The Pluralist

This book addresses one of the most significant problems in the field of public policy: how to incorporate qualitative social values into the traditional quantitative models used in policy making. Ellis’s practical argument that qualitative social value, what Ellis calls “the justice factor” (171), can be meaningfully incorporated into cost-benefit models is ambitious and innovative. He delivers admirably on his promise to provide “quantitative methods of measuring justice, so that it can become commensurable with utility in a coherent and rationally defensible decision principle” (2).

The argument of the book is tightly organized and clearly presented as befits its relative brevity. Chapters 1and 2 set up the problem of the incommensurability of utility, justice, and procedural legitimacy. In the process, Ellis provides a succinct, articulate, and critical account of five “values systems” (ethical theories) that could easily be used in an introductory ethics class without obscuring the nuances of current debates well-known to philosophers. Ellis shows that at heart of the utility-justice debate there is an underexamined assumption of philosophers and policy analysts that values are incommensurate, which gives by default the field of policy formation to various forms of quantified utilitarianism. Because “happiness” is desired by all people (without prejudging what makes anyone happy) and since happiness can be quantified by reference to willingness to pay for what makes one happy, utilitarianism has commended itself as the only reliable way, adjudicating among values in the pluralistic public sphere. However, this view is not [End Page 127]without problems because there are cases where relatively trivial economic values trump more substantive, though admittedly qualitative, human values such as the right to life, access to basic goods to maintain life, and a reasonably salubrious environment.

Ellis carefully examines the arguments for moral subjectivism upon which claims of incommensurability are based. He finds they are not sustainable because it can be demonstrated by rational argument and empirical evidence that there are (1) objectively true value statements and (2) a core of common intrinsic value claims regardless of value system that do not conflict. Thus, there is no incommensurable pluralism of value systems (55) because the divergent extrinsic values of different systems are meant to promote similar intrinsic values (56). So the meaningful conflict among value systems is not about whatshould be valued but howthe things people do value are to be equitably distributed. This debate is not intractable but is, in fact, what debate about policy is about. Whether or not a policy achieves an equitable distribution of value is a social outcome, so what is needed is a means of combining claims for justice with a justifiable and practical means of measuring the outcomes of justice achieved.

Chapters 3 and 4 lay out in more detail the problems already set up and provide a method for addressing them. Ellis takes a standard “problems” approach to deal with utilitarianism and rights-based decision-making principles. These chapters, however, are rich because of the extensive literature and concrete cases that Ellis draws on. Ellis’s argument does not head toward an either-or choice between utility or justice as do some standard accounts. Consistent with his setup, he argues for the methodological possibility of weighing conflicting values against each other by giving utility and distributive justice their “appropriate place” in a comprehensive decision principle that he sketches out in chapter...