Cost-Benefit Analysis, Static Efficiency, and the Goals of Environmental Law

Abstract

The Essay suggests that environmental law may properly be sensitive to nonwelfarist and distributive considerations as well as overall human welfare. It summarizes the author’s revisionary view of CBA as a decision-procedure roughly tracking overall welfare that incorporates an objectivist rather than preferentialist view of well-being, and that has a role to play even within a nonutilitarian of moral framework. And it explains that CBA does not (pace Driesen) involve a static conception of efficiency, a presupposition that technological change is exogeneous, or an assumption that individuals act rationally.