Reconsidering Environmental Policy: Prescriptive Consequentialism and Volitional Pragmatism

摘要

Prescriptive consequentialism informs current assessments of rational action in economics. Choice is alleged to start with stable and known preferences over alternative outcomes, and rational agents choose actions that maximize well being with respect to these preferences. Evidence suggests that this formulation fails as an accurate and reliable description of how individuals make choices, and this formulation seems particularly at odds with collective decision making with respect to environmental policy. Pragmatism, an important branch of philosophy, offers a theory of human action that economists would find helpful. This promise is especially pertinent to efforts devoted to the assignment of values to parts of nature, and to environmental policy in general.