Aggregative and Deliberative Contexts for Valuation: A Philosophical Contribution to Experimental Research in Environmental Decision Making

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Socioeconomic research has devoted considerable effort to measuring the value individuals attach to environmental goods and services that markets fail to price. The goal of this research has been to elicit the `given` or prior preferences of individuals and to use those data to guide policy concerned with maximizing individual and social well-being. A complement to this approach has emerged from recent philosophical research on democracy and deliberative processes. From this perspective, the individual, rather than serving simply as a bearer of prior preferences, joins in a social process in which public values are constructed. Economists, sociologists, and other social scientists are now developing new research approaches to determine the extent to which the valuation of environmental goods can benefit from discursive, information-rich, and deliberative experimental methods. The project intends to shape and inform these experimental methods in socioeconomic research by relating them to work in political theory and philo sophy that emphasizes processes of social learning, exchange, and identification. The investigators also propose to analyze the policy relevance of data that emerge from group discourse, deliberation, and consideration of evidence - - data which may reflect judgments individuals make not about their own well -being but about the objectives of the community as a whole.