Summary
THE POLITICS AND ETHICS OF 'SUSTAINABILITY' AS A NEW PARADIGM FOR PUBLIC POLICY FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT PLANNING - Survey
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Extract
Concluding remarks: modernity, ethics, sustainability and 'the abolition of man'.
The observations introduced throughout this essay require further comments about the ethical foundations of sustainable development. In fact, this new development ethics requires that economics rescue its roots, identity and initial purposes as oikonomy, or the material supply of the oikos, the human home. In a most fortunate coincidence, the same semantic root of ecology, the study of the laws that govern this home. Unfortunately, with the acceleration of modern times, economics has ceased to study ways and means to achieve well being for people. It has turned into and end in itself, a science in which anything that does not have monetary value, anything that cannot have a price attached to it, is not worthy or valuable. This is turning into one of the most pernicious fetishes of modern times, despite the warnings of economists of the stature of 1999 Nobel Price Winner Amartya Sen (1986: 202, see also Sen, 1989):
"Economics assigns an order of preferences to a man and when it is needed it assumes that this utility function reflects his own interests, represents his well being, summarizes his idea of what should be done and describes his choices ... In effect, the purely economic man is almost mentally retarded from a social point of view. Economic theory has dedicated much attention to this rational fool comfortably relaxed behind his unique order of preferences for all purposes." Empirical reality indicates also that wealth accumulation or economic growth does not constitute and has never been ...See the full content of this document
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