ABSTRACT
Beyond the vague affirmation that ultimately it is the well-being and quality of life of current and future generations that constitute the subject matter of sustainable development (SD), it remains to decipher what are the precise requirements of SD as both an intragenerational and intergenerational concern. What are the rights and duties of current generations, what use can they make of the scarce and non-substitutable resources of the environment, what can they consume for their own well-being and what should they save for the well-being of the future generations? Answering all these questions supposes that a more fundamental one has been addressed first: what exactly does human well-being mean? On what does it depend? How can it be improved and what hampers it? These questions are addressed by all the chapters in this book, in one way or another, directly or indirectly. For instance, in the opening chapter, Rauschmayer, Omann, and Frühmann define quality of life as composed of well-being and capabilities. The former is seen by them as a mix of subjective perceptions (with emotional, cognitive and evaluative components) and objective conditions (capabilities) linked to the satisfaction of Max-Neef’s (1991) nine fundamental human needs, considered as the most fundamental dimensions of human flourishing. For their part, Spillemaeckers, Van Ootegem, and Westerhof propose in Chapter 4 an enlarged conception of the capability approach integrating some elements of the basic needs discourse. Despite their differences, the different chapters in this book share a common starting point: the rebuttal of the welfarist, utilitarian and subjectivist conception of well-being and of justice that prevailed until very recently in economics, political philosophy and ethics and whose most renowned adversaries today are, each in his own way, John Rawls and Amartya Sen. In this chapter, we will mobilize an older intellectual tradition which has also struggled from the outset against strictly economical as well as purely psychological conceptions of well-being and to which it opposed a category:
somewhere between the philosophy of money and the philosophy of happiness, that is the assumption that everything can be measured in dollar terms, and the other assumption that the individual alone knows what has got value– in short, a category which expresses human wants and needs, interests and hopes in a way that does not suppress the subjective element but makes it clear that one is seeking more than the personal sensation of happiness, namely socially structured ways of individual life. The category which serves these multiple purposes is that of life chances.
(Dahrendorf 1979: 52)