JISCMail - ENVIROETHICS Archives

John Foster mentions a number of problems with the benefit/cost procedure. However, he does not address the more fundmental problems, imho.

The major impetus for benefit/cost (b/c) in the United States was the requirement in the 1936 Flood control Act that proposed water resource project studies be required to determine the benefits "to whomsoever they occur" which should be compared to the cost of the particular project. Sounds great. But like so many things in life, "the devil is in the details" to use a popular phrase among the current politicians (bought & paid for) in the US congress.

The problems that concern me are in the value bias in the analysis and the presumption of a common world view among the people affected and those who pay for the program. Worse yet was the implicit assumption that those who did not accept the world view of the power structure were not relevant to the analysis.

Let me try to be clear about my own bias. I have been involved, directly and indirectly, in water resource analyses for over 40 years. At the end of my career, I refused to be associated in any way with benefit/cost studies because I had become convinced that those studies mislead, even lied to, the general public, taxpayers and persons involved in the projects. Given the structure of the b/c system and the political interests in "favourable" results - for the politicians, an unbiased analysis was impossible. I could cite chapter & verse if needed and space were available. But I will focus on some fundamental problems, imho.

The value biases appear in a number of ways. For example, the analyses were/are based on *economic* benefits & costs. That is, only a comparison of market values are relevant. To the extent that social, cultural, environmental values are brought in to the equation, they are expressed in market values gained or lost - according to the received wisdom. The gains or losses of social, cultural, environmental values are not analyzed in their own terms, their own value set, the unique world view that underlies those values. In effect, the b/c procedure commensurates incommensurables.

Another bias, following from the above bias relates to the way and type of data that are selected, deemed relevant to the b/c analysis within the above context. The data selected and the data interpretation are made within the materialistic/economic paradigm. Data that are/might be more relevant to those members of society who value environmental, social, cultural values are not deemed significant to the mainstream system.

Now, I am not saying that the people who do these analyses are evil. They come to the analysis in that posture because they have that same value propensity. All of you should know that a company, a political party can hire an economist, for example, who will provide them with the sort of answer that that particular entity desires. They hire those specialists/technicians/professors who hold their own value sets.

I am not so naive as to think that bias can be erradicated; nor do I think it *should* be. The individuating biases contribute to new & different ways of thinking about a question/problem. Einstein was the great intellectual at least in part because he was thinking "out of the box". And I think that even the least of us can make a contribution to our understanding because of our own individual bias.

In my view, an analysis of the sort of public issues that Lomberg addresses should provide information about positive and negative effects *in the terms* that are relevant to people who hold value sets along the continuum of values within the community. Even developers, miners, forest company people, etc.,

I do believe that any serious investigation of the foundation/rationale for environmental ethics must be grounded in a study of the way that divergent world views influence the way one comes to values. It seems to me that those are the foundations of one's ethical system. Merely to argue about whether one aspect of a problem is ethically right/wrong/indifferent without that foundation is a waste of breath. We merely argue with each other without understanding the ethical foundations of each other. IMHO.