Deep Uncertainty, Public Reason, the Conservation of Biodiversity and the Regulation of Markets for Lion Skeletons

Peter Coals, Dawn Burnham, Paul J. Johnson, Andrew Loveridge, David W. Macdonald, Vivienne L. Williams and John A. Vucetich
Additional contact information
Peter Coals: Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Tubney OX13 5QL, UK
Dawn Burnham: Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Tubney OX13 5QL, UK
Paul J. Johnson: Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Tubney OX13 5QL, UK
Andrew Loveridge: Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Tubney OX13 5QL, UK
David W. Macdonald: Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Tubney OX13 5QL, UK
Vivienne L. Williams: School of Animal, Plant & Environmental Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 2000, South Africa
John A. Vucetich: School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, Michigan Technological University, 1400 Townsend Drive, Houghton, MI 49931-1295, USA

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 18, 1-15

Abstract: Public reason is a formal concept in political theory. There is a need to better understand how public reason might be elicited in making public decisions that involve deep uncertainty, which arises from pernicious and gross ignorance about how a system works, the boundaries of a system, and the relative value (or disvalue) of various possible outcomes. This article is the third in a series to demonstrate how ethical argument analysis—a qualitative decision-making aid—may be used to elicit public reason in the presence of deep uncertainty. The first article demonstrated how argument analysis is capable of probing deep into a single argument. The second article demonstrated how argument analysis can analyze a broad set of arguments and how argument analysis can be operationalized for use as a decision-making aid. This article demonstrates (i) the relevance of argument analysis to public reasoning, (ii) the relevance of argument analysis for decision-making under deep uncertainty, an emerging direction in decision theory, and (iii) how deep uncertainty can arise when the boundary between facts and values is inescapably entangled. This article and the previous two make these demonstrations using, as an example, the conservation and sustainable use of lions.

Keywords: deliberative democracy; CITES; collaborative governance; conservation ethics; decision-making aids; deep uncertainty; ecological economics; farmed wildlife; public reasoning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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