Obscuring Moral Responsibility Through Cost-benefit Analysis
Cost-benefit analysis, a procedure prescribed by mainstream economists to guard the public welfare from the advance of private interest, is disclosed to fail in its avowed intent when it matters most. It fails because it assumes that society is simply the sum of its members.
Daly points out an unwarranted assumption that may be blamed for the objectionable failure of CBA (Daly 1977: 174-175). The assumption is that ignorance of the specific identities of those to be killed implies that everyone should simply be paid an amount according to their increased risk of death. This supposed implication, however, does not logically follow from ignorance of the identities of those to be killed by the project. An additional assumption needs to be made if the logical implication is to be made. That assumption, Daly objects, is that people simply care about their personal welfare. In which case, society is simply the sum of its members, as assumed by CBA.
Objective experience, however, discloses that it is not the case that people simply care about their own skins: It is not unknown for complete strangers to save other strangers in imminent danger of harm or death if they have the capability of doing so. Accordingly, if it was revealed to people that the project would, with certainty, cause the death of someone (identity yet to be determined, perhaps not even a stranger but someone they loved dearly) and they could prevent this by asking for an infinite monetary compensation, then it cannot be excluded that at least some of them would. As Daly charges: “Cost-benefit analysis should be used to illuminate rather than to obscure moral responsibility.” Exerting that responsibility would then make society more than the mere sum of its members.
Liked it
