持続可能性の規範理論の基礎 : 福祉・代替・資本
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概要
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Since the 1987 report Our Common Future was published by the World Commission on Environment and Development, debate around the concept of "sustainability" or "sustainable development" has attracted wide-ranging interest, including not only narrow economic argument over the theory of economic growth under the limits of exhaustible resources, but also distributional issues concerning intra- and inter-generational ecological and social inequality. However, this widespread use the term "sustainability" has obscured the meaning of the concept, and the term itself no longer guarantees the generality of the semantic content. Similarly, economic approaches to the formulation of sustainability were never uniform, and each school of economics has attempted to interpret and define the concept of sustainability using their own framework. In particular, environmental economics based on the neo-classical approach is in opposition to ecological economics, which has tried to reconstruct radically the traditional framework of economics in terms of the laws of thermodynamics, on the degree to which natural capital and human-made capital can be substituted for each other. Correspondingly, two normative conceptions of sustainability have been suggested in recent studies of the ethics and economics of sustainability: namely, weak sustainability, to which mainly neoclassical economists have appealed, and strong sustainability, which has been defended from within the tradition of ecological economics. The main purpose of this paper is to reassess the discord between these two conceptions by returning to the basic concepts which constitute the economic discourse on sustainability, such as the metaphors of natural capital, substitutability, welfare and well-being. Although the above core concepts are open to different interpretations to a certain degree, little critical examination of these concepts has been performed. In fact, to classify conceptions of sustainability in terms of substitutability between goods or capital critically depends upon how we understand the concept of human welfare or well-being. Therefore, by scrutinizing these basic concepts and their internal relations, I shall try to reveal the common flaws of interpretations of sustainability based on subjectivist welfare theory and/or capital theory, as well to identify the differences between the two conceptions of sustainability. Then, it will be shown that as the proper basis of normative theory of sustainability, a shift is required from a subjectivist understanding of human well-being to an objectivist and substantive one.
- 2010-07-30