Friedrich von Hayek’s classical liberalism argued that free markets allow individuals the greatest opportunity to achieve their ends. This paper develops an internal critique of this claim. It argues that once externalities are introduced, the forms of economic knowledge Hayek thought to undermine government action and orthodox utilitarianism also rule out relative welfarist assessments of more or less regulated markets. Given the pervasiveness of externalities in modern economies, Hayek will frequently be unable to make comparative welfarist claims, or he must (...) relax his epistemic assumptions and allow for greater government action than his classical liberalism would wish to accept. (shrink)

The protection of human health and the environment are two major goals of international environmental law. However, there has been little coherent scrutiny of their scope or implementation at international and domestic levels in developing countries and Africa in particular. This thesis shows that international environmental law regimes with a health protection objective have not maximized opportunities to reinforce the promotion and protection of public health in Africa. Through inter alia a study of sustainable management of shared freshwaters, trans-boundary movement (...) of hazardous wastes and their disposal and international climate law, the thesis shows that a range of legal frameworks comprised of substantive, institutional and procedural law mandates States to advance the health objective in international environmental law. However, the thesis demonstrates the limits of these regimes and suggests options to enhance their potential in promoting and protecting public health. An enhanced framework of adaptive governance is proposed to improve environmental health governance. The thesis illustrates how the discourse on health in international environmental law can strengthen international environmental health governance to improve environmental and public health outcomes. It contains seven publications that analyse the strengths and weaknesses and options for reform of the international environmental law regime for health. The implications of these findings for theory, practice and public policy are discussed. (shrink)

An environmental, climate mitigation rationale for research and development on liquid transportation fuels derived from plants emerged among many scientists and engineers during the last decade. However, between 2006 and 2010, this climate ethic for pursuing biofuel became politically entangled and conceptually confused with rationales for encouraging greater use of plant-based ethanol that were both unconnected to climate ethics and potentially in conflict with the value-commitments providing a mitigation-oriented reason to promote and develop new and expanded sources of biofuel. I (...) argue that the conceptual construct of technological trajectories provides a fecund approach to the ethical evaluation of R&D strategies in the case of plant-based liquid transportation fuels. The idea of a trajectory has a current use in the literature of science studies and aptly summarizes a number of themes that are critical to the evaluation of tools and techniques whose future shape, design, applications and potential consequences are necessarily somewhat speculative. In the case of biofuels, it is the imagined future trajectory that provides the basis for resistance to an emerging technology, rather than the present-day technical capabilities and the unexpected consequences of biofuel development. (shrink)