Ethical policy analysis in an age of risk, uncertainty, and futurity.

Description

Once dominated by approaches based on positivist assumptions, the field of policy analysis has diversified in recent times. Policy analysis now includes numerous perspectives on the processes of policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation. Many of these approaches derive from self-consciously defined schools of ethics. This dissertation surveys three generalized approaches to ethical policy analysis and evaluates them in light of moral dilemmas arising in the case of nuclear waste management policy in Canada. Its central argument is that an adequate approach to ethical policy analysis contains the philosophical tools necessary to address the moral problems of defining risk and understanding safety, identifying obligations to both existing and future generations, and conceptualizing legitimacy-conferring policy processes. Neither welfare utilitarianism nor modern deontology is sufficiently equipped, each containing philosophical elements of the good that beg further determination in actual policy contexts. Only the deliberative/discursive approach contains convincing conceptions of justice and the good, as well as a convincing conception of legitimacy, that provide for the justifiable resolution of debates about the moral foundations of public policy. Responding to challenges in the case of nuclear waste management in ways more comprehensive and more justifiable than both utilitarianism and deontology, discursive policy analysis promises to be an effective approach in other cases associated with risk, uncertainty, and futurity.

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