The Utilitarian Approach to Environmental Law: Balancing Costs and Benefits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the utilitarian approach to environmental law, evaluating its effectiveness in balancing economic development with ecological preservation. Through a detailed review of literature and analysis, we explore the ethical underpinnings, applications, and limitations of utilitarianism in environmental policy-making, alongside alternative ethical frameworks including ecocentrism, biocentrism, rights-based approaches, deontological ethics, and the Capability Approach. The methodology involves a comprehensive literature review, focusing on theoretical explorations and case studies that illustrate the utilitarian approach in action, as well as its criticisms and the corresponding strengths of alternative ethical perspectives. Our findings reveal that while the utilitarian approach offers a pragmatic framework for decision-making by emphasizing the maximization of overall welfare, it faces significant challenges. These include the potential for overlooking social inequities, difficulties in quantifying long-term ecological impacts, and a tendency to value nature solely for its utility to humans. In contrast, alternative ethical frameworks provide valuable insights into the intrinsic value of nature, the importance of considering rights and duties, and the need for policies that ensure fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. In conclusion, the article argues for a pluralistic and integrative approach to environmental governance. It suggests that drawing on the strengths of both utilitarian and alternative ethical frameworks can lead to more nuanced, just, and sustainable environmental laws and policies. This approach necessitates ongoing dialogue among diverse stakeholders, aiming to reconcile economic development with moral obligations to present and future generations, as well as the non-human world. Through such collaborative efforts, we can better navigate the complex ethical landscape of environmental conservation and governance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.043 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".