John Locke vs Jeremy Bentham on Data Center Water and Air: Why These Two, and Why Now
A behind-the-scenes look at the debate, the sources, and why the philosopher of the common well and the man who would price everything disagree about the aquifer under a server farm.
Why This Topic
A large warehouse uses about 3,000 gallons of water a day. In a dataset published this September by the Pacific Institute, the typical data center drew about 121,000. Large evaporatively cooled sites draw between one and five million gallons a day, roughly the water of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. Most of that comes from municipal drinking water systems, and much of it leaves as vapor.
The air side is bigger in dollars. One estimate put the health damage from data center related air pollution at about 5 billion dollars in 2023. Projections for 2028 run from 11.7 to 20.9 billion dollars a year.
The forecasts are larger still. One 2026 analysis estimates that by 2030 American data centers could need between 697 million and 1.45 billion gallons a day of new water supply. At the high end, that is more than New York City’s entire daily supply. Nobody knows whether that demand will arrive, and the companies themselves publish little. Most operators report only limited, aggregated water figures, and many do not track them at all.
This is the third of six debates on whether data centers could pay their own way if the law treated them like plain warehouses. Episode 3 takes the hardest version of the question. Who owns the water under the ground and the air over the town? We gave it to John Locke and Jeremy Bentham, because one of them wrote the rule for taking from a commons and the other called that kind of rule nonsense.
Why John Locke
Locke’s chapter “Of Property” in the Second Treatise of Government is the founding text for how private ownership can arise from things held in common. A person makes something their own by mixing labor with it, “at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.” He adds a second limit: “Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.”
He also wrote about water directly, which is a gift for this episode. In section 29 he asks who can doubt that the water in the pitcher belongs to whoever drew it out. In section 33 he explains why that is fair: nobody is injured by another man’s drink “who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst.” Everything in the debate turns on the distance between those two sentences.
We kept Locke’s established character from our earlier Hobbes debates: earnest, patient and precise, with real alarm when the stakes become bodily, and only a few dry jokes.
Why Jeremy Bentham
Bentham is the natural opponent because he rejected the entire idea of natural rights. He called them “simple nonsense,” and imprescriptible rights “nonsense upon stilts.” For Bentham, right and wrong are measured by consequences: the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
That makes him the best possible advocate for pricing water and pollution instead of capping them. He would not ask whether a data center has a right to the aquifer. He would ask what the water is worth, what harm the drawing does, and whether the total comes out ahead.
We kept his established character from the Bentham vs Burke arc, a Groucho Marx style performer who tries to put numbers on everything, including his own jokes. In this episode he scores every argument out of ten, including Locke’s best line, which he gives a twelve. He also mentions that his preserved body is on display at University College London, which is true and which he finds hilarious.
Who Else We Considered
John Wesley Powell vs Jeremy Bentham. Powell warned Congress that the arid West could not be settled like the East because water, not land, was the limit. He would have been the expert witness on aquifers. We passed because he would have been a new voice and because the question here is philosophical before it is hydrological.
John Locke vs Robert Nozick. Nozick’s treatment of the Lockean proviso is the modern classic. He fails our rule that every debater must have died more than 100 years ago.
Elinor Ostrom vs Garrett Hardin. The commons fight in its modern form. Both fail the 100-year rule.
Thomas Hobbes vs John Locke. We have run this pairing twice already, on domestic deployments and on El Salvador. We wanted Locke against someone who would argue with numbers instead of a sword.
Why Each Man Takes the Position He Does
Locke’s position comes straight out of chapter five. A data center can draw from the aquifer, but only while plenty remains, and it cannot waste what it draws. He adds the timing problem from our research: cooling demand can roughly triple in hot weather, which is when towns ration water. For air, he uses his own definition of property as lives, liberties and estates. If smoke damages a man’s lungs without his consent, something of his has been taken.
Bentham’s opening argument is factual and strong. Data centers consumed about 17 billion gallons directly in 2023. The power plants feeding them consumed about 211 billion. Most of the water story is at the power station, not the server hall. And well-designed dry cooling can match evaporative cooling across most climates while using almost no water. His conclusion is that the remedy is engineering and a price, not a warehouse rule.
Bentham also lands the best blow of the night by quoting Locke’s pitcher passage back at him. If water belongs to whoever draws it, the data center owns what it draws. Locke answers from the very next section of his own book: the pitcher is fair only while the river is full. When the aquifer falls, the proviso applies.
Each man concedes something real. Locke admits that where water is plentiful, nobody is harmed, so a warehouse rule that ignores local scarcity is blunt. Bentham admits that he cannot do his sums with sealed numbers. Most operators report only limited, aggregated water data, many do not track it, and fence-line air monitoring barely exists. His line for it: “A felicific calculus under a nondisclosure agreement is a blind man’s abacus.”
Bentham also raises the twist that runs through this whole series. If data centers must generate their own power, the pollution moves from a distant power plant to the fence line next door, as it already has near Memphis. Locke’s answer is that at least the neighbor can then see whose chimney it is.
A Note on the Sources
Bentham’s scoring bit is built on his felicific calculus, the method he proposed for weighing pleasures and pains by their intensity, duration, certainty, nearness and extent. In the debate he runs it out loud on the data center question, assigns numbers to each factor, and arrives at an answer with “a remainder of one asthmatic in Ohio, which I carry to the next page.” Locke’s reply, that you cannot carry a dead man to the next page, is the moral center of the episode. It is also the line Bentham scores a twelve.
Locke’s lines come from the Second Treatise, chapter five, which is short and worth reading in full. Bentham’s come from A Fragment on Government and his attack on the French Declaration of Rights, usually published as Anarchical Fallacies. The insult about Locke and the Royal African Company refers to his documented investment in that company, and it is the kind of contradiction Bentham enjoyed pointing out.
The commentary booth leans further into its habits this time. Samuel Johnson is stuck cheering for a Whig, calls for Boswell to write it down, and reads his Dictionary definition of a network, “any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” He insists it describes the electric grid. Niccolo Machiavelli quotes chapter seven of The Prince, where Cesare Borgia has his own harsh minister cut in two in the square at Cesena to satisfy the public, and predicts the utility will play that part. He also tells the story from his 1513 letter to Francesco Vettori, about snaring thrushes by day and putting on courtly robes at night to talk with the ancients.
The modern figures come from the Pacific Institute, EESI, NC State, the Uptime Institute, the Federation of American Scientists and the Environmental Protection Network. A few historical lines are quoted from memory and flagged in our production notes for checking against the originals.
What Comes Next
Episode 4 turns to land. William Blackstone and Otto von Bismarck argue over whether a farm can be taken for a power line that serves a private customer. After that come William Graham Sumner against Henry George on the remedy, and Walter Bagehot against Alexander Hamilton on whether the whole thing can pay its own way.
If you want the rest of the series as it drops, subscribe here and on YouTube.
Sources
NC State: America’s Data Center Boom Puts New Pressure on Local Water Resources
Uptime Institute: Dry cooling energy performance can rival evaporative cooling
Federation of American Scientists: Advance AI with Cleaner Air and Healthier Outcomes
Environmental Protection Network: AI Data Center Boom Poses Growing Health Risks
John Locke: Second Treatise of Government (Project Gutenberg)
Every debate on PhilosophersTalk.com is made with AITalkerApp.com. Write a script, pick your voices, and it turns the conversation into an animated video. If you want to make your own, start at AITalkerApp.com.