RCBA Flashcards
(16 cards)
the steps to calculating RCBA
○ Identify options
○ Identify costs and benefits in natural terms (pricing, human cost/benefit etc.)
○ Estimate probabilities for uncertain outcomes
○ Translate costs and benefits into money
○ Identify option with greatest expected net benefit
○ Take option with greatest benefit
What is RCBA
○ Method for making decisions on risks - calculates expected costs and benefits of each available policy option and translates these in to money
○ Recommends the option with the greatest expected benefits
Commensuration
translating diverse costs and benefits into a common currency
aggregation
basing decisions on the sum of costs and benefits
Consequentialism
the right action is the one that realizes the best expected overall consequences
How do we calculate the monetary value of non-market goods?
○ Revealed preference approach - Find a bundle of goods that do have a market and that vary by the feature were interested in
- Willingness to pay/accept - how much are people willing to pay to reduce risk/how much do you have to offer to make them accept a risk
○ Expressed preference approach - Ask questions designed to elicit value people attach to risk reduction
Value of preventing a fatality/value of a statistical life (VPF/VSL)
An estimate of the monetary value of saving one expected life through some policy measure or safety improvement
objections to RCBA
- RCBA is unstable against the actual occurrence of a serious negative event
- RCBA is insensitive to important distributive concerns
- RCBA wrongly suggests we can and should put a monetary value on non-market goods
- RCBA involves unrealistic informational demands
- RCBA systematically omits important costs and benefits
- RCBA is vulnerable to abuse and political capture
responses to objections
- Monetary value is assigned to reducing a collection of
small risks of death across the population; not to an
individual human life - Wolff 2007 - And attaching monetary value to a good does not commit us to the view that that good has no intrinsic
worth to us - RCBA could also guard against excessive interest group influence
leading to policies that benefit a few but spread large cost across wider
population
potential revisions to RCBA
○ Modify method itself to accommodate key concerns
○ A more restricted role in decision making
○ Detach from consequentialist foundations - RCBA as decision procedure, not fundamental moral principle
curran and John main argument against RCBA for lockdown
CBA’s are ill suited to capturing worries about structural and relational inequalities in the pandemic context
curran and John Contractualism
should take contractualist approach (social contract theory) to lockdown - the ethics of self defence work well in approaching lockdown (‘I am ethically permitted to defend myself from someone who poses a risk to me’)
objections to curran and John
- Assumes we can assess whether complaints are relevant or not - these are more subjective decisions sometimes
- Different groups have different complaints
- how should we distinguish between groups
costa analogy
○ People feeling frustrated that they cant get their coffee from costa during lockdown - if this was accounted for in the CBA the costs of lockdown would outweigh the benefits
- But feelings of frustration are irrelevant when speaking about the livelihoods of others - has no ethical relevance
colmer against VSL for covid 19
inappropriate to use in context of covid
- the mortality risks presented by COVID-19 are larger than the risks that typically underpin VSL estimates
- the type of risk presented by COVID-19 does not match the profile of risks that underpin existing VSL estimates
- the populations at risk from COVID-19 do not match the populations used to support existing VSL estimates
Colmer - The social value of life
○ Society bears the cost of grief and loss
○ We have lost great thinkers before they became great thinkers because of death
○ “Measuring the social costs of the loss of life in a credible way is arguably impossible”
