that can be used. Nonetheless, noise continues to be a burden to those who live near airports and along the route of flight paths. Airport noise is comparable to other transport noise (cars and trains) and also to industrial noises from factories and construction noises. I assume here that such transport activities constitute a collective good and so fall into the category of unwanted but necessary sounds.

A recent large study that pooled data from three countries has shown that exposure to aircraft and traffic noise significantly affects school children's reading comprehension abilities. The research concluded that the [F]indings were consistent across the three countries, which varied with respect to a range of socioeconomic and environmental variables, thus offering robust evidence of a direct exposure-effect relation between aircraft noise and reading comprehension.' (Clark et al. 2006:36). This finding is important because it clearly demonstrates that the children in this study bore the burden of public noise required for the realization of the collective good that air transportation provides.10 This also provides grounds for agreeing that the nature of the distribution of the burden is important when assessing the question of whether such a burden is just.

What is required at this point in the argument is some account of injustice. As I mentioned earlier, I am not going to offer an argument against interpreting injustice as disutility and then weigh the disutility of noise burdens (including the disutility of distributional effects) against the utility of the associated collective good. Instead I am going to apply a liberal standard that, I believe, better captures the requirements of justice and, when applied to particular cases, better captures our intuitions.11 Liberals such as Rawls privilege rights and freedoms over utility maximization. Therefore, rights serve as side-constraints' in the pursuit of the good. More recent work has focused not only on rights and freedoms but also on citizens' capacities to exercise those freedoms and rights. On this account, someone is harmed when their basic rights and freedoms are threatened or the exercise of these rights and freedoms are unfairly obstructed, or when their capacity to develop or exercise these rights and freedoms is diminished.12 Rights and freedoms specify, in an abstract fashion, the benefits of citizenship. The diminishment of these rights and freedoms thus increases, unfairly, the burden of social cooperation and for this reason such a diminishment is prima facie unjust. The diminishment of a citizen's capacity to exercise his or her rights and freedoms needs to be significant and systematic to count as unjust. Furthermore, this diminishment must be either caused by the activities of public institutions or amenable to remedy by public institutions.

The argument thus states that a noise is unjust when it harms someone in the liberal sense specified above. The study of the effects of noise on reading comprehension among children mentioned earlier is therefore a clear instance in which an argument can be made that the burden of noise that these children suffer is unjust. It is precisely their capacities for equal citizenship that are threatened by the airport noise they are burdened with. The harm is significant since it affects their long-term life prospects, and it is systematic because it is regular in its occurrence and connected to a planned, long-term and purposeful activity, and it is institutional, that is, connected to the activities of one of the major institutions in society (the activities of the market). Since public institutions regulate noise and also since they have the means for ameliorating or compensating for the effects of noise, the noise burden that the children suffer meets all the criteria of an injustice. The state therefore has a prima facie duty to act to prevent such an injustice.

The significance of this conclusion is that it identifies noise in this case as being more than a mere nuisance. Although there is reason to control and prevent the nuisance of noise, and most towns and cities do regulate noise as a nuisance, the normative claim of an injustice is much more urgent than the claim of a nuisance. So, while the airport noise in the example lies below the threshold of an immoral use of noise, it does however constitute an injustice and not a mere nuisance. We can conclude this section by saying that some people bear an unjust burden of public noise even when such noise is necessary noise in the sense defined above; the good that necessary noise is associated with does not cancel out claims of justice.

Private noise

The most prevalent and most complained about private noise is neighbor noise'. Private noise is not usually significant, systematic or institutional, and its sufferers are particular persons rather than general categories of persons or the public at large. Private noises are annoyances' rather than threats to our rights and freedoms. This is not to say that a neighbor, for example, could not use noise to curtail someone's rights, but the class of noises I am concerned with here would normally be classified as nuisances and annoyances by law rather than as crimes. When one suffers the annoyance of the noise of a neighbor's television there is no injustice committed. However, private noises can be classified as unjust if those who suffer the burden of them do so because they share some justice-relevant' feature. The following case will serve to illustrate this point. According to data from the American Housing Survey,

The study concluded that Income is often directly related to environmental quality, especially when low-income samples are contrasted with samples that are not poor,' and that environmental quality is inversely related to multiple physical and psychological health outcomes.'13

It is possible to argue in this instance that the private noises that low-income citizens suffer rise to the level of an injustice since the noise burden is directly correlated with income.14 Income is what Rawls calls a primary good, one of the basic measures of how benefits and burdens are distributed in society. A lack of income can be an injustice in two ways: Firstly, (following Rawls) the distribution of income can be unfair because it violates the difference principle. And, secondly, a distribution of income can be unjust if it affects the worth of liberty' for some citizens, that is, their capacity for exercising their rights and freedoms.15 It is thus plausible to argue that where citizens suffer a greater burden of private noise because of their relative lack of income and, where this poverty is itself an injustice, then the consequences of that poverty (suffering higher levels of private noise) is also an injustice. Similarly, whereas hunger itself is not an injustice (it may be a misfortune), hunger that is a result of an injustice is also unjust. This is an indirect argument for the injustice of private noise and so we can conclude that private noise can be indirectly unjust.

Reasonable noise

All the noises we have considered so far are ones that we would eliminate if possible; they are sounds that are unwanted. Aircraft that make no noise and quiet neighbors, for example, are both desirable from everyone's point of view. However, there are some sounds that are wanted by some but not by others. Neighbor noise is a clear enough example of this. Some sounds and noises, though, are associated with social, cultural and religious practices that have a claim to a different standard than annoying private noises and which also have a different claim to justice than necessary noise. Here, I have in mind the sounds of church bells, calls to prayer, and music and rituals that form part of the practice of a particular way of life for some citizens in a democratic society. The question of what attitude to adopt towards these kinds of noises is particularly pressing in pluralistic societies where groups of citizens pursue different conceptions of the good. The sounds associated with these practices are clearly wanted by the practitioners and, furthermore, are often essential to the realization of the good that they pursue. On the other hand, for those citizens who have a different conception of the good, these sounds are often perceived as noise. I want to argue that these noises, that I will call reasonable noises', are different from private noises. Secondly, I will argue that justice requires that we should be maximally tolerant of such noises because they are reasonable. One way reasonable noise differs from necessary noise is that reasonable noise is essential to the good aimed at and so the counterfactual that applies to necessary noise (that if the good could be realized without the noise it would) does not apply to reasonable noise. In the remaining part of this article I argue that reasonable noise is just noise. I will end with a brief consideration of how we might treat instances of unreasonable noise.

Rawls distinguishes between reasonable and unreasonable comprehensive doctrines. A comprehensive doctrine is a more or less coherent assemblage of moral, religious and metaphysical beliefs that form a conception of the good. The idea of reasonableness specifies those comprehensive doctrines that form part of an agreement on the principles of justice that govern the basic institutions of a democratic society. In other words, those comprehensive doctrines that (for their own reasons) assent to, and affirm the foundational political ideas of a democratic society are reasonable'. The major religions, cultural, political and ideological movements in society constitute such comprehensive doctrines (e.g. Catholic, Marxist, liberal, existentialist, etc.).16

Now, given a plurality of such doctrines that overlap in their agreement on the basic principles of justice, it should be obvious that what is sound to some people will be noise to others when citizens engage in the activities associated with their reasonable comprehensive doctrines. How are we to regard these noises? We should assume that they are not immoral, of course, and also that they are not harmful in a way specified earlier that would make them unjust; that is, that they do not diminish the rights and freedoms of citizens in significant, systematic and institutional ways. That would seem to leave us with only the option of regarding these noises as private noises and to classify them as nuisances. However, I think there are good liberal and democratic reasons for arguing that such noises deserve a higher level of toleration from citizens in a pluralistic democratic state.

The reasons why citizens should accept the additional burden of reasonable noise are the following: Firstly, reasonable comprehensive doctrines, and the practices and activities that accompany them, are essential to the stability of democratic societies. It is these doctrines that form the ideological foundation for citizens' support of the principles that govern the basic institutions of their society. While all agree, ideally, with these principles of liberty and fairness, their reasons for doing so are anchored in their respective comprehensive doctrines. It is therefore important that these doctrines flourish. Secondly, citizens' sense of their own worth and their capacity to engage with society as a whole also rests, in large part, on the resources they acquire from their communities. Now, community identity and comprehensive doctrines do not, and should not, track each other; citizens who have different conceptions of the good come together to form communities. However, the broadly moral character of these communities (insofar as they are not mere modus vivendi arrangements) rests on the comprehensive doctrines that citizens subscribe to. Finally, the rituals, practices and activities associated with comprehensive doctrines are essential to their existence. Comprehensive doctrines are evolving and changing, of course, but also have histories and traditions that help engage citizens in the ideological structures that support them. Taken together, these considerations provide, I think, grounds for treating noise connected with reasonable comprehensive doctrines differently from mere private noise. It is precisely the importance of reasonable comprehensive doctrines to the stability of democratic society and to the flourishing of democratic citizens that we should treat reasonable noise as public noise and apply a different standard. The first two reasons set out in this paragraph do not apply to unreasonable comprehensive doctrines since they, by definition, do not sustain or support the principles of justice on which a liberal democratic society stands. Below, I will consider what our response should be to unreasonable noise.

I will look at two examples which I will argue can be considered reasonable noise and hence that each has a higher claim to our toleration. Here is the first example:

Now clearly, the authorities here are applying standards that apply to private noises that are nuisances. What is not in dispute is whether the noise is annoying to those who do not share the comprehensive doctrine of the Catholic Church; it clearly is. What is in question, though, is whether the burden of this annoyance should be borne by citizens.

To begin with, we need to note that there is a difference between saying that a noise is candidate for toleration and saying that any amount of noise that is reasonable' should be tolerated. So what are the criteria for a tolerable amount of reasonable noise? Firstly, one mark of reasonableness is that reasonable citizens are willing to engage with and compromise with one another, and that they generally abide by the agreements they make. In the example above, the church did in fact attempt to reach a compromise with local citizens and, furthermore, although 60 decibels is noticeably louder than 55 decibels (since sound is measured on a logarithmic scale), it is considerably less than 75 decibels. Secondly, the kind of noise is important when making judgments about reasonable noise. As we have seen, the loudness and the frequency of the noise (pure tones being more annoying, for example) as well as how often and at what time of day the noise is made and also the background environment are all important. One would also need to be persuaded that the particular noise in question is essential to the practice. This judgment would have to be made from within the perspective of the comprehensive doctrine and its history and traditions. While it might be as efficient—for instance, to email members of the congregation to remind them of a church service—the tradition of bell ringing is a clearly established part of Catholic Church ritual (see e.g. Malz 1985).

We can summarize the discussion by setting out four requirements of the Test of Reasonable Noise:

1. The noisy practice is connected with a reasonable comprehensive doctrine.
2. The practice is part of the history and traditions of that doctrine.
3. The practice is essential to the activity (as judged from within the perspective of that doctrine).
4. The reasonableness of the practitioners is evident in attempts to meet the concerns of other citizens.

We should note, however, that a noise that meets the test of reasonableness gives us only a prima facie reason to tolerate it. A noise that constituted a major nuisance' would cancel such a prima facie reason. It is tricky, of course, to say what a major nuisance' is, but hours of deafening bell ringing, for instance, probably counts as a major nuisance. So, reasonable noise should trump the nuisance of private noise all along the scale except at the top end. This is to say that at some high level private noises trump reasonable noises, although at lower levels reasonable noises trump private noises. (This perhaps requires a worked-out phenomenology of annoyance' and an argument to show the real harm of a great annoyance.)

The woolliness of the above claim shows that each case will, of course, be judged differently, but the point I am trying to establish here is that we should accept a higher burden of noise when the source of that noise is the activities associated with a reasonable comprehensive doctrine. The example given above seems to me to be just such a case. Finally, research has shown that people are less annoyed and more tolerant of noise when they understand why the noise is being made (study quoted in Langdon 1985: 152). People who received a regular circular explaining the activities of the local airport reported less annoyance than those did not receive the circulars. This suggests that public education about religious and cultural practices of others is important in ameliorating the annoyance of reasonable noise.17

The second example of a reasonable noise is one that is an indirect result of the activities associated with a reasonable comprehensive doctrine:

The noise of concern here does not come from the cultural practices themselves but from the activities that make those practices possible, such as traffic noise. Again, I would argue here that, insofar as such noise is essential to the practice, the noise is reasonable and consequently has special claim to citizens' forbearance. Once again, though, the reasonableness of practitioners is important and in the case of noise associated indirectly with the practices of reasonable comprehensive doctrines there are obviously more alternatives; after all, it is not part of the history and traditions of Hinduism that worshipers arrive at temple in SUVs. Therefore democratic citizens have an obligation to accept a greater burden of the noise associated with reasonable comprehensive doctrines, both noises directly associated with it and noises indirectly associated it.

Unreasonable noise

Finally, I will turn briefly to the matter of unreasonable noises. Protestant marches in Catholic neighborhoods in Northern Ireland are very noisy and the noise is an act of deliberate intimidation. The sectarian character of the Protestant Orange Order' makes it unreasonable and thus citizens in a democratic society have no reason to distinguish this noise from private noise and thus have no reason to accept the burdens of this noise. Similar considerations apply to neo-Nazi marches in Jewish neighborhoods, such as the notorious neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois. Setting aside other considerations such as the affect of these acts of intimidation of the freedoms, rights and capacities of their targets, we should apply the same noise standards to these marches as we would to someone playing loud music in his or her backyard and thus regard this noise not as reasonable, but as a nuisance. So, unreasonable noise is noise that has no special normative claim on our toleration and forbearance. Unreasonable noise is obviously not necessary noise since it is not connected to the realization of a collective good and thus it can only be regarded as private noise and subject to those standards.

Conclusion

I have argued that necessary noise can be unjust if it fails to meet the liberal standard of justice I have set out above. I have also argued that private noise can be unjust if citizens suffer it because of some justice-relevant' characteristic. Finally, I have argued that we should accept a higher burden of noise if that noise is connected to the practices and activities of a reasonable comprehensive doctrine.18