Sustainability: Are we short on science or on willpower?

by

Dr. Niels Gottschalk-Mazouz

First of all, I’d like to thank the organizers of the “Weekend of Ideas” at the Manning Clark House for inviting me to be part of this fascinating event. Of course, I cannot replace Bruce Hobbs, who is a scientist involved in strategic planning of science at the highest levels of politics. Myself, I am trained as a physicist and a philosopher, doing research and not working on research policy; and as such, I cannot speak about specific scientific programs or specific political barriers concerning sustainability here in Australia. I have been involved in some consulting: On behalf of the German Federal Ministery of the Environment, our research group in Germany has been reflecting about the concept of sustainability, or better: the concepts of sustainability that are in the discussion now, from an ethical point of view; in this context we were also asked to comment on the Sustainability of Nuclear Power. Second, for the German Federal Ministery of Research we have tried to figure out ways to better organize research on Sustainability and Global Change – and some of that might be of interest here.

The organizers found some provocative headlines to each of the session, basically in form of a question. Ours is: “Sustainability: Are we short on science or willpower?”. Well, my answer would be: Both, and Neither. The “both” side of the answer is somehow evident, for there are lots of complex questions in the environmental sciences, just think of climate change, and for there is empirical evidence that people (and governments) do not act on their best insights when it comes to the environment. Much of that seems to be commonplace to me. So I decited to work out the “neither” side in my statement.

Short on Neither

A. So first: why aren’t we actually so short on science after all? Well, let’s take climate change again. This issue is enourmously complex, there is a lot of research going on, but what did it really tell us new within the last five years or so? The principal mechanism is clear (greenhouse warming), but there are just that many other mechanisms that have to be considered and there is so much uncertainty that comes with it, that despite of all the effort there are still scientifically sound arguments for “climate sceptism”, i.e., to deny that given the usual 2xCO2-Secenario, we will see any maleficient climate change within the next 200 years or so, see for example Mr. Lindzen, who is a top meteorologist of MIT. So: Scientists very rarely speak with one voice on a given environmental problem. Second point: If one looks at the major international research programs on environmental issues, one can see a major shift from encouraging mainly natural sciences research to encouraging social sciences and humanities research as well. It is now well established that one needs this research to analyze environmental challenges to humans. Social sciences are needed because any action or change of behaviour may give rise to feedback processes not only in the natural but also in the social environment. Moreover, there are crucial interactions between the two systems (just think of environment and economy, or of wars between states over regionally short resources, like water). Humanities are needed as the attitudes towards the environment depends strongly on cultural factors. Quite often we have the situation that people are degrading the environment and know that they do so, but that they do it for a certain reason (For a religious reason think of the funerals and ritual washings in the river Ganges in India). We then have to refer to the humanities to find out why a behaviour like that does nevertheless makes sense to them. ((Like that, we can sometimes better understand phenomena that look like shortages on willpower, but aren’t)). But in Social Sciences and Humanities, experts do give competing explanations and recommendations to an even larger extent. And now, as a decision maker, we have also the clash of perspectives of these researchers: Shall we follow environmental science, or cultural studies? That may be the reason why there is also a second major shift in research funding, towards genuinely integrated research programs and towards apt participation of lay people to take local, pragmatic knowledge into account.

So, the full version of the science answer is: No, not so much short on science, not even really short on social sciences and humanities, but especially short on integrated research and on apt participation procedures to attack socially and politically relevant problems.

B. Now, how about willpower? Why maybe not short on willpower? One part of the answer has already been given: Some problems look like we are short on willpower, but on a closer it is not that we are unwilling but that we just don’t know what we should do (despite of all that science). The other part of the answer is more radical. Maybe there is a problem not with the means, but with the ends as well. The question given by the organizers does presuppose that sustainability is a valid normative concept that should be attractive. But maybe we should not take this for granted. That is what the rest of my statement is about.

The term Sustainability (and also: Sustainable Development) has become very popular since the Brundtland report to the UN in 1987: “Our common future”. In this report, the authors state: “Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The main underlying problem was at that time already pointed out by the famous paper “limits to growth” of the Club of Rome in 1972. It is that when we go on as we are, we will run out of natural resources. Better to say: There will be no, or not enough, resources left for future generations. And that might pose a problem of responsability for and of justice to these generations. In short, to reach Sustainability means to stop living at the costs of future generations. What does that mean and what does that not mean?

a) It is an anthropocentric aim: Sustainability does not mean preservation of nature for nature’s own sake – to make this clear: On behalf of sustainability, it’s not that you should not kill/“use” whales because they would then suffer or things like that, it is because future generations might also want to kill/“use” whales. And, at least on behalf of some concepts of Sustainability, you ought to kill the whales, sell them, invest the money and pass future generations the money, if the aggregate returns are higher than the value increase of the whales when kept alive. Some people wouldn’t think that that is ethically appropriate (cf. the animal rights section of this w/e of ideas).

b) It means worrying about future generations, that is: aiming at intergenerational justice (or solidarity), between different generations, but not at intragenerational justice, that is justice between people within one generation; think of the north/south issue, development aid etc.: Again, some people wouldn’t think that worrying only about future people is ethically appropriate.

We have to keep these two restrictions in mind, when we want to understand why Sustainability may not be that appealing, especially to “green” thinking people or to those who care about the so called third world, about the poor or the like. And because within the political arena, Sustainability competes with other terms that these people might consider to be more appropriate, I can also understand their political restraint towards Sustainability discourse.

So, these worries about Sustainability concern the appropriateness of its central normative idea, that is of anthropocentric, intergenerational justice. But I think that moreover, even if we concede these worries and still want to spell out a concept of intergenerational justice (let’s say, as one component of a broader concept of ethically sound behaviour towards men and nature), the specific concepts of Sustainability that are widespread now are not apt to do that. That brings me to my last and perhaps most important point: To make this point, it will be necessary to have a quick look at the more specific concepts of Sustainability that there are at present. We can roughly distinguish three different types here, aggregation accounts, rule-based accounts and indicator-based accounts. I don’t have the time to go into much detail, I will just very roughly sketch these accounts.

Aggregation Accounts

S1 The first type of aggregating concepts tries to build directly upon the Brundtland definition, that was, securing the “ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Meeting needs is understood as preference satisfaction. You might know these technical terms from economics (esp. welfare economics) and/or politics. Economic activities are projected into the future. Then a measure of overall preference satisfaction is found either directly in some GDP or “net”/“green” GDP integral over time. ((That means that we have to assign (or let the market assign) prices also to every environmental good or service.)) Or, it is found in some other overall utility, that is obtained using some more elaborate axioms of how the key values of this projection (like income and its distribution) affect preference satisfaction.

The justice-between-generations aspect is then taken into account by saying: Well, this overall measure of how well needs are met shall not decrease over time. That’s why this is called the “Non-declining welfare criterion”. Or it is said that, within a given time horizon, we shall maximize this measure. That can mean that within time this measure decreases, so the notion of justice is a little different here; but this notion might be known to you from utilitarian ethics.

S2 The second type of aggregating concepts does not aggregate over all activities, but tries to assign value to environmental resources, i.e. determine the “environmental capital” (i.e., the physical basis of goods and services). Only these values are summed up then, and only these values have to be kept constant, at least. In a variant of this type, the environmental resources are to be kept constant in physical units, not in value units.

One main problem with these two concepts is the following: We want to spell out a concept of justice towards future generations with an indefinite time horizon (!), and we assign values with respect to our present, specific preferences and needs. We don’t know much about future preferences, but I just don’t see the argument why we should just take our preferences to be theirs, when we know that their preferences will most likely be different. A Sustainability concept that does that is simply overspecific. And together with that, it is also quite paternalistic, because we take their preferences to be ours. Even if one takes projections of preferences or probability distributions of preferences as a basis of aggregation: I would still say that the concept of aggregation is overspecific, at least for very long time horizons.

So: The “liberalistic” way of referring to actual or projected preferences is problematic here: It wants to be non-paternalistic, does not want to impose values on others. But in Sustainability, we have to make assumptions about the values of future generations. And doing it in a “liberalistic” tends to be overspecific and thus paternalistic, or maybe better: more paternalistic than necessary.

Finally: This argument also applies to the the second Sustainability concept mentioned, the resources one, because to consider something as a resource does mean that it is a resource within some process of production of goods and services, such that what you consider to be a resource does depend on the possible uses you can make of it.

Rule-based accounts

So let’s have a look at the rule-based accounts.

S3 In rule-based accounts, there are typically between three and five major rules that are specified and then indicators are assigned to each rule. They are inspired more by ecology than be economy. Nevertheless: The core of the rule-based accounts consists of one or more rules that refer to the aggregation concepts just mentioned, quite often they do refer to the variant of the second aggregation concept that says one ought to preserve natural resources. This is then further specified: renewable resources (like water) one is allowed to exploit to the point of their recreation rate, while nonrenewable resources (like coal) one either is not allowed to use at all (remember: Sustainability is a goal), or, one is allowed to use only if there are renewable substitutes. But there are also rule-based concepts that allow the exploitation of any natural resource when it can be substituted by man-made capital. Sometimes there are limits to that, sometimes not. To illustrate what that means: Herman Daly, one of the key figures in the Sustainability discourse, called those concepts that build heavily on substitution (which also includes the majority of aggregation concepts) the Disneyland Concepts of Sustainability.

So in a way, the different concepts of aggregation show up as resource rules here. That is why the same criticism applies to them: they are also determining resources (and the possibilities of substitution) with respect to our present production and consumption process. As soon as you find a new possible use for some otherwise useless material, it will become a resource, and as soon as you find a new possible use for some resource, it may not be substitutable any more. You just don’t know today, but you behave as if you would know exactly. But what we think you should do is taking into account that you don’t know exactly.

OK, so let’s have a quick look at the other rules of a rule-based concept. Because, whatever the resource rules might be in particular, they are now just rules among other rules. These other rules concern “sinks” (consider greenhouse warming: It is the sink effect, the CO2 within the atmosphere, that sets the environmental limits to the burning of charbon, not the availability of charbon itself). They concern timescales of environmental change, i.e. that triggered transformations of the environment shall not be too fast, and they concern so-called fatal risks of mankind, that is life-threatening intoxication/irradiation of significant parts of the world and the like.

These additional rules, I think, do not have the problem of being too specific: Of course they can be spelled out only in terms of actual or hypothetical threats known to us, and of course future generations might find some technical solutions to these problems, but ethically we cannot just suppose that they will, somehow, find some solution, for this would mean to put them under pressure to find solutions or to die/suffer.

One additional problem with rule-based accounts is that there can be a conflict of having to break one or some of them to fulfill the others (“conflict of rules”). While ultimately, in the far future, when we live sustainable, this should no longer be the case, it will quite often be the case in the meantime.

Indicators

Finally a very brief look at Indicator-based concepts. They are used by the OECD, for instance. Basically, indicators are aggregates that indicate a state, a pressure or a response. Of course, one can take the aggregation accounts as indicator accounts with just one indicator (which is a state indicator, by the way). And in fact, in most of the concepts there is a “wealth” indicator that consists in the first of the discussed aggregations, but then there are other indicators as well like degree of air pollution, energy consumption per capita and so forth.

The main problems with this kind of concept should already be clear: First, the overspecification criticism applies. Second, there is an equivalent to the conflict of rules, that is that decreasing one indicator value might increase other ones. Finally, we have to have a basis on which we can justify the selection of indicators and that allows us to determine just how alarming a certain value of a certain indicator is.

So we need an adequate ethical basis that is not overspecific, but that is also not arbitrary, a basis that does point out relevant aspects of human life that can be linked to resource use and all the other things that are mentioned in the different rules or indicators. A basis, from which we might even be able to discuss “conflict of rules” cases, weight indicators against each other etc.

Just to remind you: Why not use the quantity of natural resources left, or more in general: the state of the environment measured in physical values: Because we do not value those resources as such. When we take them as resources, they are resources for something, they are of merely instrumental value, so one should try to develop the Sustainability concept starting with that something. The same argument does apply to “basic goods” (as John Rawls proposed, in the context of his A Theory of Justice): Most of the proposed goods (Life, health, also income and property, and the like) are not valued as such, they are not ends-in-themselves, but as requirements or means to do certain things we can value for themselves. ((I said most, because there is also freedom on the list.)) Goods that are really basic goods are defined as goods that everyone wants to have whatever else he or she might strive for. They are considered to be general means to whatever a specific purpose. So, by definition they are means and not ends-in-themselves. Moreover: Basic goods are clearly not overspecific. It’s merely the opposite, they tend to be too unspecific.

On the other hand: Why not just take satisfaction of basic needs as the basis of Sustainability: Because we shouldn’t (and often also cannot) make shure that their basic needs will be met (somehow), but we should worry about the ability of future generations to satisfy their own needs for themselves, such that it is up to them to do it in the way they want to, or to be voluntarily unsatisfied (for a certain time). This might not sound like much of a difference, but it is the difference between being able to feed yourself and being unable to do that and being fed by somebody else without being asked what you like to eat, when you like to eat or whether you would prefer to live for some days on a diet.

And there is a conceptual framework that might take these caveats into account: It is the “capabilites”-concept of Amartya Sen. It was introduced into the human development debate a couple of years ago and might just be what we need for the Sustainability debate as well: Sen proposed to look for basic human “functionings” that consist in the fulfilment of basic needs, and tried to identify the resp. basic “capabilities” that consist in being able to basically “function” if you want. Together with Martha Nussbaum, he worked out a basic sketch of a list of such capabilities, drawing on Aristotle’s writings on the Good Life. It’s just amazing how little has changed in writings on that subject over time, such that contemporary authors say pretty much the same as Aristotle did, 2000 years ago. Of course, in the context of Sustainability, such a list would maybe have to be extended or shortened. But nevertheless, we would suggest to take it as a starting point in the Sustainability debate as well, refine it, then rework the rules etc. One idea of Sen was that it is not the job of an academic to try to justify a precise and specific list. One can present such a list as a suggestion, but the specification and validation should be as much as possible up to the affected people itself. In the case of Sustainability, this might be difficult or impossible. But, the present people are also affected by Sustainability measures, so participatory procedures like those that come with the Agenda 21 do make sense also under this aspect. ((And often they can produce the kind of local and pragmatic knowledge that research cannot provide.)) – – The sustainable development debate was, in the beginning, linked to the development debate. By putting capabilities in the center, that link would become stronger again.

This way, a rather thin concept of Sustainability might result. But this way, we can say that we do make best use of our knowledge about certain constants of the human condition and thus we do care about things that really make a difference to future generations. This concept can also comprise aggregations, rules and indicators. So to a certain extent it just helps us to interpret the existing concepts or components of them and choose wisely between them. But, there will probably also be some shifts in focus: Services will matter more than goods (think of energy: it is now not so much to produce a certain amount of electricity or heat, but to be able to live in comfortably temperatured rooms). And: Institutions will become more important compared to physical stuff. Like the institution of science, of state and law and the like.

Finally: Such a “less is more”-concept would also make it easier to leave room for the otherwise far too often competing claims of intragenerational justice, of animal rights/ecocentrism and the like. And thus be maybe a little more attractive.

OK, the full version of the science answer was:

• We seem to be not so much short on science, not even really short on social sciences and humanities, but especially short on integrated research and on apt participation procedures to attack socially and politically relevant problems.

And, to sum up the last part:

• Maybe we are not so much short on willpower, but Sustainability is ethically convincing only as part of a broader normative framework and because even as such a part, the concepts that are developed so far typically have a core that is over-specific and thus tend to be inapt and paternalistic.