Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Cost-Benefit Analysis and Decision Making

Mark Sagoff argues in his article “At the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, or Why Political Questions Are Not All Economic” that cost-benefit analysis should not necessarily be the determinant of political decisions. I agree with this claim and believe that many political decisions, such as the decision to pass a law such as one proposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that would (supposedly) protect American workers from exposure to harmful toxins, should not be made solely on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. However, I think that Sagoff could have made his argument stronger by acknowledging the usefulness as well as the inadequacy of cost-benefit analysis. One could argue, for instance, that some such decisions, such as the decision to employ methods of geoengineering should be based at least in part on cost-benefit analysis.
If the potential costs or disadvantages of injecting sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere (e.g., causing further anthropogenic harm to the atmosphere/ozone, causing harm/injury to people, causing species extinctions) outweigh the potential benefits of doing so (e.g., improving the condition of the atmosphere), the logical conclusion that we would then come to would be that we should not use this method of geoengineering because of the risk(s) associated with it. However, any decision, whether or not it concerns the environment, should be made based on the consideration of multiple factors- cost-benefit analysis could be one of these factors but should not be the only one. Likewise, any other factor should not on its own be the basis of any decisions, especially those decisions that directly concern the health of the environment.

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