One possible justification for the punishment of BP is that while BP may not be causally responsible for the unsafeness of other companies' oil rigs, BP is the only oil-drilling company whose procedures were provably unsafe.
In other words, if the government decided to ban drilling because it suddenly realized, with p ~ 0.9, that drilling, on average, caused more harm than good, then of course the payments for displaced workers should come from the general public treasury, or, at worst, from the drilling industry as a whole.
What actually happened seems to be that the government continues to have no idea whether drilling, in the abstract and done cautiously, causes more harm than good, but that the government has suddenly updated its estimate that an arbitrary currently existing dirller is negligent from ~ 0.01 to ~ 0.3, and has suddenly updated its estimate that BP is negligent from ~ 0.01 to ~ 0.95. Given that "data," and without making any attempt to vouch for the accuracy or precision of the government's conclusions, it does make sense to punish BP, not punish other drillers, and shut down drilling.
It makes sense to punish BP because BP was almost certainly negligent, whereas Rachel Carson was not negligent; she warned of the dangers of DDT in good faith and with ample consideration of the risks of causing economic inefficiencies.
It makes sense not to punish other drillers because there is no way for the government to cheaply prove their negligence; a massive investigation of the entire industry would consume too much political capital. Although the government suspects that many, if not most drillers were negligent, no one driller (besides BP) is so clearly negligent as to deserve the punishment of being held responsible for displaced workers.
Finally, it makes sense to ban drilling, because, even if individual negligent drillers (besides BP) cannot be reliably and cheaply identified, it seems clear that there are at least a few other negligent drillers in the marketplace right now, and that allowing drilling while knowing that there are probably some negligent drillers out there is expected to do more harm than good.
The White House says there will be a temporary ban on new deep-water drilling, and BP will have to pay the salaries of oilmen who have no work during that ban. I scratched my head trying to figure out the logic behind this. This was my first attempt:
This logic works equally well in this case:
But "everyone" would agree that the second example is fallacious. Are people so angry at BP that they can't think at all?
Then I came up with this second argument. ("At fault" is legalese for "caused by an immoral or illegal action.")
Applied to Rachel Carson:
Both these chains of reasoning are still faulty, but they're more similar to the reactions of most people. They are faulty because they're not specific about the connection between the fault and the injured party, or about what an "injury" is. In the second case, there is no injury to the workers; the company simply stopped employing them, and could only be held morally responsible for this under something like feudalism. In the BP case, you could argue that non-BP oilmen were injured, because they want to work and their (non-BP) employers want to hire them, but outside forces prevented them.
However, being at fault for the oil spill is not the same as being at fault for (causing by immoral action) the ban on drilling. The word "cause" is too vague for moral responsibility to be transitive over it; and "X caused Z" does not preclude "Y caused Z". The ban on drilling is not a ban only on drilling by BP; this means that the powers that be decided the ban on drilling is good for the country, not a punishment of BP. It is a decision that the expected cost of further drilling outweighs the expected benefits. There is no moral failing and no one at fault, and either the government should pay them, or the oilmen should bite it the way any workers do when their industry has a downturn and rely on existing safety nets such as unemployment insurance. (This is completely different from the case of fishermen put out of work directly by the oil spill; I believe it makes sense for BP to pay them.)
Figuring out how moral responsibility propagates through a chain of events is complicated. I propose that people are using the "sin-based" model of cause and effect. This model says that all bad outcomes are caused by moral failings. (On the radio yesterday, I heard a woman being interviewed whose house had been destroyed by a landslide. The first question the interviewer asked was, "Whose fault was this?")
In the sin-based model, when you enumerate a chain of events that is causally linked, and some events are bad outcomes, all you need to do is transfer blame for the bad outcomes to the moral failings preceding them in the chain. Oilmen are out of work; you construct a chain of events leading to them being out of work, identify the closest preceding moral failure in the chain, and pin the blame on that moral failing. No need for painful thinking!