In response to Cheryl's comments on the bioprospecting post below, I should clear up something. That post speaks to a way of thinking about conserving/preserving biodiversity where a balance is sought between various kinds of development, conservation, and local human livelihoods. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is just that, really, although it has become a highly complex document as it tackles the problems of access and benefit-sharing, inavasive species, technology transfer, indigenous rights, and intellectual property rights (how do you assign property rights to genetic information as it goes through various uses and applications?). Bioprospecting becomes salient here because it is in theory a way to produce economic value which, it is assumed, is the only kind of value that matters in developing policy. In the CBD's Preamble, however, there is a nod to the intrinsic value of biodiversity and other ways of valuing nature. This language is dropped immediately in the rest of the document and in the CBD's protocols and further meetings.
We've long known that there are different modes of valuation. In the Western tradition, Aristotle discussed the instrumental/intrinsic distinction in terms of means and ends in search of the basic question of ethics: what is the good life? The question in various forms has dominated ethics and political philosophy since the good life - whatever it is - has to be lived with others. Humans don't exist in social vacuums, even those awaiting the apocalypse in Idaho bunkers or the caricatured guru on the Himalayan mountaintop.
During the past 35 years or so, the question of intrinsic value has dominated environmental ethics. It was thought that if there was to be a distinctly environmental ethic - which Aldo Leopold thought "an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity" - it would be based on a robust notion of the intrinsic value of nature. It was thought not only that this would form the grounds for a theoretical ethics, but also a practical ethics of environmental preservationism. Frankly, though, that quest for a robust notion of intrinsic value has failed, in my view. This is a long discussion, but let me simply say that, 1) I don't think that we can somehow step outside of our own valuing selves and say that intrinsic value inheres in natural objects independent of human valuers; and 2) in order to try make this argument one shifts to a conception of ethics that requires all sorts of a priori-ist Kantian transcendental deductionist contortions, which I think are pointless and discredited. Environmental ethics is at an impasse because it began from the wrong premises.
This is not to say, however, that human beings cannot value things intrinsically, instrumentally, etc. But we do it. Regarding the natural environment, biodiversity, or however one wishes to put it, we are the valuers. We need natural resources to live (water, air, etc.), but we get great value out of wilderness recreation, pharmaceutical improvements from natural products, aesthetic inspiration, metaphors that form the basis for cultural identities, and a sense of the sacred. And we ascribe intrinsic value to nature. John Muir referred to Yosemite as, "my cathedral." It's a truly great thing that humans have the capacity to value in innumerable ways and that the world is a world of things worthy of value (and disvalue). It's a shame when this is all reduced to crass utilitarian considerations. But that's how the policy world works. If the economic incentives aren't there, forget it. Even genuine environmentalists, motivated by a sense of the intrinsic value of nature, find that they must speak the language of instrumental value in the policy world or back out. The long, ongoing battle is to try find a language rich in value that can also integrate, and perhaps transform, the way policy thinking is done.
7 comments:
The existence of an economic incentive is contingent on the system we choose to run and the things we allow corporations to externalize. There's an argument that, being on the verge of a global environmental catastrophe, the climate has more value than the socioeconomic conventions that currently keep us from protecting it. But even if we all agree that the species is more valuable than having a Republican in the White House, we don't all agree that the one thing hinges on the other, or in which way.
Point being it's complicated and/or that I was interrupted halfway through posting the above and forgot where I was going.
I suspected I'd be able to bait a philosopher with my comment. [smirk]
More seriously, I don't have a problem with it being me that's doing the valuing, rather than something intrinsic in the thing itself, although there's a little voice in the back of my brain saying, but of course it's all got value. Yes, I guess that's still me. So then I suppose we can go on to the subjectivity of what I value and what, say, George Bush or Murky Thoughts doesn't.
I'm not at all sure that that's the only way the policy world works. I think that when we claim that biodiversity will give us miracle drugs, we are being quite cynical.
Let's look at the FDA's recent decisions on Plan B and such. Or AIDS prevention in Africa. If the policies behind those decisions had been solely economic, we'd be a lot better off, and Plan B would be available, at least to adults, over the counter and condoms would be distributed.
Is this a desirable direction for policy, to fight out religion or other personal/spiritual values in the policy realm? I think not, and I'd be more than happy to argue against this explicit use of a particular, narrow range of what some call Christianity to distort, um, the marketplace.
OTOH, values are always going to insert themselves into policy judgments. I'd like it better if we were more explicit: Don't mine that mountain because it's beautiful along with its value to maintaining fresh water for use.
The dilemma for the biodiversity issue in the tropics is that the indigenous people may want development, which will lead to environmental destruction. But we can't ask them to remain poor for our esthetic preference. We need to find better ways of development. I think this was one of the hopes of the folks touting biodiversity as a source of new drugs, but they haven't put the entire thing together so that the indigenous people get enough out of it.
CKR
It's not that I don't value the rainforests so much as I think they offer a lot of opportunity for parking, whereas everybody knows albedo is a myth.
I see policymaking as largely economic in both method and in the formulation of ends. Climate change will have to become disastrous economically before an administration like the present one would do anything about it. If we are being kind to them, we could say that they're simply running the standard utilitarian calculus - greater benefit for the greater number of people - where those benefits happen to be viewed in the short-term. That in itself is a form of valuation (it requires, for one thing, to have decided not to go with Kant). So, yes, I think non-economic values are always tangled up in policymaking.
But enviros know that over and over their values re the environment get short shrift. So, don't raze that mountain because of what that would do to a freshwater source (thus harming people). But if the sole argument is don't raze it because it's beautiful, it's going to lose nearly every time if it is upo against economic concerns. The kicker is that even if razing the mountain fouls up a drinking water source, but this will only affect a relatively small number of people (as compared to, say, the larger number of people benefiting from the extraction of coal), then any reason for not razing it drops out. That's how enviro policy tends to go. It is exceedingly difficult to base an argument on something like the beauty of the mountain or, further, some form of an intrinsic value or even ecosystemic argument.
The burden of proof always falls on the latter, though there's nothing in the cosmic scheme of things that says valuing the beauty of the mountain is any less important or meaningful than valuing it as a source of coal.
So, on one hand, policymaking is always "informed" by values and modes of valuation. On the other hand, they're of a certain type - as MT says, socioeconomic conventions. The latter appear to continue to include even the belief that we can somehow be neutral about value politically and economically (old-timey liberalism), which is false. If we give up on the mythical notion of neutrality, however, then we put discussion of value out in the open. I think that is a good thing, but only if it's not then dominated by the perspectives of a particularly well-funded group.
I think my point about "the system" must have been confusing--both because I got lost in the middle and because I can't tell what helmut's talking about in referencing me. Anyway, I suddenly feel like something else and I think it may be related:
Al Gore says he thinks more stringent regulation of industrial emissions would boost the U.S. and global economies, and no economist in the world can disprove him. Who's right? Economists disagree about so many important things that I doubt many policy decisions fairly could be described as purely based on economics.
I was just rambling, MT. Didn't mean to attribute something to you that weren't saying.
About economic valuation, I'm conflating a few things that need deflating.
1) intrinsic value is, by its nature, non-quantifiable. Economics quantifies and it does so in monetary units. Despite attempts to formulate metrics for intrinsic value in environmental economics - "existence value" and the method of "contingent valuation in particular - it misses the point re intrinsic value.
2) philosophically, especially in environmentalethics as a field of inquiry, I don't think the debate over intrinsic value has gotten anyone very far. But this doesn't mean that the environmental economist's attempt to measure intrinsic value isn't misguided, and really kind of stupid.
3) I don't adhere to some strict fact/value dichotomy, whether we're talking about philosophy, economics, or science. I assume that other considerations are always part of policy-making. Nonetheless, I teach in a policy school and see that most of the thinking about policy-making comes from economics. Economists will even claim to have cornered the market on normative inquiry. This drives philosophers nuts.
4) economists disagree about a number of things because, as in the sciences or humanities, there are differences of view regarding "fact" and the best course of action in a given set of circumstances. There's a lot about orthodox economics that I find is built on faulty philosophical assumptions, so disagreement is certainly going to happen between philosophers and economists. But different areas, methodologies,and ideologies in economics also start with differing sets of assumptions. These are usually taken as factual assumptions rather than value assumptions. Philosophers see them as a priori value assumptions that simply go unquestioned most of the time.
5) enviros have been claiming for a long time that there are good economic reasons for dealing effectively with solving enviro problems. But that's precisely the point I was making - that many enviros know that they must make the economic case or fail. If one's an environmentalist who believes in the intrinsic value of nature, this move to economics then cedes the grounds of policymaking over to economists who trade in instrumentalities. I don't know of any good economic arguments for preserving natural areas as is, which is what some environmentalists would like to see.
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