Environmental Ethics and Decision Theory: Fellow Travellers or Bitter Enemies?

Often decision theory and ethics are depicted as in conflict: They seem to give different advice about certain kinds of compromises. But this chapter argues that decision theory is more a matter of the idealizations, budget constraints, and time-scales attended to in decision theory-based approaches. There is no in-principle conflict, although practice would need to change to reflect time scale and dynamics explicitly in order for the two to be reconciled. Specific cases in this discussion are environmental triage and carbon trading offsets. There are also reasons to be concerned about the political side of the issue—in general, decision theoretic approaches need probabilities and values as inputs. The more uncertainty there is (or can be politically generated) about these, the easier it is to paralyze the political process. Together with the challenge of future values, economics tends to assume that substitutions are always available, so it sets the value of a future forest—say, 40 years hence—so low that one can't economically justify the cost of replanting today; these difficulties make public policy decisions look very difficult indeed. A deontological rule cannot be motivated in any particular case unless following it will, or at least will be likely to contribute best to bringing about the ends value. An important corollary to this is the recognition that accepting deontic constraints on choices makes good sense from the point of view of a modest view of one's ability to anticipate the effects of choices, reflecting the value of prudence and the limits of predictive powers.