It's useful to remember that German environmentalism comes with a baggage of traditional biases.

No doubt that's why we focussed on measuring sustanability first instead of choosing utility (what might be the natural choice for a societies valuing indidual experssion highly). But we didn't exclude preferrences because we considered them irrelevant but because we wanted to separate them out. That's a valid approach. We just may not forget to plug it in later.