ABSTRACT
Discussions relating to the ethical underpinnings of economics and their implications for understanding human-induced climate change have typically been sustained at a superficial level of engagement due to the restrictions imposed by maintaining consistency with the tenets of mainstream economics. Belief in a Humean fact-value dichotomy is evident in the promotion of economics as a positive science and the persistence of regarding “efficiency” as an uncontroversial and value free objective. This distinction made by Hume as a passing remark, about not believing everything you read, was taken up as a major philosophical distinction. Hume’s concern was that some authors drew unwarranted moral direction from factual/empirical claims to knowledge. Later this became taken as a prescriptive difference with the analytical/factual/empirical being seen as scientific while the normative/ethical/moral was seen as a distinct area of knowledge; the former supposedly could not direct human action while the latter could provide such direction. In economics this is enshrined in the split between positive and normative economics, in philosophy the analytical vs. normative, and more generally the division between science and politics. Under such reasoning, discounting the future becomes merely ads aspect of empirical reality to be objectively observed in a positive economics. The logic of discounting is then enforced as part of resource efficiency as if this were not an ethical choice (e.g. Arrow et al. 1996). Even those who recognise the importance of ethics in economics wish to maintain an analytical economics separated from the ethics and fall back heavily on a narrow consequentialism (Stern 2014a). Thus, climate economists typically regard policy decisions as being made on the basis of weighing the costs of death and destruction against the benefits of increasing consumption, and deem this a necessary act of rational and efficient economic risk management (Stern 2006). Under the mainstream economic framing the imperative of growth cannot be questioned and is actually described as a means for controlling human induced climate change (GCEC 2014), rather than a fundamental cause of the problem in the first place.
