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Contrasting Methods of Environmental Planning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
In planning the conduct of his affairs in relation to nature, man is faced with many problems which are so complex and so intermeshed that it is hard to say at first even what kind of problems they are. We are all familiar with the distinction between factual and evaluative questions, and I do not doubt that there is this distinction; but the actual problems with which we are faced are always an amalgam of these two kinds of question. The various methods used by environmental planners are all attempts to separate out this amalgam, as we have to do if we are ever to understand the problems — let alone solve them. I wish in this lecture to give examples of, and appraise, two such methods. I shall draw from this appraisal not only theoretical lessons which may interest the moral philosopher, but also practical lessons which, I am sure, those who try to plan our environment ought to absorb. Though my examples come mostly from urban planning, because that is the kind of planning with whose problems (although only an amateur) I am most familiar, what I have to say will apply also to problems about the countryside. Whether we have to deal with the human nature of the man in the congested street, or the nature of the nature reserves or of the areas of outstanding natural beauty, the word ‘nature’ may bear slightly different senses, but the problem is still the same: to ascertain the facts about this nature, and then to think how we should conduct ourselves in order to make things better, or at any rate not worse, than they would otherwise be.
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- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 8: Nature and Conduct , March 1974 , pp. 281 - 297
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1974
References
1 Creighton, R. L., Urban Transportation Planning (Urbana, 1970).Google Scholar
2 Colin Buchanan and Partners, Freeman Fox, Wilbur Smith and Associates (Edinburgh, 1971, 1972) (obtainable from Edinburgh Corporation).
3 See, e.g., Munby, D. L., ‘Faith and Facts: Quantity and Quality’, in Humane Gesellschaft, ed. Rendtorff, T. and Rich, A. (Zurich, 1970).Google Scholar
4 Commission on the Third London Airport (the Roskill Commission) (London: H.M.S.O., 1971).Google Scholar
5 Popper, K. R., The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Vienna, 1934; London, 1959)Google Scholar; Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1963) chap. 1.Google Scholar
6 It has been suggested that Oliver Goldsmith's Deserted Village is about this eviction; but the text presents obvious difficulties for such a claim.
7 Philosophy and Public Affairs i (1972)Google Scholar, repr. in War and Moral Responsibility, ed. Mv Cohen et al. (Princeton, 1974) pp. 47 ff.Google Scholar; Ar. Soc. lxxii (1972/1973)Google Scholar; Ph.Q. xxiii (1973).Google Scholar
8 Lewis, C. I., Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, 1946) p. 547.Google Scholar
9 Cf. p. 146 of Creighton's book, cited above p. 285. On the general question see Sen, Amartya, Collective Choice and Human Welfare (London, 1972)Google Scholar. Obviously much more needs to be said than I have been able to say about the uses and pitfalls of cost-benefit analysis. In this lecture I wish merely to claim that the trial-design method is less dependent on it than the means-end method, and not that the former can dispense with it altogether when more than one person's interest is involved. However, the inevitable crudities in practice of cost-benefit analysis make it a virtue of the trial-design method that it at least allows the preference-ordering of solutions by an individual to be made without recourse to it. When it comes to converting these individual preference-orderings into a collective choice, some kind of cost-benefit analysis may be the only way of balancing them fairly against one another. But this is too big a topic for the present lecture.