Cost-Benefit Analysis, Climate Policy, and the Parasite Class
In a paper published in Philosophical Issues in 2001, David Schmidtz argued for an approach to environmental ethics – climate change in particular – based on Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA). I’m not at all convinced that CBA is an appropriate and/or useful tool to understand the ethics of the climate crisis, however, and quite recently, Jeppe von Platz raised serious doubts about the possibility of making the necessary calculations to apply CBA. Nevertheless, I do think that CBA is a useful tool to understand the policy situation. When the topic is the ethics of climate change it makes sense to apply...