ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two broad strategies for connecting ethics, environment, and economic theory. Environmentalists' criticisms of economics derive in part from a failure to distinguish between positive economics and the ethical applications of economic theory, but not entirely. The chapter explains how welfare economics interprets efficiency and how that differs from some common ways in which the word "efficiency" is used in ordinary language. In addition, economic models of productivity can be useful in evaluating both policies and technological innovations that might be proposed in response to agriculture's environmental impact. Trade-offs between environmental costs and direct food costs are currently being made under a regime that undeniably gives consumers in the industrialized world cheap food. The hope of basing human conduct on the "true costs" of food is motivated by the same ethos that has seduced several generations of philosophers and social theorists into a highly reductive form of utilitarianism.
