0.14 Related issues in sustainable development and the environment  (Page 2/7)

These and milder forms of environmental triage involve economic, ecological, and ethical questions of the most fundamental nature. Even if information about the severity of these problems were much more available, and even if we were more confident of what remedies could be applied, there is still little systematic basis for intelligent and humane choices in coping with such a wide array of environmental dilemmas.

But, a start has to be made somewhere. As a beginning, serious efforts are required to mend the long broken circle between economics, ecology, and ethics.

Economics, ecology and ethics

Much of the international debate over global environmental problems has been conducted as if economic values, and economic interests, are inherently in conflict with ecological and ethical values. But to a degree not widely appreciated at present, economic, ecological, and ethical rationales for sustainable and environmentally sound development are interconnected, and often mutually reinforcing. A main reason for the lack of widespread recognition of the linkages between these rationales has been the obscuration, in this century, of the linkages between the disciplines from whence they came. The compartmentalization across and even within disciplines, such as Economics and the resulting focus on studying parts in isolation from the whole, has been responsible for much of the problem.

Thus, the linkages between economics, ecology, and ethics have been largely severed by decades of growing disciplinary reductionism. Can these links be restored sufficiently to allow societies to begin to devise new tools to cope with sever environmental degradation?

It is very doubtful that many modern economists are aware that their discipline has its roots in what was called moral philosophy not a century ago. Some economists, who do know this, might even be reluctant to admit it. But, the fact remains , the venerable Adam Smith himself was famed as a moral philosopher long before he published the Wealth of Nations in 1776. And the economist who first caused economics to be called the dismal science was the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. In the United States, the first courses labeled as “economics” were often taught by clergy. Before 1890, economics was almost invariably considered an adjunct to moral philosophy. The American Economic Association, established in 1885, counted among its founders and early adherents a “sizeable contingent of clergymen.” At Cambridge University in England, economics was, until very recently, taught as part of the moral science tripos. Moreover, consider Alfred Marshall, the mentor of Keynes and one of the founders of the school of neoclassical economists, and the 900 pound gorilla of British economist from 1890 until his death in 1924. Marshall habitually referred to political economy’s “sister, the science of ethics .” Further, the modern discipline of economics grew up hand in hand with the utilitarian philosophy of Bentham, Mill, and others.

Moral and ethical content of economics instruction was in any case once much more explicit than now. It has not been absent in the mainstream economics of the past quarter-century. Rather, it has been largely unacknowledged . Why? 21 ^st century economists contend that the prevailing paradigm in their field is, or could be made to be, value-free. Not all agree. No less a contemporary economic figure than future Nobel Laureate A.K. Sen has argued that the discipline has been substantially impoverished by the distance that has grown between economics and ethics.