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7 - Incommensurability and Uncertainty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2009

Sahotra Sarkar
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Summary

Suppose we have at hand a set of lists of places that have been prioritized by biodiversity value. Presumably, each member of this set was initially generated by prioritizing for biodiversity content using the methods described in the last chapter. This list was then filtered to take into account the prognosis for biodiversity at each place, resulting in a list prioritized by biodiversity value. It now remains to incorporate the other (for instance, anthropocentric) considerations that must be taken into account during biodiversity conservation planning. If biodiversity conservationists were the only contestants in the struggle over land, nothing more than prioritization by biodiversity value would be necessary. Places would be targeted for conservation on the basis of the prioritized list, perhaps constrained globally by cost and similar considerations. Unfortunately, there is no dearth of other contestants for land. These contestants evaluate our lists of places according to criteria other than biodiversity. In the following discussion (up to the end of section 7.3), these other criteria will sometimes be said to reflect other “values”; this use of “value,” though common in environmental philosophy, is strictly distinct from the use of “value” in the preceding chapters (except Chapter 4, § 4.1), though the two uses are consistent with each other: instead of saying that there are different criteria that each attributes value to alternatives, it is a useful shorthand to say that there are different values associated with an alternative.

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Information
Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy
An Introduction
, pp. 185 - 217
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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