Book Review: Fairness vs. Welfare

Reviewing Louis Kaplow & Steven Shavell, Fairness versus Welfare (2002

Constitutional Fidelity, The Rule of Recognition, and the Communitarian Turn in Contemporary Positivism

Contemporary positivism has taken a communitarian turn. Hart, in the Postscript to the Concept of Law, clarifies that the rule of recognition is a special sort of social practice: a convention. It is not clear whether Hart, here, means “convention” in the strict sense elaborated by David Lewis, or in some weaker sense. A number of contemporary positivists, including Jules Coleman (at one point), Andrei Marmor, and Gerald Postema, have argued that the rule of recognition is something like a Lewis-convention. Others have suggested that the rule of recognition is conventional in a weaker sense -- specifically, by figuring in a “shared cooperative activity” (SCA) among officials. Chris Kutz, Scott Shapiro, and Jules Coleman (more recently) have adopted this model. This Article criticizes the Lewis-convention and SCA models of the rule of recognition, drawing on U.S. constitutional theory. Imagine a society of U.S. officials who are committed to the text of the 1787 Constitution in a strong form: each official would continue to accept the text as supreme law even if every other official defected to an alternative text, and no official is prepared to bargain or negotiate with the others about the supremacy of the text. The social practice among these officials is neither a Lewis-convention (since there is no alternative text to which every official would shift if every other official did), nor an SCA (since the officials have no general intention to “mesh” their conceptions of legal validity with each other, and in particular have no intention to compromise with officials who deny the supremacy of the 1787 text). Therefore, under the Lewis-convention and SCA models, a hypothetical society of U.S. officials who are committed, first and foremost, to the 1787 text rather than to the community of officials, is not a full-fledged legal system. But this is deeply counterintuitive. The hypothetical society simply embodies, in a particularly pure form, an attitude of fidelity to the 1787 text that many officials and citizens currently profess. The tension between the Lewis-convention and SCA models of the rule of recognition, and constitutional fidelity, points the way to a different model of the rule of recognition: namely, that the rule of recognition is a social norm

Future Generations: A Prioritarian View

Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on two different intellectual traditions: the social welfare function (“SWF”) tradition in welfare economics, and scholarship on “prioritarianism” in moral philosophy. Unlike utilitarians, prioritarians are sensitive to the distribution of well-being. They give greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism can be captured, formally, through an SWF which sums a concave transformation of individual utility, rather than simply summing unweighted utilities in utilitarian fashion. The Article considers the appropriate structure of a prioritarian SWF in intergenerational cases. The simplest case involves a fixed and finite intertemporal population. In that case, I argue, policymakers can and should maintain full neutrality between present and future generations. No discount factor should be attached to the utility of future individuals. Neutrality becomes trickier when we depart from this simple case, meaning: (1) “non-identity” problems, where current choices change the identity of future individuals; (2) population-size variation, where current choices affect not merely the identity of future individuals, but the size of the world’s future population (this case raises the specter of what Derek Parfit terms “the repugnant conclusion,” i.e., that dramatic reductions in the average level of individual well-being might be compensated for by increases in population size); or (3) an infinite population. The Article grapples with the difficult question of outfitting a prioritarian SWF to handle non-identity problems, population-size variation, and infinite populations. It tentatively suggests that a measure of neutrality can be maintained even in these cases

Corrective Justice and Liability for Global Warming

This report addresses the environmental discourse of the current comprehensive plan of Stockholm, The Walkable City, and in what ways it can be developed following an ecofeminist framework. With a foundation in a critical perspective on current processes of urbanization, ecofeminist theory, and an interest in the potential in utopian thought, this thesis attempts to assist the comprehensive plan in finding alternative ways of approaching the urban development of the city, in search for social and environmental justice through increased citizen participation. Ecofeminists argue that economic growth is conditioned by and enforces colonial and patriarchal relations between humans, and between humans and nature. The current global process of urbanization is an integral part in sustaining the economic growth, making cities an important area to address in search of other relations. Sustainable development has been put forth as a way to relieve the negative social and environmental effects of the economic system, and has informed much urban policy-making. Urban policy, such as comprehensive plans, shape the path of urban development. The main strategy of the current comprehensive plan of Stockholm is ”sustainable growth”. This thesis analyses the components that make out the strategy of sustainable growth in order to understand why it is problematic. Further, it engages in participatory scenario generation using an ecofeminist framework, to find new ideas and paths for a sustainable urban development in Stockholm. The conclusions that are found comprise the positive notion that there are great chances to develop the notion and strategies for sustainability through workshops with stakeholders. While the overall course of development of the scenarios may be too far from our current reality to be easily implemented, there are several suggestions with great potential even in our current context. Furthermore, the results point out important directions in which to develop the plan in a longer perspective, that concern a fundamental restructuring of the political economy along more socially and environmentally sound lines that elevate the interconnectedness of humans and nature. This is a restructuring that makes economic growth according to the current model impossible, but that aims for equality between humans and far-reaching environmental protection. It is also pointed out that the deployment of a multitude of conflicting scenarios in planning would benefit both the urban development and democratic participation.Denna studie hanterar miljödiskurser i den gällande översiktsplanen för Stockholm, Promenadstaden, och hur de kan utvecklas utefter ett ekofeministiskt ramverk. Med en grund i ett kritiskt perspektiv på samtida urbaniseringsprocesser, ekofeministisk teori, och ett intresse i den potential som vilar i utopiskt tänkande, avser detta arbete vara översiktsplanen behjälplig i att hitta alternativa vägar att närma sig stadens utveckling, på jakt efter social och miljörättvisa genom ökat medborgardeltagande. Ekofeminister menar att ekonomisk tillväst villkoras av och förstärker koloniala och patriarkala relationer mellan människor, och mellan människor och naturen. Den nuvarande globala urbaniseringsprocessen är en grundläggande del i att upprätthålla ekonomisk tillväxt, vilket gör städer till ett viktigt område att hantera ifall nya relationer ska etableras. Hållbar utveckling har framhävts som ett sätt att minska det ekonomiska systemets negativa sociala och miljöeffekter, och har därför haft stort inflytande över policys för stadsutveckling. Policys, som översiktsplaner, formar hur våra städer utvecklas. Den huvudsakliga strategin i Stockholms gällande översiktsplan är ”hållbar tillväxt”. Denna studie analyserar de delar som formar strategin hållbar tillväxt för att förstå varför den är problematisk. Vidare ägnas arbetet åt generering av framtidsscenarier med deltagare utifrån ett ekofeministiskt ramverk, för att finna nya idéer och spår för hållbar stadsutveckling i Stockholm. Slutsatserna omfattar den positiva uppfattningen att det finns goda chanser att utveckla formuleringen av och strategierna för att nå hållbarhet genom workshops med deltagare. Även om den övergripande utvecklingsinriktningen i scenarierna ligger alltför långt ifrån vår nuvarande verklighet för att med lätthet implementeras finns det fortfarande många konkreta förslag med god potential redan idag. Vidare pekar resultaten ut viktiga riktningar för planens utveckling i ett längre perspektiv, vilka har att göra med en grundläggande omstrukturering av den politiska ekonomin i enlighet med en mer socialt och miljömässigt förnuftig riktning, där mänsklighetens och naturens ofrånkomliga sammanlänkning upphöjs. Det är en omstrukturering som gör ekonomisk tillväxt enligt nuvarande modell omöjlig, men som eftersträvar jämlikhet mellan människor och ett långtgående miljöskydd. Det påpekas vidare i rapporten att nyttjandet av motstridiga scenarier i planering skulle bidra både till stadsutveckling och demokratiskt deltagande, där de konflikter planering präglas av blottläggs

Legal Transitions: Some Welfarist Remarks

This essay offers a sympathetic, utilitarian critique of Louis Kaplow\u27s famous argument for legal retroactivity in his 1986 article, An Economic Analysis of Legal Transitions. The argument, very roughly, is that the prospect of retroactivity is desirable if citizens are rational because it gives them a desirable incentive to anticipate legal change. My central claim is that this argument trades upon a dubious, objective view of probability that assumes rational citizens assign the same probabilities to states as rational governmental officials. But it is subjective, not objective probabilities that bear on rational choice, and the subjective probabilities of rational citizens can diverge from rational officials\u27. I imagine a simple case in which a single Social Planner structures both transition policy and substantive law in some domain. The legal change that the Planner anticipates she would enact in response to a given set of events, and the legal change that the Planner believes one or another citizen believes she (the Planner) will enact in response to those events, can differ. And this means, in turn, that there can be incentive costs to a retroactivity regime as well as a prospectivity regime, even if all actors are fully rational. The utilitarian case for retroactivity is more contingent than Kaplow thinks

Policy Analysis for Natural Hazards: Some Cautionary Lessons From Environmental Policy Analysis

How should agencies and legislatures evaluate possible policies to mitigate the impacts of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other natural hazards? In particular, should governmental bodies adopt the sorts of policy-analytic and risk assessment techniques that are widely used in the area of environmental hazards (chemical toxins and radiation)? Environmental hazards policy analysis regularly employs proxy tests, in particular tests of technological feasibility, rather than focusing on a policy\u27s impact on well-being. When human welfare does enter the analysis, particular aspects of well-being, such as health and safety, are often given priority over others. Individual risk tests and other features of environmental policy analysis sometimes make policy choice fairly insensitive to the size of the exposed population. Seemingly arbitrary numerical cutoffs, such as the one-in-one million incremental risk level, help structure policy evaluation. Risk assessment techniques are often deterministic rather than probabilistic, and in estimating point values often rely on conservative rather than central-tendency estimates. The Article argues that these sorts of features of environmental policy analysis may be justifiable, but only on institutional grounds-if they sufficiently reduce decision costs or bureaucratic error or shirking-and should not be reflexively adopted by natural hazards policymakers. Absent persuasive. institutional justification, natural hazards policy analysis should be welfare-focused, multidimensional, and sensitive to population size, and natural hazards risk assessment techniques should provide information suitable for policy-analytic techniques of this sort

Risk Equity: A New Proposal

What does distributive justice require of risk regulators? Various executive orders enjoin health and safety regulators to take account of “distributive impacts,” “equity,” or “environmental justice,” and many scholars endorse these requirements. But concrete methodologies for evaluating the equity effects of risk regulation policies remain undeveloped. The contrast with cost-benefit analysis--now a very well developed set of techniques --is stark. Equity analysis by governmental agencies that regulate health and safety risks, at least in the United States, lacks rigor and structure. This Article proposes a rigorous framework for risk-equity analysis, which I term “probabilistic population profile analysis” (PPPA). PPPA is both novel, yet firmly grounded in the social-welfare-function tradition in welfare economics. The PPPA framework conceptualizes both the status quo, and possible policies, as probability distributions across population profiles -- where each population profile is, in turn, a concatenation of lifetime health-longevity-income histories, one for each member of the population. A utility function transforms each such profile into a utility vector. An equity-regarding social welfare function (SWF) is then specified. Policy analysts can employ the equity-regarding SWF both (1) to determine how policies compare purely as a matter of equality; and (2) to determine how they compare all-things-considered, considering both equality and overall welfare. The proposal may seem utopian, but is not. Scholars in the field of optimal tax policy already use SWFs to evaluate policies. Characterizing policies as distributions across population health-longevity-income profiles builds on existing risk assessment and general-equilibrium-modeling techniques. Utility functions can be specified through survey research and, in the interim, by building on standard functional forms. Plausible normative axioms considerably narrow the possible forms of the SWF, and survey research or thought experiments narrow the field further. Part I of the Article describes and criticizes existing approaches to risk equity that have been proposed in the scholarly literature: the environmental justice conception of risk equity; “individual risk” approaches; QALY-based equity analysis; incidence analysis; inclusive equality measurement; and cost-benefit analysis with distributive weights. Part II describes and defends PPPA. PPPA has many virtues. It recognizes that well-being is multidimensional, a function of both income and health/longevity; furnishes a metric for inequality; provides a framework for making tradeoffs between equality and overall well-being; and understands that distributive justice includes (but is not limited to) inequalities between high and low-status social groups