Valuing Health Risks, Costs, and Benefits for Environmental Decision Making Report of a Conference (1990) / Chapter Skim
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2. The Making of Cruel Choices
2. The Making of Cruel Choices
Pages 15-22
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From page 15... ...
It may be especially useful for those on the "firing line" in agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA - individuals who are in a position to make decisions, to advise those who do, or to prepare the analytic underpinnings that inform the decisions that are made. I know from experience that people in such positions need to set aside time from their day-to-day activities to think critically about the premises underlying their actions.
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From page 16... ...
My experience at EPA revealed that the agency deals with extremely complex problems whose potential solutions have serious and far-reaching implications. I found that an explicit decision framework to sort out pros and cons, benefits and costs, was absolutely essential to any reasonable possibility of using the agency's immense power to do good rather than ill.
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From page 17... ...
The same process seems to be under way today in environmental matters and can be seen in the new attention being given to safer disposal and lower production levels of hazardous wastes, the reduced use of pesticides, designs for chemical processes involving the risk of release of toxic chemicals that can handle a broader range of conditions and problems, and so forth. Any analysis of proposed environmental protection actions must take these dynamic effects into account and must also consider the second and higher order effects that follow from the initial perturbation.
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From page 18... ...
Analyses range from data-based but ultimately judgmental comparative risk efforts to risk-risk comparisons, cost-effectiveness estimates, and, finally, full-blown, formal benefit-cost studies. I welcome the discussion of benefit-cost analysis at this conference because of the important issues involved in its use: its value predicates, its unexamined assumptions, its static bias, its demands for data, and, certainly, the opportunity for manipulation of results by unscrupulous practitioners.
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From page 19... ...
And there's the rub: how to decide which are "best." One view, to which I subscribe and which I think is enshrined in the American system of government, is that what is "best" depends on the values of those to whom government officials are responsible; that is, those now living. This approach does not imply a decision framework that turns its back on the past or one that ignores future generations.
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From page 20... ...
As a contribution to the context for a discussion of these issues, I want to provide an illustration of the way some of these questions are presented, and demonstrate why I find an explicit decision framework essential when it comes to protecting the environment. Municipal sewage plants produce sludge that must be disposed of-on or under the ground, in the air through incineration, or in the ocean.
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From page 21... ...
Apples and oranges cannot be added, but how many of one must be given up to get how many more of the other can and I believe should be reckoned consciously, before a decision is made. I noted earlier the resistance to a decision process that openly confronts such trade-offs, a process that, however gingerly, puts a "price" on health effects or ecological damage.
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From page 22... ...
This response is my incomplete and still unsatisfactory answer to the question posed at the beginning of this paper regarding the nature of a "principled basis" for making environmental decisions. In terms of the second question posed earlier, I believe legitimacy flows from an acceptance of the decision, or at least of the decision process, by those affected.
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