Irrational Economist_ Making Decisions in a Dangerous World - Erwann Michel-Kerjan [39]
3. Intergenerational equity, irreversibility, and intertemporal choice: Legitimation problems are particularly difficult in these areas because it is impossible to bring all the affected parties into the decision context at the time policy choices are made. The special problems of intergenerational equity (meaning all the future generations who will be affected by our actions today but who are not yet born) and irreversibility have been at the heart of the climate change debate, just as they were for disputes about radioactive waste. More generally, the “precautionary principle” and the sustainability debate overall has been focused on the central question of what it actually means for present generations to live in such a manner as to not disadvantage future generations.
4. Low-probability, high-consequence events: Added to the above are the continuing perplexities of risk management and mitigation associated with the low-probability, very high-consequence outcomes of climate change. Howard Kunreuther’s primary contributions to the social sciences have been in this area, and several other chapters in this volume examine these. Suffice it to say that from a legitimation perspective, the lack of easily interpretable feedback on climate change policies contributes to the ease of misinterpretation and denial of the noisy signals that arise from climate change.
WHAT TO DO?
What guidance can research on legitimation theory provide us to inform this discussion? According to Habermas, we should engage in open discourse and attempt to promote communicative rationality, rather than holing up in our disciplines and attempting to legitimate the goodness of one or another policy by decorating our ideas with the plumage of intellectual certifications. At first glance, Habermas’s call for a more democratic approach would appear to be an impossible recipe to follow, given the complexities of this problem. However, on reflection, are the ideas so difficult that individual citizens cannot be brought into the discussion? Can they be made aware, in meaningful terms, of the stakes—and of the tradeoffs for themselves and their grandchildren? And rather than speaking about the potential cost of various policies for addressing climate change in terms of a net present value of $800 billion or 3 percent of global GDP in the year 2050 (the types of economic numbers attached to the Stern Report to summarize the cost of climate change policies), can we express the consequences of these alternatives in terms that are meaningful to individuals in various parts of the world? I think the answer to both of these questions is most definitely yes. Moreover, given the magnitude of the stakes in this problem, it seems to me critical to bring the citizens of the planet into a meaningful and urgent debate of these policies, which have the potential to significantly affect their lives and those of many generations to come.
Research on legitimation provides some guidance regarding the ways in which decision processes will be affected by alternative approaches to accountability, justification, and observability. However, the characteristics of the climate change problem pose a particularly difficult problem with respect to legitimation. Truth and validation of theories, and the associated recommendations derived from them, are ultimately based on well-intentioned inquiry. However, from epistemology and Thomas Kuhn’s work on the history of the philosophy of science we know that models of such inquiry, and the guarantors of truth in these models, take many forms. They range from simple consensus among affected parties to deductive coherence, to correspondence with corroborative evidence,