ABSTRACT
Combatting climate change will require mitigation policies that abate greenhouse gas emissions as well as adaptation policies that buffer against the impacts. One of the problems that decision makers face concerns the complexity involved in assessing policy options – comparing, on the one hand, potential gains in agricultural productivity, biodiversity, and sea level stability from mitigation policy against the risk of higher energy/transportation prices, lower economic growth rates, lost employment opportunities and reduced competition in certain markets. Economic methods present a solution: they’re designed to “measure diverse benefits and harms . . . to arrive at overall judgments about value” (IPCC 2014b: 24).2 For instance, cost-benefit analysis (CBA) measures total costs of a policy against benefits from reduced climatic changes on a monetary scale and sums them. A policy is justified when the result is positive and the benefits outweigh the costs. Despite presenting an elegant way to resolve the challenge of diverse effects, economic methods invite serious criticisms. Economics “cannot account for all ethical principles” nor can it “take account of justice and rights” (IPCC 2014b: 24).3 Indeed, philosopher Simon Caney argues that aggregation should be suspended in assessments that compare potential human rights violations to economic productivity and general well-being (Caney 2010). This chapter argues that we would be too quick to restrict or rule out the application of aggregative methods in assessing climate change policy, and offers an alternative diagnosis of aggregative economic methods based on the differences or “asymmetries” in the moral significance of “harms” and “benefits” appropriately defined (§2). While traditional economic methods fail to accommodate the moral difference between harms and benefits, it is possible to design aggregation methods to be more morally sensitive by assigning greater weight to certain harms or by creating aggregation functions that represent the moral asymmetries between diverse effects (§3 and §4).
