Social Ecological Economies and Nature Based Values

Abstract

Modern 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.