Environment and capability: A new normative framework for environmental policy analysis

In contemporary environmental policy analysis, questions of environmental value are commonly understood, debated, and resolved through an analytic framework that relies on neoclassical economic reasoning and decision-making tools. Although this framework ensures routine consideration of a policy's economic efficiency, it is often criticized for relying on a theory of value that treats welfare-maximization as the ultimate good and preference satisfaction as the means of achieving it. My dissertation, entitled Environment and Capability: A New Normative Framework for Environmental Policy Analysis, responds to these criticisms of contemporary environmental policy analysis by incorporating economic reasoning within a broader and more nuanced approach to policy evaluation. Drawing on recent work in ethics and welfare-economics---the capabilities approach and the capability approach---the dissertation argues that we should conceive of environmental value as a relationship between the environmental preconditions of individual choice and ecological interactions that create conditions for organic life. The dissertation then uses this conception of value to assemble a framework for evaluating environmental policies that incorporates values such as preference satisfaction and economic efficiency in addition to individual and social values that economic analysis does not address. To demonstrate how this framework can improve the information that policy analysis introduces into democratic politics, I use it to critique and improve the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) existing analysis of the water quality regulations issued for the organic chemicals, plastics and synthetic fibers industry. Here I find that while EPA's existing analysis provides some information relevant to the proposed framework of policy evaluation, the exiting analysis too quickly monetizes individual values, and it fails to account for how these values make genuine contributions to individuals' quality of life, and for how these value create outcomes that unjustly burden certain people. Finally, drawing on ideals of "social justice" and "environmental sustainability," I propose a criterion for resolving conflicts over environmental resources that can provide a basis for recommending appropriate tradeoffs in environmental policy analysis. This criterion requires information from the framework of policy evaluation that the dissertation develops and offers an alternative to the current effort evaluate policy options in terms of "economic efficiency."...