By Mark D. White

Talk about the gift that keeps giving: The "Cost-Benefit Analysis at the Crossroads" symposium at the LPE Project has posted several new entries which collectively focus and intensify the critical look at CBA in the earlier contributions. In this post, I'll look at three that highlight the failures of inclusivity at the heart of CBA.

In "Modernizing Regulatory Review Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis," Melissa Luttrell (University of Tulsa College of Law) and Jorge Roman-Romero (Equal Justice Works) write that:

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is inherently classist, racist, and ableist. Since these are foundational problems with CBA, and are not simply issues with its implementation, they can never be fixed by mere methodological improvements. Instead, the ongoing modernization of centralized regulatory analyses must focus on “moving beyond” CBA, and not on fixing it or improving it.

In response, they suggest a more comprehensive and holistic approach to regulatory review that incorporates values outside of CBA, partly by inviting the input of experts other than economists:

A comprehensive and just approach to regulation that properly balances economic considerations with deontological factors is possible in a post-CBA world. In the context of risk regulation, the regulatory review process should prioritize deontological interests, particularly when controlling statutes don’t provide for a welfarist blueprint, and are, instead, more concerned with protecting rights or promoting equity—as most of them are.

Implementing this post CBA-approach to regulation requires OIRA to diversify its portfolio of career staffers beyond economists, thus avoiding falling into methodological labyrinths that threaten to derail regulatory action with no apparent coherence. By incorporating more areas of disciplinary expertise in the review process, important non-quantifiable considerations like climate resilience, environmental justice, and intergenerational equity would be given predominant weight despite the difficulties associated with assigning a monetary value to the benefits that might accrue from centering them. Moreover, a post-CBA regulatory review that appreciates deontological values should be wary of falling into other reductionist utilitarian frameworks that democratically-enacted statutes do not call for. Recall that the Clinton and Obama administrations both made gestures toward retaining CBA while softening its anti-regulatory effects; these half-measures were ineffective then, as they will be again if CBA is merely “reformed” instead of rejected.

Karen Tani (University of Pennsylvania) follows in the same vein in her contribution, "The Limits of the Cost-Benefit Worldview: A Disability-Informed Perspective," which details two specific objections to CBA in this specific context. First, she highlights who has the power to make decisions and who is subject to them:

In a society that remains inaccessible to many disabled people, some have found it useful to be able to say, “this thing I want (need) is not that costly, especially relative to the benefits, so you should just give it to me.” But as disability law scholars and practitioners would be the first to admit, that same framework carries within it a concession. It suggests that at some point, or for some seekers, cost will be an entirely valid reason for the person who controls access or resources to say “no.” The benefits may be entirely real, but they will not justify the costs.

Surely there are situations in which we don’t want to make that decisional framework available—not because we think we can simply wish away costs, but because of the importance of the interest at stake and because we know just how easy it is to craft compelling narratives of austerity and costliness. To be sure, austerity/cost narratives have counter-narratives—of deservingness, of need, and even of right—but historically, some narrators have received more credence from the American public than others. There is a thumb on a scale against anyone who can plausibly be blamed for their own vulnerability (“welfare mothers” are a prominent historical example).

Second, she questions the ways that different issues are framed, either as costs or benefits:

The second point—again, heard often in the disability community—is about deep structures of exclusion and how easily they escape the notice of policymakers. CBA is particularly unhelpful in this regard. As Martha Nussbaum has argued, in the context of her capabilities work, CBA may help us in answering which of the options in front of us “contains the largest net measure of good,” but it is not an apt tool for naming and questioning the immorality that may be embedded in the set of choices made available. As Nussbaum puts it, CBA foregrounds the “obvious question” and leaves unasked and unanswered the “tragic question” that may be present in the same situation. Thus in the disability context, CBA might help us decide whether and how to make existing public transportation accessible (still a serious problem), but it does not ask why transportation systems were built in ways that excluded so many disabled people in the first place. It might help us make a decision about the pace and nature of deinstitutionalization, but it would not interrogate the morality of a society that has long separated people with intellectual and developmental disabilities from the rest of the community and confined them in warehouse-like settings. More generally, CBA is comfortable casting some people’s needs as the “costs,” and implicitly asking those people show their worth, rather than asking how and why they ended up on that side of the ledger to begin with.

Finally, in "A Post-Neoliberal Regulatory Analysis for a Post-Neoliberal World," James Goodwin (Center for Progressive Reform) echoes the comments of the previous two posts, calling out the undemocratic nature of CBA as well as its neglect of deontological values, and adds an anti-social bias (that will certainly resonate with social economists):

[T]he analysis must recognize and properly account for the complex patterns of social relationships that define and give meaning to each of our lives. Welfare economics-based cost-benefit analysis denies these linkages, viewing individuals in strictly atomistic terms and pretending our existence is little more than the single-minded pursuit of self-interested utility. An analysis lacking a richer understanding of our situated, mutual dependencies is not merely incomplete; it is systematically biased against pro-social policies, such as controls on toxic mercury pollution emissions from fossil-fueled power plants or effective COVID protections for workers in the service industry. Worse still, it rewards and reinforces the cultural disconnectedness at the root of so many of our public policy challenges.

Mark D. White

The latest issue of Utilitas (23/1, March 2011) contains some very interesting articles; it was very difficult to select just a few to highlight, but here they are:

MOZAFFAR QIZILBASH, Sugden's Critique of the Capability Approach

In comparing Sen's work with Mill's, Sugden criticizes Sen's capability approach because it may be applied in such a way that society or theorists judge what is best for people and potentially restrict liberty on that basis. Sugden cites Nussbaum's work as evidence in making his case. Sugden's critique of Sen's approach succeeds on a narrow reading of it. On that reading Sen is also critical of it because it does not leave enough room for liberty. On a broad reading, the critique has less force. Nussbaum's approach follows Mill in allowing people freedom to act on whatever desires they have if this does not harm others. This neutralizes the central element of Sugden's critique as it applies to her approach to some degree. Both Sen and Nussbaum nonetheless recognize the danger of illiberal restrictions in application which motivates Sugden's critique.

BEN COLBURN, Autonomy and Adaptive Preferences

Adaptive preference formation is the unconscious altering of our preferences in light of the options we have available. Jon Elster has argued that this is bad because it undermines our autonomy. I agree, but think that Elster's explanation of why is lacking. So, I draw on a richer account of autonomy to give the following answer. Preferences formed through adaptation are characterized by covert influence (that is, explanations of which an agent herself is necessarily unaware), and covert influence undermines our autonomy because it undermines the extent to which an agent's preferences are ones that she has decided upon for herself. This answer fills the lacuna in Elster's argument. It also allows us to draw a principled distinction between adaptive preference formation and the closely related – but potentially autonomy-enhancing – phenomenon of character planning.

SANDRINE BERGES, Why Women Hug their Chains: Wollstonecraft and Adaptive Preferences

In a recent article, Amartya Sen writes that one important influence on his theory of adaptive preferences is Wollstonecraft's account of how some women, though clearly oppressed, are apparently satisfied with their lot. Wollstonecraft's arguments have received little attention so far from contemporary political philosophers, and one might be tempted to dismiss Sen's acknowledgment as a form of gallantry. That would be wrong. Wollstonecraft does have a lot of interest to say on the topic of why her contemporaries appeared to choose what struck her as oppression, and her views can still help us reflect on contemporary problems such as the ones identified and discussed by Amartya Sen. In this article I will argue that a close look at Wollstonecraft's arguments may lead us to rethink some aspects of Sen's discussion of the phenomenon of adaptive preferences.

KEITH HORTON, Fairness and Fair Shares

Some moral principles require agents to do more than their fair share of a common task, if others won't do their fair share – each agent's fair share being what she would be required to do if all contributed as they should. This seems to provide a strong basis for objecting to such principles. For it seems unfair to require agents who have already done their fair share to do more, just because other agents won't do their fair share. The philosopher who has written most about this issue, however, Liam Murphy, argues that it is not unfair to do so, at least in the standard sense of that term. In this article, I give Murphy's reasons for saying this, explain why I think he's wrong, and then say a little about why this issue might be important.

MATTHEW TEDESCO, Intuitions and the Demands of Consequentialism

One response to the demandingness objection is that it begs the question against consequentialism by assuming a moral distinction between what a theory requires and what it permits. According to the consequentialist, this distinction stands in need of defense. However, this response may also beg the question, this time at the methodological level, regarding the credibility of the intuitions underlying the objection. The success of the consequentialist's response thus turns on the role we assign to intuitions in our moral methodology. After presenting the demandingness objection to consequentialism and revealing the underlying methodological stalemate, I break the stalemate by appealing to research in the cognitive neuroscience of intuitions. Given the evidence for the hypothesis that our moral intuitions are fundamentally emotional (rather than rational) responses, we should give our intuitions a modest (rather than robust) role in our moral methodology. This rescues the consequentialist's response to the demandingness objection.

EZEQUIEL SPECTOR, Do You Deserve To Be Talented?

Are inborn characteristics deserved or undeserved? Using Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and Peter Strawson's objection to this theory, I argue that this question does not make sense. In order to know whether a person deserves something she has, it is necessary to evaluate what she did before having it. But people did not exist before their birth, so they did not exist before having their inborn characteristics. Therefore, talking about people deserving their inborn characteristics does not make sense: these characteristics are neither deserved nor undeserved.

Mark D. White

In the latest issue of Ratio Juris (24/1, March 2011), Martha Nussbaum reconsiders several aspects of John Rawls's Political Liberalism:

"Rawls' Political Liberalism. A Reassessment"

Since Rawls's Political Liberalism is by now the subject of a wide and deep philosophical literature, much of it excellent in quality, it would be foolhardy to attempt to say something about each of the major issues of the work, or to sort through debates that can easily be located elsewhere. I have therefore decided to focus on a small number of issues where there is at least some chance that a fresh approach may yield some new understanding of the text: Rawls's distinction between “reasonable” and “unreasonable” comprehensive doctrines; the psychological underpinnings of political liberalism; and the possibility that political liberalism might be extended beyond the small group of modern Western societies that Rawls's historical remarks suggest as its primary focus. I also include a discussion of the much-debated issue of civility and public reason, which could hardly be avoided given its prominence in the book's reception. This paper should therefore be read not as a comprehensive account of the work but as one person's attempt to grapple, very incompletely and imperfectly, with a book that is as great as any philosophy has seen on this topic of great human urgency.