The Ethical Significance of Cost-Benefit Analysis in Business and The Professions

Abstract

ism, probability assignments are crucial in certain kinds of moral decisions. Utilitarianism also encourages quantification of whatever values are to be promoted, such as human happiness or, on a hedonistic version, pleasure and the reduction of pain. Given its emphasis on quantification, utilitarian ism is sometimes taken to be quantitative rather than qualitative. But the position is not unqualifiedly quantitative, nor is it the only ethical theory that gives probability a major role and attempts, in some way, to quantify value. The view can also be qualitative, as in the case of Mill's version, which distinguishes between pleasures in a way that permits considering some of them intrinsically better than others (Mill, 1957, p. 12). My aim here is to explicate some of the ethical uses of a form of cost benefit analysis, to explore the extent to which it may be employed by moral theories other than utilitarianism, and consider both some points about the nature of intrinsic value and the possibility of treating it quantitatively as well as qualitatively. The results are intended to be of use in moral reflec tion of many kinds and to facilitate reflection in business and professional ethics as well as on matters of ethical theory.