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Putting a price tag on the environment is controversial. This book discusses ethical and political aspects of environmental cost-benefit analysis: why controversies must be expected, why they should be taken seriously, and how they can be handled in practice. Cost-benefit analysis is commonly thought of as a method for ranking projects according to their contributions to social welfare. The starting point of the present book is different. Rather than providing a final ranking, the purpose of a project analysis is to enable participants in a democratic decision-making process to make their own well-founded rankings of projects, according to their own normative views. Since ethical and political views differ, the analysis should be useful as factual background for any reasonable social welfare judgement. This purpose faces the analyst with quite different challenges than the purpose of ranking projects. The argument of the book is based on economic theory, but with a strong emphasis on readability and applicability. It is aimed at those – economists and non-economists alike – who use or are faced with cost-benefit analysis and environmental valuation in their work: politicians, employees of ministries and regulatory agencies, students, journalists, consultants and researchers. No particular prior knowledge of economics is required.
Putting a price tag on the environment is controversial. The aim of this book is to discuss some of the ethical and political issues arising in the context of applied cost-benefit analysis and environmental valuation - and to do so using economic analysis, but in a language accessible to non-specialists. In particular, the author emphasizes the fundamental, but surprisingly often poorly understood distinction between normative and positive analysis, and the implications of this distinction for practical use of cost-benefit analyses.
Written in a clear and non-technical manner, Retaking Rationality gives progressive groups and the public the tools they need both to understand and to engage in the debate over the economic analysis of environmental, public health, and safety regulation. Since the Reagan presidency, the most important regulations affecting every American have been required to pass a "cost-benefit" test, but most Americans-including many professionals working for progressive institutions or elected officials-do not understand how economic analysis works. The result is that industry and conservative ideologues have twisted economic analysis so that good regulations seem to fail the cost-benefit test. This book argues that the public, and progressive institutions, must take up the fight over how economic analysis is conducted, and gives them the knowledge they need to engage industry and conservatives about when and how economic analysis of regulation should be carried out.
A heated debate has emerged among legal academics over the continued appropriateness of using cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as a decisionmaking tool in federal administrative agencies. Environmentalists and other progressive thinkers argue that regulators should abandon CBA in favor of more holistic procedures. In response, this manuscript provides three original defenses of cost-benefit analysis and hopes to show that CBA advances basic tenets of the environmental movement. Specifically, this Note argues that cost-benefit analysis 1) promotes thoughtful deliberation, 2) protects the dignity of those in contested policy debates, and, 3) improves the standing of environmental groups in the eyes of the public.
In Just Results, Ralph E. Ellis provides an authoritative solution to one of the major problems in the field of public policy. Until now, analysts and planners have had no practical or accurate means of incorporating qualitative social concerns into the traditional quantitative formulas used in policymaking. By introducing a justice factor--a quantitative measure for social values--Ellis opens the door for more balanced policy decisions. Using concrete, real-world examples, Ellis shows how policy analysts can better account for the use value--or practical measurable utility--of universally agreed-upon social benefits such as life, health, safety, and environmental preservation when making cost-benefit analyses. In this way, policymakers, and by extension, society as a whole, can avoid making unjust tradeoffs between important social values and comparatively frivolous economic benefits. Drawing on philosophical works on justice from Kant through John Rawls, this book is informed by a theoretical defense of distributive justice that emphasizes diminishing marginal utility, thus favoring the poor. Just Results is a stimulating and highly applicable book that will be of great interest to philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts and planners.
If indeed scientists and technologists, especially economists, set much of the agenda by which the future is played out, and I think they do, then the student of scientific methodology and public ethics has at least three options. He can embrace certain scientific methods and the value they hold for social decisionmaking, much as Milton Friedman has accepted neoclassical econom ics. Or, he can condemn them, regardless of their value, much as Stuart Hampshire has rejected risk-cost-benefit analysis (RCBA). Finally, he can critically assess these scientific methods and attempt to provide solutions to the problems he has uncovered. As a philosopher of science seeking the middle path between uncritical acceptance and extremist rejection of the economic methods used in policy analysis, I have tried to avoid the charge of being "anti science". Fred Hapgood, in response to my presentation at a recent Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, said that my arguments "felt like" a call for rejection of the methods of risk-cost-benefit analysis. Not so, as Chapter Two of this volume should make eminently clear. All my criticisms are construc tive ones, and the flaws in economic methodology which I address are uncovered for the purpose of suggesting means of making good techniques better. Likewise, although I criticize the economic methodology by which many technology assessments (TA's) and environmental-impact analyses (EIA's) have been used to justify public projects, it is wrong to conclude that I am anti-technology.
Environmental health involves the assessment and control of environmental factors that can potentially affect human health, such as radiation, toxic chemicals and other hazardous agents. It is less commonly understood that environmental health also requires addressing questions of an ethical nature. Bringing together work from experts across a range of sub-disciplines of environmental health, this collection of essays discusses the ethical implications of environmental health research and its application, presented at the 3rd International Symposium on Ethics of Environmental Health held in August 2016 in the Czech Republic. In doing so, it builds upon the insights and ideas put forward in the first volume of Ethics of Environmental Health, published by Routledge in early 2017. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental health, applied ethics, environmental ethics, medical ethics and bioethics, as well as those concerned with public health, environmental studies, toxicology and radiation.
Elizabeth Anderson offers a new theory of value and rationality that rejects cost-benefit analysis in our social lives and in our ethical theories. This account of the plurality of values thus offers a new approach, beyond welfare economics and traditional theories of justice, for assessing the ethical limitations of the market. In this light, Anderson discusses several contemporary controversies involving the proper scope of the market, including commercial surrogate motherhood, privatization of public services, and the application of cost-benefit analysis to issues of environmental protection. Table of Contents: Preface 1. A Pluralist Theory of Value A Rational Attitude Theory of Value Ideals and Self-Assessment How Goods Differ in Kind (I): Different Modes of Valuation How Goods Differ in Kind (II): Social Relations of Realization 2. An Expressive Theory of Rational Action Value and Rational Action The Framing of Decisions The Extrinsic Value of States of Affairs Consequentialism Practical Reason and the Unity of the Self 3. Pluralism and Incommensurable Goods The Advantages of Consequentialism A Pragmatic Theory of Comparative Value Judgments Incommensurable Goods Rational Choice among Incommensurable Goods 4. Self-Understanding, the Hierarchy of Values, and Moral Constraints The Test of Self-Understanding The Hierarchy of Values Agent-Centered Restrictions Hybrid Consequentialism A Self-Effacing Theory of Practical Reason? 5. Criticism, Justification, and Common Sense A Pragmatic Account of Objectivity The Thick Conceptual Structure of the Space of Reasons How Common Sense Can Be Self-Critical Why We Should Ignore Skeptical Challenges to Common Sense 6. Monistic Theories of Value Monism Moore's Aesthetic Monism Hedonism Rational Desire Theory 7. The Ethical Limitations of the Market Pluralism, Freedom, and Liberal Politics The Ideals and Social Relations of the Modern Market Civil Society and the Market Personal Relations and the Market Political Goods and the Market The Limitations of Market Ideologies 8. Is Women's Labor a Commodity? The Case of Commercial Surrogate Motherhood Children as Commodities Women's Labor as a Commodity Contract Pregnancy and the Status of Women Contract Pregnancy, Freedom, and the Law 9. Cost-Benefit Analysis, Safety, and Environmental Quality Cost-Benefit Analysis as a Form of Commodification Autonomy, Labor Markets, and the Value of Life Citizens, Consumers, and the Value of the Environment Toward Democratic Alternatives to Cost-Benefit Analysis Conclusion Notes References Index Reviews of this book: Anderson/auhtor is anxious to combat what she sees as a tendency for commercial values to invade areas of human life where they do not belong...A useful contribution to debate about the proper scope of the market. "Not everything is a commodity, insists Anderson, and her brief should shake up social science technocrats." DD--Philadelphia Inquirer "The book is rich in both argument and application." DD--Alan Hamlin, Times Higher Education Supplement "In this rich and insightful book Elizabeth Anderson develops an original account of value and rational action and then employs this account to address the pragmatic political question of what the proper range of the market should be. Anderson's principal targets are consequentialism, monism and the crude 'economistic' reasoning which underpins much contemporary social policy...This is an important book...For anyone interested in political philosophy this is essential reading." DD--A. J. Walsh, Australasian Journal of Philosophy --Hugo Dixon, Financial Times [UK] Reviews of this book: Not everything is a commodity, insists Anderson, and her brief should shake up social science technocrats. --Philadelphia Inquirer Reviews of this book: The book is rich in both argument and application. --Alan Hamlin, Times Higher Education Supplement Reviews of this book: In this rich and insightful book Elizabeth Anderson develops an original account of value and rational action and then employs this account to address the pragmatic political question of what the proper range of the market should be. Anderson's principal targets are consequentialism, monism and the crude 'economistic' reasoning which underpins much contemporary social policy...This is an important book...For anyone interested in political philosophy this is essential reading. --A. J. Walsh, Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Mark Sagoff draws on the last twenty years of debate over the foundations of environmentalism in this comprehensive revision of The Economy of the Earth. Posing questions pertinent to consumption, cost-benefit analysis, the normative implications of neo-Darwinism, the role of the natural in national history, and the centrality of the concept of place in environmental ethics, he analyses social policy in relation to the environment, pollution, the workplace, and public safely and health. Sagoff distinguishes ethical from economic questions and explains which kinds of concepts, arguments, and processes are appropriate to each. He offers a critique 'preference' and 'willingness to pay' as measures of value in environmental economics and defends political, cultural, aesthetic, and ethical reasons to protect the natural environment.