In an account of parental responsibilities, Clovis, the pampered protagonist of many of Saki's stories, said that his mother taught him “the difference between right and wrong; there is some difference, you know, but I've forgotten what it is.” He explained that his mother had also introduced him “to at least four different ways of cooking lobster,” and one cannot remember everything.

Because one cannot remember everything, I shall pause here to review the three ways I have so far described of cooking the lobster of environmental and welfare economics. The present chapter adds a fourth general argument against the conceptual framework economists use to attach value to environmental assets. In later chapters I shall say something about the democratic alternatives to economic analysis – where I shall offer reasons to remember the difference between right and wrong, in other words, to consider arguments of principle, even if economists would have us consider only preferences.

The Argument So Far

So far, I have presented three general arguments. First, I have proposed that the concept of “welfare” to which economists appeal to provide a normative basis for their science in fact has no normative content or substance. Economists suppose that the satisfaction of preferences taken as they come on a willingness-to-pay (WTP) basis bounded by indifference curves is a good thing – but why is it good? To explain why preference-satisfaction is a good thing, microeconomists assert a relation between preference and welfare.