Philosophical-Policy & Legal Design: Ecosystem Policy and a Transition to the Anticipatory Regulation of Environmental Risk

Abstract

If the COVID-19 pandemic tells us anything, it is that an environmental risk policy focused primarily on an efficient economy and only the ex post regulation of harm to the environment is not adequate. It fails to protect and empower of the intrinsic human and natural values that ought to be the foundation of planning and policy implementation. The ‘economic’ status-quo has failed for decades to properly regulate climate change, but the immediate threat and the drastic ex post measures required by the overall lack of policy planning and anticipation of harm with this pandemic is evidence that the conventional assumptions of our current public policy model are severely flawed. Science can tell us what we have, but policy is necessary in term of how we prepare and which values drive that planning. In this chapter, I argue that it is only with a change to the essential philosophical-moral premises of environmental risk law and policy that we can move to anticipatory Ecosystem Policy and protect the intrinsic values at stake, now, and in the future. This requires that we replace the dominance of the Market Paradigm for policy choice with a Philosophical-Policy and Legal Design Paradigm created from Kant’s Argument for Justice-From-Autonomy.