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Social Ecological Economies and Nature Based Values
No full textModern market economies are fundamentally unsustainable for a complex of reasons that include reliance on institutions promoting hedonistic individualism and the exploitation of others: both human and non-human. While environmental concerns, or at least climate change, have now become more common topics in economic debates, the mainstream reliance on consequentialism, and specifically preference utilitarianism, proves highly limiting and exclusionary of plural values. The approach excludes incommensurable values, denies irreconcilable value conflicts and limits the moral considerability of non-humans to human interests. Mainstream economics reduces values and choice to a matter of preference as if buying commodities in a market place. Social ecological economics identifies and emphasise social relations distinct from market institutions, including: female labour power, non-humans and natural systems. We contrast the mainstream approach with the two other major ethical systems in Western philosophy: deontology or rights based ethics and neo-Aristotelian approaches as in virtue ethics. We argue that Nature based values entail an environmental ethics that recognises the ability of non-humans to flourish autonomously and that caring for others is a constitutive of human wellbeing. We concluded that maintaining and reproducing economies as social-ecological provisioning systems requires developing institutions and social arrangements that acknowledge the ethical context of choice. In turn this means rethinking Nature based values to avoid the failings of current economies and mainstream economics
'The economy' as if people mattered: Revisiting critiques of economic growth in a time of crisis
Full text linkCoronavirus (COVID-19) policy shut down the world economy with a range of government actions unprecedented outside of wartime. In this paper, economic systems dominated by a capital accumulating growth imperative are shown to have had their structural weaknesses exposed, revealing numerous problems including unstable supply chains, unjust social provisioning of essentials, profiteering, precarious employment, inequities and pollution. Such phenomena must be understood in the context of long standing critiques relating to the limits of economic systems, their consumerist values and divorce from biophysical reality. Critical reflection on the Coronavirus pandemic is combined with a review of how economists have defended economic growth as sustainable, Green and inclusive regardless of systemic limits and multiple crises – climate emergency, economic crash and pandemic. Instead of rebuilding the old flawed political economy again, what the world needs now is a more robust, just, ethical and equitable social-ecological economy
Towards the integration of social, economic and ecological knowledge
No full textIntegration of knowledge has become a contentious issue in an age where increasing
specialisation creates boundaries and division. Yet, there is an identifiable need for
integration across social, ecological and economic understandings if we are to address ever
more threatening crises and alarming potential scenarios. This paper relates to the work of K.
William Kapp and in so doing raises questions about how integration might be achieved. A
core idea that arises is the role of common denominator concepts. (author's abstract)Series: SRE - Discussion Paper
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