ABSTRACT
In part one of this book we have considered the broadly utilitarian approaches to decision making that are used to justify the main policy-making instruments employed in public decisions about the environment, such as cost-benefit analysis. In chapter 3 we examined the constraints on a policy of maximising total welfare that have been articulated, in different ways, from within deontological and virtue ethics. In chapter 4 we argued that a purely maximising approach cannot capture the distributive dimensions of good environmental policy. In chapter 5 we argued that the dominant utilitarian approaches to environmental policy are not consistent with the existence of plural and incommensurable values. We also gave reasons for scepticism about the very idea that reasoned ethical reflection should take the form of providing the ethical equivalent of a scientific theory, complete with theoretical primitives, from which our specific obligations could be deduced.
