Valuing Health Risks, Costs, and Benefits for Environmental Decision Making Report of a Conference (1990) / Chapter Skim
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5. Comparing Values in Environmental Policies: Moral Issues and Moral Arguments
5. Comparing Values in Environmental Policies: Moral Issues and Moral Arguments
Pages 83-106
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From page 83... ...
The second problem in administering environmental policy is technical. Uncertainty is pervasive in this area, and the demand for precision is often greater than science or practicality permits.
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From page 84... ...
The reason to single out this problem for environmental policies has to do with the nature of the benefits or values that are involved. Environmental decisions typically require the comparison of different benefits (e.g., the preservation of human life, health, clean air and water, wilderness, endangered species, money, and consumer products)
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From page 85... ...
The appropriateness of discounting the value of future lives, the application of benefit-cost analysis as a method of setting environmental policies more generally, and other issues that remain central and contentious in the environmental policy arena are essentially moral disputes. METHODS OF REASONING ABOUT MORALITY Most policy analysts would agree that the problems I have been describing are pervasive and at the core of many environmental disputes.
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From page 86... ...
Philosophers, of course, are also interested in moral theories and normative doctrines, but their interests often have very little to do with shedding light on particular moral or policy questions. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon to find policy analysts suggesting that this is the approach mat philosophers might use most effectively to shed light on the moral aspects of environmental issues.
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From page 87... ...
The problem with this particular approach, of course, is that people are not always free or informed; even when they are, their consumer behavior does not always indicate their considered preferences, let alone their reflective moral judgments. An alternative empirical approach is expressed preference theory or contingent valuation methods.
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From page 88... ...
If moral truths can be reduced to individual preferences, then soliciting opinions must either be ultimately self-defeating (if people express what they believe is morally justified) or land in an infinite regress.3 If moral truths cannot be reduced to individual preferences, however, there is no apparent reason for surveying opinions to advance the understanding of moral truth and justification, except perhaps to help uncover reasons or arguments that might not be immediately apparent.
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From page 89... ...
Discussions of libertarianism typically do not attempt to explain the foundation of its basic moral principles or relate them to other basic moral issues- for example, the nature of the subject matter of morality, the nature of moral reasoning, or the connection between moral principles and rational motivation or will. Moral theories address these more abstract issues, and
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From page 90... ...
A contractarian moral theorist, for example, might argue that a utilitarian principle is the normative doctrine at which a properly defined social contract would arrive. In this respect, utilitarianism is relatively more complicated or confusing, because it has been defended both as a moral theory and as a normative doctrine or basic normative principle.
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From page 91... ...
VALUING AND DISCOUNTING LIVES IN ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES Having defended the approach to moral reasoning that I find most natural and useful to apply to moral issues in environmental decision making, I will now illustrate this approach by considering some of the prominent questions I described at the outset of this paper. Policy makers are usually interested in analyzing the values of the consequences of alternative policies.
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From page 92... ...
Two issues are central to moral debates over environmental policies. The first is the social discount rate, which raises distributional issues about how to compare costs and benefits that are spread out in time.
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From page 93... ...
The reasons for discounting can appeal to the opportunity costs of capital, the reasons for wanting returns on investments sooner rather than later; or they can appeal to rates of time preference, the claim that people tend to care less about consumption in the future or about the remote effects of their actions and policies. These are very different kinds of justifications.
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From page 94... ...
A third reason is uncertainty, which I will not consider here (see Parfit, 1983~. What justifies discounting lives saved or lost in the future?
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From page 95... ...
Democracy and Consumer Sovereignty Some have argued from the assumption of consumer sovereignty that government policies should include discount rates that reflect society's time preference. Earlier, I discussed the relevance of arguments about democracy to moral argument and so will add a few brief comments here.
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From page 96... ...
Morrall points to one such absurdity when he suggests that "all rules yielding continuous benefits are worth any amount of immediate costs" (1986:28~. Situations in which this result might follow are familiar at EPIC For example, EPA's analysis of a uranium mill tailings standard estimated that the present costs would be $388 million and that the standard would save 4.9 lives per year perpetually.
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From page 97... ...
Individual moral rights may be seen in part as an effort to protect individuals from the possibly excessive demands of morality. There are similar limits on the sacrifices that can be demanded of current generations for the benefit of future generations.
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From page 98... ...
These assumptions appear to generate a paradox: the value of lives saved should not be discounted but money should be discounted; nevertheless, the lives saved can be given monetary equivalents.6 Let us refer again to Projects A and B and consider now an alternative, Project C', which is to choose neither program and return the resources to the private sector where they will be consumed or invested according to 6 I first discussed this paradox at a workshop on discount rates at Resources for the Future in 1985. Robert Dorfman reformulated it more precisely and elegantly than I had.
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From page 99... ...
These objections show that benefit-cost analysis must be applied carefully; in addition, selectivity must be exercised in choosing what to discount, determining time horizons for the analysis, assigning monetary equivalents, and so on. I am arguing for selectivity and not for rejection of the method of analysis or discounting; that is, in cases in which discounting is appropriate.
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From page 100... ...
The principal reason given for similar social and private discount rates is the belief that social investments should meet the same economic standards that private investments must meet. This belief is sometimes reinforced by a currently popular political theory; which says that the proper role of government is to enforce rights and to act to correct market failures.
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From page 101... ...
, which claims that the social discount rate should be lower than the private rate, even it the social rate is based strictly on individual preferences and all individuals have the same private rate of time preference. The isolation argument assumes that individual savings decisions are based in part on an individual's altruistic preferences for future generations, perhaps especially for his or her own descendants.
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From page 102... ...
I would argue that the value of life is complex.7 Human life has intrinsic value, which makes it worth saving and prolonging. This component of life's value favors efficiency and the saving of more lives rather than fewer.
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From page 103... ...
These rituals surround birth sex and marriage for example and they also surround death and ~__~ ___~__~0_~ ~ ~ -- -r~~~ the taking of life. Precisely because health and safety decisions have obvious economic consequences, it is necessary to guard against treating human life as exchangeable in these contexts.
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From page 104... ...
It is also important, however, to realize that different values may have to be treated differently. It is this fact, and not measurement problems, that makes value comparisons in environmental policy making so difficult.
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From page 105... ...
MacLean, D 1983 Valuing human life.
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From page 106... ...
1b the heads of executive department and establishments, subject: discount ratm to be used in evaluating time distributed costs and benefits. Washington, O.C.: OMB, March Z7.
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