Abstract
If Chapters Three and Four of this volume are correct, then technology assessors and environmental-impact analysts have attempted, unsuccessfully, to avoid the normative dimensions of their tasks. This avoidance is, in part, the result of adherence to a positivist philosophy of science and the consequence of our failure as a society to rethink our ethical and social commitments.
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Notes
Peter Self, Econocrats and the Policy Process: The Politics and Philosophy of Cost-Benefit Analysis, Macmillan, London, 1975, pp. 155–165 discusses the Roskill Report. Self’s book is hereafter cited as: PPCBA.
D. W. Pearce, The Valuation of Social Cost, George Allen and Unwin, 197 8; hereafter cited as: Pearce, VSC. This point is defended in great detail in K. S. Shrader-Frechette, ‘Technology Assessment as Applied Philosophy of Science’, Science, Technology, and Human Values 6 (33), (1980), 34–41; hereafter cited as: Shrader-Frechette, TA.
Pearce, VSC, p. 134.
G. Myrdal, quoted by M. C. Tool, The Discretionary Economy, Goodyear, Santa Monica, 1979, p. 291.
A. M. Freeman, ‘Distribution of Environmental Quality’, in Environmental Quality Analysis (ed. by A. V. Kneese and B. T. Bower), Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1972, pp. 247–248 makes this same point, as does Shrader-Frechette, TA, pp. 35–37.
See K. Basu, Revealed Preference of Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, p. 23; hereafter cited as: RPG.
See this volume, Chapter 6, and K. S. Shrader-Frechette, ‘Das Quantifizierungsproblem bei der Technikbewertung’, in Technikphilosophie in der Diskussion (ed. by Friedrich Rapp and Paul Durbin), Vieweg, Wiesbaden, 1982, pp. 123–138.
For discussion of Gresham’s Law, see B. M. Gross, ‘The State of the Nation’, in Social Indicators (ed. R. A. Bauer), MIT Press, Cambridge, 1966, p. 222.
Some of the main practitioners of the method of revealed preferences include C. Starr, C. Whipple, and D. Okrent. See, for example, Starr and Whipple, ‘Risks of Risk Decisions’, Science 208 (4448), (June 6, 1980), and D. Okrent, ‘Comment on Societal Risk’, Science 208 (4442), (1980), 374.
See also C. Starr, Current Issues in Energy, Pergamon, New York, 1979
D. Okrent and C. Whipple, Approach to Societal Risk Acceptance Criteria and Risk Management, PB-271–264, US Department of Commerce, Washington, D.C., 1977. Although other means (e.g., the method of expressed preferences) of assigning measures to RCBA parameters have been discussed, I treat only the methods of market assignment of values and expressed preferences since these two dominate all current RCBA practice.
For an economist’s perspective on the problems with the method of revealed preferences, see Basu, RPG, especially Chapter 9.
J. S. Mill, ‘Utilitarianism’, in John Stuart Mill (ed. by M. Warnock), Meridian, New York, 1962, p. 310; see also p. 321.
B. A. Weisbrod, ‘Income Redistribution Effects and Benefit-Cost Analysis’, in Problems in Public Expenditure Analysis (ed. by S. B. Chase), Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., pp. 177–208
hereafter cited as: Weisbrod, IRE, in Brookings, Problems. See also UNIDO, Guidelines for Project Evaluation (by P. Dasgupta, S. A. Marglin and A. K. Sen), United Nations Industrial Development Organization, Project Formulation and Evaluation Series, No. 2, United Nations, New York, 1972.
See, for example, R. Haveman, ‘Comment on the Weisbrod Model’, Brookings, Problems, in pp. 209–222. See also the next note.
See Basu, PRG, pp. 23–24. For other criticisms of the Weisbrod and UNIDO approaches, see note 12 and A. M. Freeman, ‘Income Redistribution and Social Choice: A Pragmatic Approach’, Public Choice 7 (Fall 1969), 3–22
E. J. Mishan, ‘Flexibility and Consistency in Project Evaluation’, Economica 41 (161), (1974), 81–96
R. A. Musgrave, ‘Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Theory of Public Finance’, in Cost-Benefit Analysis (ed. by R. Layard), Penguin, Baltimore, 1972, pp.101–116.
A. V. Kneese, Shaul Ben-David, and W. D. Schulze, ‘The Ethical Foundations of Benefit-Cost Analysis’, in Energy and the Future (ed. by D. MacLean and P. G. Brown), Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, N.J., 1982, 59–74
hereafter cited as: Foundations. A. V. Kneese, S. Ben-David, and W. Schulze, A Study of the Ethical Foundations of Benefit-Cost Analysis Techniques, unpublished report, done with funding from the National Science Foundation, Program in Ethics and Values in Science and Technology, August, 1979; hereafter cited as: Study.
Kneese et al., Foundations, pp. 62–63;Kneese et al., Study, pp. 11–13.
Kneese et al., Foundations, pp. 63–65;Kneese et al., Study, pp. 13–23.
Kneese et al., Foundations, pp. 65–73;Kneese et al., Study, pp. 46–82.
Kneese et al., Study, pp. 83–119.
Kneese et al., Study, pp. 120–130.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1971, pp. 244, 302.
Lucian Kern, ‘Comparative Distributive Ethics’, in Decision Theory and Social Ethics (ed. by H. W. Gottinger and W. Leinfellner), Reidel, Boston, 1978, p. 189.
See K. R. MacCrimmon and D. A. Wehrung, ‘Trade-off Analysis’, in Conflicting Objectives in Decisions (ed. by D. Bell, R. Keeney, and H. Raiffa), Wiley, New York, 1977, p. 143. See Kneese et al., Foundations, pp. 62–63.
See Self, PPCBA, p. 89; G. Myrdal, Against the Stream, Random House, New York, 1973, p. 168
A. Lovins, ‘Cost-Risk-Benefit Assessment…’ George Washington Law Review 45 (5), (August 1977), p. 927
N. Georgescu-Roegen, Analytical Economics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1966, p. 196
E. Rotwein, ‘Mathematical Economies’, in The Structure of Economic Science (ed. by S. R. Krupp), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1966, p. 102
G. Shackle, Epistemics and Economics, University Press, Cambridge, 1972, pp. 45–47.
D. MacLean, ‘Quantified Risk Assessment’, in Uncertain Power (ed. by D. Zinberg), Pergamon, New York, 1983, section V
S. Hampshire, ‘Morality and Pessimism’, in Public and Private Morality (ed. by Hampshire), University Press, Cambridge, 1978, p. 5
R. Wolff, ‘The Derivation of the Minimal State’, in Reading Nozick, Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, N.J., 1981, pp. 99–101
R. Coburn, ‘Technology Assessment, Human Good, and Freedom’ in Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century (ed. K. Sayre and K. Goodpaster), University Press, Notre Dame, 1979, p. 108
A. Gewirth, ‘Human Righrs and the Prevention of Cancer’ in Ethics and the Environment (ed. D. Scherer and T. Attig), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1983, p. 177
A. MacIntyre, ‘Utilitarianism and Cost-Benefit Analysis’, in Ethics and the Environment (ed. Scherer and Attig), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1983, pp. 139–142.
Steven Strasnick, ‘Neo-Utilitarian Ethics and the Ordinal Representation Assumption’, in Philosophy in Economics (ed. by J. C. Pitt), Reidel, Boston, 1981, pp. 63–92; hereafter cited as: NU.
Strasnick, NU, pp. 70, 84. Numerous economists hold this same position. Y. K. Ng, Welfare Economics, John Wiley, New York, 1980, p. 27 (hereafter cited as: WE), for instance, says that “the standard example where representation by a real-valued function is not possible is the so-called lexicographic order.”
See also Amartya Sen, On Economic Inequality, Norton, New York, 1973, pp. 2–3
hereafter cited as: Sen, OEI. Finally, see A. K. Dasgupta and D. W. Pearce, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1972, p. 75.
Strasnick, NU, pp. 69–70.
Gerard Debreu, ‘Representation of a Preference Ordering by a Numerical Function’, in Decision Processes (ed. by R. M. Thrall, C. H. Coombs, and R. L. Davis), John Wiley, New York, 1954, p. 164; hereafter cited as: Representation. It appears that Debreu should have written “α 2(a) = α(a, b 2 )” in the quoted passage and not “α 2 (a, b 2 )”.
Strasnick, NU, p. 70.
Debreu, Representation, p. 161.
Basu, RPG, p. 7.
One of the anonymous manuscript referees for Reidel Publishing Company noted, in response to this argument: “I fail to see the relevance of the fact that the irrational numbers are denser than the rationals. See Bolzano—Weierstrass Theorem on points of accumulation”. However, my argument has absolutely nothing to do either with the concept of density or with the Bolzano—Weierstrass Theorem. Hence the objection is irrelevant.
E. Mishan, Economics for Social Decisions, Praeger, New York, 1972, p. 23.
See also E. Mishan, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Praeger, New York, 1976, pp. 403–415; hereafter cited as: CBA.
Y. K. Ng, Welfare Economics, John Wiley, New York, 1980, pp. 68–72.
A. J. Culyer, ‘The Quality of Life and the Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis’, in Public Economics and the Quality of Life (ed. by L. Wingo and A. Evans), Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1977, pp. 143, 150, 151.
See Raymond F. Mikesell, The Rate of Discount for Evaluating Public Projects, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C., 1977. See also Mishan, CBA, pp. 175–219, 408–410.
Kneese et al., Study, pp. 8–9. See also pp. 32–42.
See, for example Talbot Page, Conservation and Economic Efficiency, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1977.
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Shrader-Frechette, K.S. (1985). Ethically Weighted Risk-Cost-Benefit Analysis. In: Science Policy, Ethics, and Economic Methodology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6449-5_8
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