Sustainability

How should sustainability in this general sense be characterized? One useful starting point is through an answer to three questions: The sustainability of what? For whom? And why? In the economic literature that informs much public policy on sustainability following the Brundtland Report, the answer to these questions runs roughly as follows. What is to be sustained is a certain level of human welfare or well-being. In the original Brundtland formulation welfare is characterized objectively in terms of needs. In standard welfare economics it is understood in terms of preference satisfaction. For whom it is to be sustained are present and future generations of humans. The question why it should be sustained is normally given either a broadly utilitarian answer – to maximize welfare over time – or an answer that appeals to intergenerational justice – to meet the demands of distributional justice between generations. Sustainable development is then defined as economic and social development that at least maintains and if possible improves levels of human welfare. Typically it is argued that what is required to maintain or improve levels of human welfare over generations is for each generation to leave its successor a stock of capital assets no less than it receives. The term “sustainable” is applied to entire social and economic arrangements to capture what classically would have been called changes to “the wealth of nations”. There are clearly large normative and conceptual questions that might be raised about this

characterization of sustainability. The account is welfarist: it assumes that what matters for sustainability is maintaining or improving welfare. It also assumes that only human welfare matters. One set of debates around this concept of sustainability centres on the defensibility of these assumptions. One might reject the second assumption, that only human welfare matters. The welfare of sentient beings, or more generally the good of living things, might be argued to matter independently of the welfare of human beings. The first assumption might also be rejected. Welfare is not the only value. For example, one might hold that there are impersonal values, that is, that there are certain things or states, for example biodiversity or beauty, that are valuable in themselves but not of value for the life of any being. Something close to this position about beauty was, for example, held by G. E. Moore who thought that beauty was of value even though there was no agent conscious of that beauty (Moore 1903: 85-87). Many might similarly think that the accelerated loss of species is bad even if it is not bad for any particular being. If either of these objections is telling then one might still defend a wider conception of environmental sustainability, for example, as the maintenance or improvement of levels of human and non-human welfare over time or levels of total value, including impersonal value, over time. These arguments raise important issues that deserve detailed consideration. However, they will not be my central concern in this chapter. For the remainder of this chapter I will focus on the narrower definition of sustainability in terms of the maintenance and improvement of human well-being. I will argue that even so understood there are some major problems with the way it has been characterized in the economic literature.