ABSTRACT
What makes for good public decisions about the environment? We saw in part one that the dominant answer to that question has its basis in a particular maximising form of consequentialism. A good decision is one that best improves the well-being of affected agents. A form of consequentialism is embodied in many of the standard tools for public decision making, most notably in cost-benefit analysis. In the first part of the book we argued that this dominant answer to the question is inadequate. It fails to recognise constraints on policy making that are independent of the realisation of total well-being, constraints that have been articulated in different ways from within the traditions of deontological and virtues ethics. It is also unable to deal properly with the distributive dimensions of environmental decision making. Furthermore, the existence of plural and incommensurable values is incompatible with the assumption it requires that there is a measure of value through which we can arrive at a maximising score for the value of options. In chapter 5 we examined how rational public decision making might proceed in the absence of some single measure of value, looking in particular at procedural alternatives.
