T y R a t e r m a n
3601 Pacific Avenue
Stockton, CA 95211
Office: Wendell Phillips 207
Email: traterman {at} pacific {.} edu
Phone: (209) 946-7624
Dissertation:
"Preferences, Well-Being, and Value: A Critique of the Normative Foundations of the Economic Approach to Valuing Non-Market Goods"
Abstract
Should the government permit drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness? How much arsenic should be allowed in municipal drinking water? What level of pollution-abatement technology should factories be required to utilize? One approach to answering these and many similar questions is to employ cost-benefit analysis (CBA). Many politicians call for such analysis when faced with tough policy choices regarding the allocation of “scarce resources.” But CBA’s critics charge that it is morally bankrupt and undemocratic. My dissertation is a philosophical evaluation of the normative foundations of CBA. I focus on the theory of value underpinning CBA, which consists of two main claims. The first is that the satisfaction of individual preferences is what counts as a benefit and their frustration is what counts as a cost. The second is that all costs and benefits – including human lives lost or preserved, as well as changes affecting human health and comfort, the cleanliness of air and water, the welfare of non-human species, and ecological services rendered – can be expressed monetarily. I defend a version of the first claim, but reject the second.
CBA’s proponents assert that public policy should aim to satisfy individual preferences because doing so promotes individual well-being and, in turn, social welfare. Should we accept this claim? I argue that, to a large extent, we should. This is because there is a close connection between well-being and preference satisfaction: a person’s well-being simply consists in the satisfaction of that person’s fully-informed and rational preferences. Of course, not all preferences are fully informed and rational. Against many of CBA’s defenders, I maintain that there are occasions where a person’s actual preferences would, if satisfied, diminish her well-being, and where the state is a better judge than the person herself of what would enhance her well-being. On such occasions, the state’s aim should neither be merely to promote the satisfaction of a person’s actual preferences nor to frustrate these preferences in order to promote what it knows to be her well-being. Instead, the state should strive as far as possible to make people informed and rational (in the relevant respects), and then after doing so, attend to and promote the satisfaction of the preferences they then have. In connection with this I defend an account of the nature of value, arguing that the value of a good is fixed by preferences regarding the good, so long as these preferences are informed and rational. Although this is a stronger view than many economists would endorse, I maintain it is one CBA can and should accommodate.
This brings me to the second of the claims comprising CBA’s theory of value, which is, in effect, that the value of any good can be expressed monetarily. I maintain that an individual’s willingness to pay or to accept a certain amount of money for a good does not suffice to show that this good’s value can be monetized. With respect to certain goods, an individual can have preferences that differ from one another along multiple irreducible dimensions. Different preferences will sometimes incorporate fundamentally distinct attitudes such as appreciation, fascination, respect, agitation, disgust, and shame. Thus, there will be pairs of goods of which it can neither be said that one member is simply more valuable than the other nor that the members are equal in value. This means that rational preferences cannot generate a single ordering of value, monetary or otherwise. The dissertation ends with a discussion of how public decision makers can approach regulatory and investment decisions without reducing these in each case to a comparison of monetized costs to monetized benefits.
Here is a link to a partial bibliography for the dissertation.