Читать книгу The Psychology of Environmental Law - Arden Rowell - Страница 29

It is simply not possible for people to know everything about what the future will look like. The world may change in unexpected ways, and people themselves may change and develop new values and new ways of thinking about it. These changes can matter to environmental policy. If we forgo economic gain today, for instance, by forbidding overfishing a particular species in the ocean, we have guaranteed a present loss, undertaken in the hopes it will mitigate overall loss when averaged with the future. But what if technology develops to allow us to farm that species in a way that makes its flourishing in the open ocean unimportant? We will have delayed consuming and enjoying that species today with no corresponding future benefits. As with public goods dilemmas, it is irrational for us to invest fully in a future event when we cannot guarantee we will fully internalize its benefits.

Such problems can be addressed at least partially by adjusting for future probabilities based on what we do know. That is, we can estimate the possible future scenarios, weight them by their likelihood, and calculate an expected value. This is a practical and highly rational approach to future impacts, and is particularly suitable where there is good information about probabilities. Indeed, it is the approach that regulators generally take in the United States to valuing future environmental impacts (Sunstein & Rowell, 2007). But as we discuss further in Chapter 7, this approach is imperfect. Most obviously, as a practical matter, even hyperrational decision makers cannot use expected value to generate prescriptions when there is insufficient information about probabilities. In such cases, decision makers must adopt other methods of choosing (Farber, 2010)—but, unfortunately, all those other methods (such as the precautionary principle) still depend upon decisions about how to value the future.

In addition to simple informational limitations, there are cognitive quirks associated with how we think about time that complicate our ability to fully internalize future effects. These include how we manage future uncertainty, our ability to accurately predict how we will feel in the future (“hedonic forecasting”), how much we value the present versus the future (“present bias”), and our perceptions of our ethical obligations to the future. We focus on each of these problems below.