Welfare economics advances normative views through unremarked assumptions and exclusions, not debate.

Evidence

Understood this way, the welfareeconomic approach to environmental, health, and safety law seems capable of advancing normative views not through overt debate and suasion but through unremarked assumptions and exclusions. … Rather than representing an effort to actively enhance the position of workers, endangered species, future generations, and other benefi ciaries of legal protection— to endow those entities with greater social value than they attract under current market and po liti cal equilibria— environmental, health, and safety laws instead appear to represent “irrational” overinvestments in protection. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 271

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the polyad: names future generations and nonhuman beneficiaries as the entities whose value environmental law is meant to raise — bridging to Eco-Justice content. — connects to: Welfare economics must deny its own incompleteness to sustain its optimization logic. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 269; Lacking ethical foundations does not defeat the economic approach for pragmatists. — Richard A. Posner, What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?, 126

Broader Connections

• Lacking ethical foundations does not defeat the economic approach for pragmatists. #complicates (0.72) — Richard A. Posner, What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?, 126