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Technology and the notion of sustainability
Technology in Society 32 (2010) 274–279
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Technology in Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/techsoc
Technology and the notion of sustainability Sven Ove Hansson Department of Philosophy, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
a b s t r a c t Keywords: Aesthetic values Contingent valuation Discounting Natural resources Sustainability Technology Time preferences
Some of the difficulties connected with the concept of sustainable development can be resolved if we distinguish between sustainability of different types of assets, in particular between those that pertain to technological uses and those that do not. A weak concept of sustainability is appropriate for the former and a strong concept for the latter. Furthermore, time discounting is appropriate (in the relatively short run) for the former but not for the latter. It is concluded that instead of choosing between weak and strong sustainability, the two notions should be included in the same analysis, since they are needed to account for different kinds of assets. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
from Nature (1971), saying: “The blue whale could have supplied indefinitely a sustainable yield of 6,000 individuals a year”. The earliest use of the phrase “sustainable development” recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1972, and the earliest use of “sustainable city” from 1989. However, it was in the 1987 report Our Common Future (a/k/a The Brundtland Report) from the World Commission on the Environment and Development (WCED) that sustainability became a central concept in environmental policies [1]. The importance of this report in late 20th century environmental policies cannot be overstated. It had a central role at the UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and provided the basic ideas for the Agenda 21 document adopted there. More recently, sustainable development has also become a catchword for corporate social responsibility [2,3]. The success of the sustainability concept depends at least in part on the fact that it “struck a middle ground between more radical approaches which denounced all development, and the idea of development conceived as business as usual” [4]. In particular, sustainable development is more palatable to most economists and politicians than the previously popular concept of ‘zero growth’ that implied an irresolvable conflict between economic growth and environmental preservation, and required the submission of the former to the latter [5]. However, sustainability is ecumenical at the cost of being indeterminate. It is commonplace
The concept of sustainable development is ambiguous and therefore often difficult to apply in concrete sociotechnological contexts. This article shows how philosophical considerations related to technology can be used to clarify the concept. In Section 2, traditional controversies about the definition of sustainable development are summarized, with an emphasis on the distinction between weak and strong sustainability. In Section 3, three types of assets are delineated, showing that weak sustainability is the appropriate concept for one of them and strong sustainability for the other two. In Section 4 it is shown that time discounting applies only to one of them, and Section 5 shows that they differ also in the local-global dimension of sustainability. In Section 6, conclusions are drawn for practical applications of the sustainability concept. 2. Concepts of sustainable development Sustainability means capability to go on for a long time. The use of this term goes back at least to the 1960s in economics and to the early 1970s in environmental management. The Oxford English Dictionary has a quotation
E-mail address: [email protected]. URL: http://www.infra.kth.se/~soh/ 0160-791X/$ – see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.techsoc.2010.10.003
S.O. Hansson / Technology in Society 32 (2010) 274–279
that economists and environmentalists tend do define it in widely different ways. Definitions of sustainable development can be divided into two major classes, representing what are known as the weak and strong concepts of sustainability. The weak concept is the more common one. It is contained in the Brundtland Report’s influential definition of sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. An (economic) development is weakly sustainable if it can go on at a non-diminishing level from generation to generation. This is the dominant interpretation of sustainability among economists. It largely makes sustainability an issue of intergenerational equity in classical economical terms [6]. To achieve sustainability is then a matter of managing the total capital which includes both natural and human-made capital. No limits are set on the substitution of these two forms of capital [7]. Hence, according to weak sustainability we can pass on less environmental resources to coming generations as long as we pass on more human-made capital instead [5]. If we hand over to coming generations new technologies that reduce their needs of natural resources, then according to this view we can deplete more resources and yet comply with the precepts of sustainability. Strong sustainability, in contrast, sees human-made and natural capital as different categories, each of which must be preserved separately. In the most extreme version it is maintained that every species must be preserved since it cannot be replaced by anything else. A compromise version focuses on critical ecosystems and environmental assets, such as the ozone layer, that are assumed not to be replaceable by anything else [7]. The distinction between weak and strong sustainability is usually recognized as having two major components. First, as already mentioned, weak but not strong sustainability allows for the substitution of natural resources by manufactured capital. Secondly, weak but not strong sustainability assumes that the economic welfare concept covers all other policy concerns [7,8]. These are both value assumptions that cannot be reduced to empirical considerations. The strong concept of sustainability is widely considered to be impracticable. The weak concept, on the other hand, has been criticized for being too lax, since it allows for natural resources to be depleted provided that this is compensated for by increases in other resources. This threatens to make the concept of sustainable development next to meaningless. “For if the choice between preserving natural capital and adding to (or preserving) man-made capital depends on which makes the greatest contribution to welfare the concept of sustainable development becomes redundant” [9], (p. 195). In other words, sustainability would be reduced to the maximization of economic welfare in the classical sense. As was noted by Beckerman, with this interpretation, sustainability does not even survive as a constraint on welfare maximization, since a constraint on welfare maximization is only meaningful if it conflicts with welfare maximization [9], (p. 202). In a much-quoted article, Ludwig et al. [10] argued that sustainability is a difficult concept to deal with due to
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scientific uncertainty. They referred to the concept of maximal sustainable yield (MSY), used in fisheries management long before sustainability became a general catchword in environmental policies. The use of this concept was often unfortunate according to these authors, since scientific uncertainties were not recognized, with depletion of resources as a result. Against this background, they admonished: “Distrust claims of sustainability. Because past resource exploitation has seldom been sustainable, any new plan that involves claims of sustainability should be suspect” [10], (p. 17). Roe [11] discusses the debate that this article gave rise to. For some purposes, the vagueness of the concept may be tolerable, perhaps even an advantage. Henryk Skolimowski defended the use of an undefined sustainability concept. After admitting that the concept “is loose and our sense of intellectual respectability is often offended by its ambiguities”, he went on to say: “We should not worry too much about intellectual respectability. We should worry more about the survival of the species” [4], (p. 69). However, although this approach may be sensible in certain general discussions on a policy level, it is untenable for the work on a technical level that must be carried out in order to implement the general ideas of sustainability in practice. Scientists, engineers, and civil planners given the task to implement policy ideas of sustainable development need some guidance on what is meant by that concept. 3. A technological perspective on sustainability The concept of a natural resource is a technological concept. It is technological since a natural object1 is a natural resource only to the extent that we have some technology with which we can make use of it.2 This is admittedly a trivial observation but in a sense it is nevertheless unconventional. The notion of a resource, and consequently that of a natural resource, is usually seen as an economic concept. Without denying its importance in economic analysis, I propose that it is in an important sense primarily a technological concept: A natural object can be a natural resource since there is a technology with which we can use it, but yet not be a resource from a strictly economic point of view since nobody would buy it, perhaps because there are better alternatives. A typical example would be an iron ore with a much lower iron yield than the ores we use today. It is clearly a natural resource since we have a technology for making iron from it, and in a distant future we may come to use it. However, it is not an economic resource since there is no way you can sell it. As this example shows, only some natural resources are economic resources. However, even in this (widened) sense the concept of a natural resource is insufficient for clarifying what we usually mean by sustainability and sustainable development. 1 For the present purpose, I use the concept of an object in a broad sense, thus counting gases and energy as objects. 2 There are a few cases in which we uses a natural object directly, with no intermediate technological process, such as when we pick and eat wild-grown fruit. For simplicity, I will leave these marginal cases out of the analysis.
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S.O. Hansson / Technology in Society 32 (2010) 274–279
Not everything that sustainable development aims at sustaining is a natural resource. I am for instance much more concerned with the preservation of the glaciers in northern Sweden than with the subterranean iron ores on the same latitude. Yet the glaciers do not appear to be an important technological resource now or in the future; we can always get hold of water much easier elsewhere. My appreciation of the glaciers is not based on their usefulness as natural (technological) resources. More generally, when we talk about the sustainable use of a natural resource we do not refer to it only qua natural (technological) resource. We can also refer to (1) its sustainability as an object of human appreciation, in short, as an aesthetic natural asset, and (2) its sustainability as a component of one or several ecological systems, in short, as an ecological asset (over and above its instrumental value for human beings). The value of a natural (technological) resource or an aesthetic asset is anthropogenic, since it depends on human needs respectively human appreciation. In contrast, the value of an ecological asset is conceived as non-anthropogenic and therefore independent of humanity. Let us apply the sustainability concept to each of these three aspects of a natural object: as a natural (technological) resource, as an aesthetic asset, and as an ecological asset. Once we have delineated the concept of a natural (technological) resource, it should be obvious that the weak concept of sustainability is appropriate in dealing with natural resources qua natural (technological) resources. If we deplete the high-yield silver ores, but develop technology for equally efficient extraction of silver from the abundant lower-yield ores, then we leave future generations in a situation that is no worse than ours with respect to their access to silver, as a natural-technological resource. In contrast, for aesthetic assets in nature the relevant sustainability concept is the strong one. To see why, let us consider an example of aesthetic appreciation of a nonnatural, human-made object. Suppose that one of the most famous painters of our times loses his mind when visiting a museum. In a moment of rage, he tears out a Vermeer canvas worth €50,000,000 and cuts it into small pieces so that it is beyond repair. After regaining sanity, he paints five exquisite paintings that he donates to the museum as a compensation. Each of these paintings is estimated to be worth €11,000,000, and the museum also receives an offer from another museum to buy them all at €55,000,000. Is then everything well, after the compensation has taken place? I for one would mourn the lost Vermeer, even though I might rejoice at the five new masterpieces. This example shows that objects of aesthetic appreciation are not replaceable in the same way that you can replace banknotes of equal value with each other. This applies also to natural objects of aesthetic appreciation, although equally illustrative examples are not easily constructed with natural objects. In other words, the strong rather than the weak notion of sustainability is appropriate for aesthetic assets in nature. Turning to ecological assets, their non-instrumental value refers largely to their unique existence. This can be seen clearly for instance from discussions on the extinction of species. Suppose that the tiger becomes distinct, but 10
years later a new and even more spectacular cat species comes into existence (either through a mutation or through genetic technology). This would hardly be seen as a compensation for the loss of the tiger, at least not in the same sense as money can compensate for the loss of money. Based on examples like this we can conclude that the strong notion of sustainability is the appropriate one for ecological assets.
4. The temporal perspective The standard economic method for evaluating future goods and future events is discounting, a method modeled after the interest rate calculations we perform for monetary assets. More precisely, a bifactorial model is used in which the value of a future advantage or disadvantage is assumed to be equal to the product of two factors. One of these is a time-independent evaluation of the good in question, i.e., the value of having it now. The other factor is a person’s or a society’s “time preferences”. It is a function of the length of the delay, and it is the same for all types of goods. The most common type of time preference function can be written 1/(1 þ r)t, where r is a discount rate and t the duration of the delay. This is the discounted utility model, proposed by Paul Samuelson in 1937, which still dominates in economic analysis [12]. Discounting corresponds to how the economy works in the short run. If I need €10,000 in 10 years, I do not have to set aside €10,000 today. Since the bank pays interest, a somewhat lower sum will suffice. If the interest rate is 3%, then it is sufficient to set aside about €7500 today. We can then say that the present value of having €10,000 in 10 years’ time is about €7500. However, we should note two essential features of this example that are not present in all applications of discounting to environmental issues. First, the example concerns monetary value, and it is of course for money that we have interest rates. Second, the time period is relatively short. In environmental issues we often deal with effects that will occur after hundreds or thousands of years. When discounting is applied to events far off into the future, it tends to lead to results that we consider absurd. Before turning to sustainability of environmental assets, let us consider the most discussed case in which discounting has been questioned: its application to human lives. For a concrete example, let us use the common discount rate r ¼ .03, and let us assume that the world’s population will be 10 billion in 2800. Consider the following two actions: A murder taking place in 2020, i.e., an action that leads to the immediate death of one person An action, also taking place in 2020, that will kill every living person on earth in 2800. A simple calculation shows that the former of these actions has the highest disvalue. In other words, if we discount lives by a discount rate of 3%, then it is worse to perform an act that kills one person immediately than one that kills 10 billion persons 780 years later. If we applied discounting of lives to the problem of nuclear waste
S.O. Hansson / Technology in Society 32 (2010) 274–279
disposal, then we could stop worrying about its effects on people who live several 1000 years into the future. This seems to be in stark contrast to most people’s views of our responsibilities for future generations. Exactly the same problem arises if we apply discounting to environmental damages. Even with a very low discount rate (say 0.5%), effects that take place in the distant future will be discounted to almost nil. (With a discount rate of 0.5%, a damage that takes place 2000 years into the future has less than 1/20,000 of the negative value of the corresponding damage today.) To see where the discounting argument breaks down in cases like this, let us consider its structure more in detail. Clearly, the discounting of lives or environmental assets cannot be justified by the same direct argument that can be used for the discounting of money. We cannot deposit health or threatened animal species in the bank and expect to receive more back after a couple of years. For goods like these, the justification of discounting has to be more indirect. It cannot be justified with an argument that directly combines the two entities: lives today – lives in the future. Instead, the following chain of three commensuration steps needs to be considered:
The first step consists in assigning a monetary value to the loss of human lives today. This step is controversial, but let us for the moment assume that such values can be assigned, as an expression of current willingness to pay. The second step is the discounting of money, which is a standard economic procedure. In the time spans that economists usually work with, it is a highly useful tool of analysis. However, in the longer time spans applied in some economic analyses of climate change and other long-term environmental issues, this step is more uncertain. When the time span is counted in centuries rather than decades it cannot be taken for granted that the economy will function in the same way as today. We can fairly safely assume that there will be interest rates 30 years from now, but will there be interest rates 300 or 3000 years from now? We cannot know. The third commensuration step, that between money and lives at some point in the future, is the most problematic one. Present life values are reports on what we are prepared to pay for saving a life today. We have no reason to believe that our present priorities in these respects will remain the same over a longer period of time. (Historically, our willingness to pay for saving lives seems to have increased dramatically.) Therefore, we have no ground for projecting the trade-offs that we make today between human lives and money far off into the future. Hence, although discounting is reasonable for monetary resources, it breaks down for human lives. How does it fare for the three objects of sustainability analysis that we have identified? Natural-technological resources are for the most part included in the money economy, i.e., they are sold and bought for money. Therefore it makes good sense to apply
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the discounting methodology to them. However, just as for money discounting becomes uncertain in a distant future when the economic system may possibly be very different from the present one. Ecological assets represent the other extreme. When we value for instance a species non-instrumentally, this means that we value it in much the same way that we value a human life. Therefore, the argumentation presented above for human lives applies to ecological assets as well, i.e., they should not be subject to standard discounting. Finally, many aesthetic assets are bought and sold. This applies to artifacts made by humans, such as paintings, and also to some natural objects such as fossils and precious stones. However, it does not follow that the economic values of these objects exhaust their values as objects of human appreciation. Suppose that a rich eccentric spends his fortune buying all the Picasso paintings he can get hold of, and burns them. Probably, some sort of action would be taken to prevent such a destructive practice. This example shows that the money paid for an object of art does not exhaust its value to humanity. The same applies to natural objects of aesthetic appreciation. No price has been set to the Shilin stone forest. Should such a price be set, it would be a report of how much we would now be willing to spend on averting a threat to it, not a price at which someone should be allowed to buy it in order to blow it into small pieces for his own pleasure. This example shows that aesthetic assets in nature are not accessible to standard economic discounting. In summary, the application of traditional economic discounting to natural-technological resources is justifiable, but not in an analysis that covers a very long time period. In contrast, standard economic discounting cannot in general be justified for aesthetic or ecological assets. This puts a clear limit to economic analysis of environmental issues. 5. The spatial perspective Sustainability, as it was conceived by the Brundtland commission, is essentially a holistic concept. Either the global community as a whole is sustainable, or in the end no part of it can be so. As was noted by Dias de Avila Pires and coworkers, it becomes more and more difficult to treat even the most isolated human populations as self-reproducing closed systems [13]. In spite of this, the notion of sustainable development is increasingly often used as an ideal for urban and other geographically isolated systems. This gives rise to coordination problems that have high relevance for environmental policies. The complexity of these coordination problems is accentuated by overlaps, since sustainability is applied not only to geographically defined areas (e.g., sustainable cities) but also to functionally defined systems (e.g., sustainable water supply). A common-sense solution to the coordination problem is what Baylor Johnson calls the Kantian solution, namely that “every commons user should restrict his or her use to a level that would be sustainable if all other users reduced their use in a similar way, and to do this regardless of what others do” [14], (p. 272). Johnson criticizes this as a mistaken solution since it fails to distinguish between
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S.O. Hansson / Technology in Society 32 (2010) 274–279
Table 1 Properties of the three major types of assets to which the concept of sustainability is applied. Type of asset
Source of value
Value expressible in money?
Suitable to discount?
Location of value
Appropriate notion of sustainability
Natural-technological resource Aesthetic natural asset Ecological asset
Anthropogenic Non-anthropogenic Non-anthropogenic
Yes At most partly No
Yes, in the short run No No
Global Local Local
Weak Strong Strong
unilateral action and action that is part of a cooperative scheme to address the problem. Unilateral reductions of use often have very small chances of success. In his view, the focus should instead be on work aiming at a collective agreement to solve the problem. The obligation to adjust one’s own behaviour “does not predate the agreement” [14], (p. 283), although unilateral reductions may in some cases be useful as means to work out new solutions and to convince others of one’s sincerity. But let us return to the basic spatial issue: Is the concept of sustainability applicable to a geographically restricted area, or does it always have to refer to the planet as a whole? It turns out that this issue as well can be clarified with the distinction between three types of assets outlined above. Due to the integration of the world economy, naturaltechnological resources are traded across the world. The processes through which natural resources replace other natural resources (such as in the example of iron ores) depend on worldwide trading. Therefore sustainability in terms of natural-technological resources is essentially a global issue. No city, in fact no country or region in the world, is fully self-supporting for all types of resources. Both aesthetic and ecological assets are much more of a local issue. The ecosystems of the Galapagos Islands have to be preserved where they are, not somewhere else. The preservation of a species in a particular location is of course particularly important if it is the only habitat of the species; but on the other hand, the fact that a species is abundant elsewhere is no reason to take its disappearance from a particular location lightly. Its loss will change the local ecological system, and the repercussions for other species may be substantial. However, things are somewhat more complicated than that. Although different ecosystems cannot replace each other, and each is a separate object of preservation, the ecosystems are nevertheless far from isolated from each other. Global warming and global pollution affect all ecosystems on the planet. Even though the values of aesthetic and ecological assets are local in the sense just described, their preservation has to be discussed and managed not only on a local but also on a global level. 6. Conclusion The major results of the above analysis are summarized in Table 1. In the issues that are most important for applications of the sustainability concept (columns 3, 4, and 6), the distinction between aesthetic natural assets and ecological assets is inconsequential. From the viewpoint of sustainable development, objects of human appreciation and objects whose value is independent of humanity have essentially the same value-theoretical properties. It would
seem to follow from this that the much disputed issue whether non-human nature has a value that is independent of human beings is not as important for sustainable development as it is sometimes conceived to be. The crucial distinction is that between on one hand natural resources that are intended for technological use and on the other hand two other types of assets that are not intended for technological use. Often, one and the same asset belongs, in its different aspects, to two or all of the three categories. In traditional economic analysis of environmental problems, methods such as contingent valuation are employed to include all aspects in the same analysis [15]. (Hansson [16] offers a critical discussion.) The above analysis leads to a different approach. The values of natural-technological resources and the other types of assets fare differently when extended into the future. (The former but not the latter are suitable for discounting.) Therefore, when the time factor is crucial, as it is in issues of sustainability, it is usually better to keep the values of the different types of assets apart in the analysis. In this way, the concept of sustainability emerges as somewhat more complicated and somewhat less unified than what we might have hoped for. But these are complications that we cannot escape. Oversimplified accounts of sustainable development have given rise to the view that we have to choose between using, exclusively, either a weak or a strong notion of sustainability. The present analysis shows that both notions are needed in one and the same analysis. Combining them is by no means a simple task, but it may be a key to improved policy analysis. References [1] World Commission on the Environment and Development. Our common future. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1987. [2] Korhonen J. On the ethics of corporate social responsibility – considering the paradigm of industrial metabolism. Journal of Business Ethics 2003;48(4):301–15. [3] Balakrishman U, Duvall T, Primeaux P. Rewriting the bases of capitalism: reflexive modernity and ecological sustainability as the foundations of a new normative framework. Journal of Business Ethics 2003;47(4):299–314. [4] Skolimowski H. In defence of sustainable development. Environmental Values 1995;4(1):69–70. [5] Munda G. Environmental economics, ecological economics, and the concept of sustainable development. Environmental Values 1997; 6(2):213–33. [6] Beekman V. Sustainable development and future generations. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 2004;17(1):3–22. [7] Ayres RU, Van den Bergh JCJM, Gowdy JM. Strong versus weak sustainability: economics, natural sciences, and ‘consilience’. Environmental Ethics 2001;23(2):155–68. [8] Beckerman W. How would you like your sustainability, Sir? weak or strong? A reply to my critics. Environmental Values 1995;4(2):169–79. [9] Beckerman W. ‘Sustainable development’: is it a useful concept? Environmental Values 1994;3:191–209. [10] Ludwig D, Hilborn R, Waters C. Uncertainty, resource exploitation, and conservation: lessons from history. Science April 1993;260 (5104):17–36.
S.O. Hansson / Technology in Society 32 (2010) 274–279 [11] Roe E. Sustainable development and the local justice framework. Philosophy and Social Criticism 1997;23(2):97–114. [12] Samuelson PA. A note on measurement of utility. Review of Economic Studies 1937;4:155–61. [13] Dias de Avila Pires F, Mior LC, Aguiar VP, De Mello Schlemper SR. The concept of sustainable development revisited. Foundations of Science 2000;5(3):261–8. [14] Johnson BL. Ethical obligations in a tragedy of the commons. Environmental Values 2003;12:271–87. [15] Carson RT, Michael Hanemann WM. Contingent valuation. In: Maler KG, Vincent JR, editors. Handbook of environmental economics, vol. 2. Amsterdam: Elsevier; 1936.
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[16] Hansson SO. Philosophical problems in cost-benefit analysis. Economics and Philosophy 2007;23:163–83. Sven Ove Hansson is a professor of philosophy and head of the Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. He is editor-in-chief of Theoria and member of the board of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. His research areas include philosophy of technology, value theory, decision theory, epistemology, and belief dynamics. He is the author of more than 200 articles in refereed journals. His books include A Textbook of Belief Dynamics. Theory Change and Database Updating (Kluwer 1999), and The Structures of Values and Norms (CUP 2001).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Technology in Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/techsoc
Technology and the notion of sustainability Sven Ove Hansson Department of Philosophy, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
a b s t r a c t Keywords: Aesthetic values Contingent valuation Discounting Natural resources Sustainability Technology Time preferences
Some of the difficulties connected with the concept of sustainable development can be resolved if we distinguish between sustainability of different types of assets, in particular between those that pertain to technological uses and those that do not. A weak concept of sustainability is appropriate for the former and a strong concept for the latter. Furthermore, time discounting is appropriate (in the relatively short run) for the former but not for the latter. It is concluded that instead of choosing between weak and strong sustainability, the two notions should be included in the same analysis, since they are needed to account for different kinds of assets. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
from Nature (1971), saying: “The blue whale could have supplied indefinitely a sustainable yield of 6,000 individuals a year”. The earliest use of the phrase “sustainable development” recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1972, and the earliest use of “sustainable city” from 1989. However, it was in the 1987 report Our Common Future (a/k/a The Brundtland Report) from the World Commission on the Environment and Development (WCED) that sustainability became a central concept in environmental policies [1]. The importance of this report in late 20th century environmental policies cannot be overstated. It had a central role at the UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and provided the basic ideas for the Agenda 21 document adopted there. More recently, sustainable development has also become a catchword for corporate social responsibility [2,3]. The success of the sustainability concept depends at least in part on the fact that it “struck a middle ground between more radical approaches which denounced all development, and the idea of development conceived as business as usual” [4]. In particular, sustainable development is more palatable to most economists and politicians than the previously popular concept of ‘zero growth’ that implied an irresolvable conflict between economic growth and environmental preservation, and required the submission of the former to the latter [5]. However, sustainability is ecumenical at the cost of being indeterminate. It is commonplace
The concept of sustainable development is ambiguous and therefore often difficult to apply in concrete sociotechnological contexts. This article shows how philosophical considerations related to technology can be used to clarify the concept. In Section 2, traditional controversies about the definition of sustainable development are summarized, with an emphasis on the distinction between weak and strong sustainability. In Section 3, three types of assets are delineated, showing that weak sustainability is the appropriate concept for one of them and strong sustainability for the other two. In Section 4 it is shown that time discounting applies only to one of them, and Section 5 shows that they differ also in the local-global dimension of sustainability. In Section 6, conclusions are drawn for practical applications of the sustainability concept. 2. Concepts of sustainable development Sustainability means capability to go on for a long time. The use of this term goes back at least to the 1960s in economics and to the early 1970s in environmental management. The Oxford English Dictionary has a quotation
E-mail address: [email protected]. URL: http://www.infra.kth.se/~soh/ 0160-791X/$ – see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.techsoc.2010.10.003
S.O. Hansson / Technology in Society 32 (2010) 274–279
that economists and environmentalists tend do define it in widely different ways. Definitions of sustainable development can be divided into two major classes, representing what are known as the weak and strong concepts of sustainability. The weak concept is the more common one. It is contained in the Brundtland Report’s influential definition of sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. An (economic) development is weakly sustainable if it can go on at a non-diminishing level from generation to generation. This is the dominant interpretation of sustainability among economists. It largely makes sustainability an issue of intergenerational equity in classical economical terms [6]. To achieve sustainability is then a matter of managing the total capital which includes both natural and human-made capital. No limits are set on the substitution of these two forms of capital [7]. Hence, according to weak sustainability we can pass on less environmental resources to coming generations as long as we pass on more human-made capital instead [5]. If we hand over to coming generations new technologies that reduce their needs of natural resources, then according to this view we can deplete more resources and yet comply with the precepts of sustainability. Strong sustainability, in contrast, sees human-made and natural capital as different categories, each of which must be preserved separately. In the most extreme version it is maintained that every species must be preserved since it cannot be replaced by anything else. A compromise version focuses on critical ecosystems and environmental assets, such as the ozone layer, that are assumed not to be replaceable by anything else [7]. The distinction between weak and strong sustainability is usually recognized as having two major components. First, as already mentioned, weak but not strong sustainability allows for the substitution of natural resources by manufactured capital. Secondly, weak but not strong sustainability assumes that the economic welfare concept covers all other policy concerns [7,8]. These are both value assumptions that cannot be reduced to empirical considerations. The strong concept of sustainability is widely considered to be impracticable. The weak concept, on the other hand, has been criticized for being too lax, since it allows for natural resources to be depleted provided that this is compensated for by increases in other resources. This threatens to make the concept of sustainable development next to meaningless. “For if the choice between preserving natural capital and adding to (or preserving) man-made capital depends on which makes the greatest contribution to welfare the concept of sustainable development becomes redundant” [9], (p. 195). In other words, sustainability would be reduced to the maximization of economic welfare in the classical sense. As was noted by Beckerman, with this interpretation, sustainability does not even survive as a constraint on welfare maximization, since a constraint on welfare maximization is only meaningful if it conflicts with welfare maximization [9], (p. 202). In a much-quoted article, Ludwig et al. [10] argued that sustainability is a difficult concept to deal with due to
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scientific uncertainty. They referred to the concept of maximal sustainable yield (MSY), used in fisheries management long before sustainability became a general catchword in environmental policies. The use of this concept was often unfortunate according to these authors, since scientific uncertainties were not recognized, with depletion of resources as a result. Against this background, they admonished: “Distrust claims of sustainability. Because past resource exploitation has seldom been sustainable, any new plan that involves claims of sustainability should be suspect” [10], (p. 17). Roe [11] discusses the debate that this article gave rise to. For some purposes, the vagueness of the concept may be tolerable, perhaps even an advantage. Henryk Skolimowski defended the use of an undefined sustainability concept. After admitting that the concept “is loose and our sense of intellectual respectability is often offended by its ambiguities”, he went on to say: “We should not worry too much about intellectual respectability. We should worry more about the survival of the species” [4], (p. 69). However, although this approach may be sensible in certain general discussions on a policy level, it is untenable for the work on a technical level that must be carried out in order to implement the general ideas of sustainability in practice. Scientists, engineers, and civil planners given the task to implement policy ideas of sustainable development need some guidance on what is meant by that concept. 3. A technological perspective on sustainability The concept of a natural resource is a technological concept. It is technological since a natural object1 is a natural resource only to the extent that we have some technology with which we can make use of it.2 This is admittedly a trivial observation but in a sense it is nevertheless unconventional. The notion of a resource, and consequently that of a natural resource, is usually seen as an economic concept. Without denying its importance in economic analysis, I propose that it is in an important sense primarily a technological concept: A natural object can be a natural resource since there is a technology with which we can use it, but yet not be a resource from a strictly economic point of view since nobody would buy it, perhaps because there are better alternatives. A typical example would be an iron ore with a much lower iron yield than the ores we use today. It is clearly a natural resource since we have a technology for making iron from it, and in a distant future we may come to use it. However, it is not an economic resource since there is no way you can sell it. As this example shows, only some natural resources are economic resources. However, even in this (widened) sense the concept of a natural resource is insufficient for clarifying what we usually mean by sustainability and sustainable development. 1 For the present purpose, I use the concept of an object in a broad sense, thus counting gases and energy as objects. 2 There are a few cases in which we uses a natural object directly, with no intermediate technological process, such as when we pick and eat wild-grown fruit. For simplicity, I will leave these marginal cases out of the analysis.
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Not everything that sustainable development aims at sustaining is a natural resource. I am for instance much more concerned with the preservation of the glaciers in northern Sweden than with the subterranean iron ores on the same latitude. Yet the glaciers do not appear to be an important technological resource now or in the future; we can always get hold of water much easier elsewhere. My appreciation of the glaciers is not based on their usefulness as natural (technological) resources. More generally, when we talk about the sustainable use of a natural resource we do not refer to it only qua natural (technological) resource. We can also refer to (1) its sustainability as an object of human appreciation, in short, as an aesthetic natural asset, and (2) its sustainability as a component of one or several ecological systems, in short, as an ecological asset (over and above its instrumental value for human beings). The value of a natural (technological) resource or an aesthetic asset is anthropogenic, since it depends on human needs respectively human appreciation. In contrast, the value of an ecological asset is conceived as non-anthropogenic and therefore independent of humanity. Let us apply the sustainability concept to each of these three aspects of a natural object: as a natural (technological) resource, as an aesthetic asset, and as an ecological asset. Once we have delineated the concept of a natural (technological) resource, it should be obvious that the weak concept of sustainability is appropriate in dealing with natural resources qua natural (technological) resources. If we deplete the high-yield silver ores, but develop technology for equally efficient extraction of silver from the abundant lower-yield ores, then we leave future generations in a situation that is no worse than ours with respect to their access to silver, as a natural-technological resource. In contrast, for aesthetic assets in nature the relevant sustainability concept is the strong one. To see why, let us consider an example of aesthetic appreciation of a nonnatural, human-made object. Suppose that one of the most famous painters of our times loses his mind when visiting a museum. In a moment of rage, he tears out a Vermeer canvas worth €50,000,000 and cuts it into small pieces so that it is beyond repair. After regaining sanity, he paints five exquisite paintings that he donates to the museum as a compensation. Each of these paintings is estimated to be worth €11,000,000, and the museum also receives an offer from another museum to buy them all at €55,000,000. Is then everything well, after the compensation has taken place? I for one would mourn the lost Vermeer, even though I might rejoice at the five new masterpieces. This example shows that objects of aesthetic appreciation are not replaceable in the same way that you can replace banknotes of equal value with each other. This applies also to natural objects of aesthetic appreciation, although equally illustrative examples are not easily constructed with natural objects. In other words, the strong rather than the weak notion of sustainability is appropriate for aesthetic assets in nature. Turning to ecological assets, their non-instrumental value refers largely to their unique existence. This can be seen clearly for instance from discussions on the extinction of species. Suppose that the tiger becomes distinct, but 10
years later a new and even more spectacular cat species comes into existence (either through a mutation or through genetic technology). This would hardly be seen as a compensation for the loss of the tiger, at least not in the same sense as money can compensate for the loss of money. Based on examples like this we can conclude that the strong notion of sustainability is the appropriate one for ecological assets.
4. The temporal perspective The standard economic method for evaluating future goods and future events is discounting, a method modeled after the interest rate calculations we perform for monetary assets. More precisely, a bifactorial model is used in which the value of a future advantage or disadvantage is assumed to be equal to the product of two factors. One of these is a time-independent evaluation of the good in question, i.e., the value of having it now. The other factor is a person’s or a society’s “time preferences”. It is a function of the length of the delay, and it is the same for all types of goods. The most common type of time preference function can be written 1/(1 þ r)t, where r is a discount rate and t the duration of the delay. This is the discounted utility model, proposed by Paul Samuelson in 1937, which still dominates in economic analysis [12]. Discounting corresponds to how the economy works in the short run. If I need €10,000 in 10 years, I do not have to set aside €10,000 today. Since the bank pays interest, a somewhat lower sum will suffice. If the interest rate is 3%, then it is sufficient to set aside about €7500 today. We can then say that the present value of having €10,000 in 10 years’ time is about €7500. However, we should note two essential features of this example that are not present in all applications of discounting to environmental issues. First, the example concerns monetary value, and it is of course for money that we have interest rates. Second, the time period is relatively short. In environmental issues we often deal with effects that will occur after hundreds or thousands of years. When discounting is applied to events far off into the future, it tends to lead to results that we consider absurd. Before turning to sustainability of environmental assets, let us consider the most discussed case in which discounting has been questioned: its application to human lives. For a concrete example, let us use the common discount rate r ¼ .03, and let us assume that the world’s population will be 10 billion in 2800. Consider the following two actions: A murder taking place in 2020, i.e., an action that leads to the immediate death of one person An action, also taking place in 2020, that will kill every living person on earth in 2800. A simple calculation shows that the former of these actions has the highest disvalue. In other words, if we discount lives by a discount rate of 3%, then it is worse to perform an act that kills one person immediately than one that kills 10 billion persons 780 years later. If we applied discounting of lives to the problem of nuclear waste
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disposal, then we could stop worrying about its effects on people who live several 1000 years into the future. This seems to be in stark contrast to most people’s views of our responsibilities for future generations. Exactly the same problem arises if we apply discounting to environmental damages. Even with a very low discount rate (say 0.5%), effects that take place in the distant future will be discounted to almost nil. (With a discount rate of 0.5%, a damage that takes place 2000 years into the future has less than 1/20,000 of the negative value of the corresponding damage today.) To see where the discounting argument breaks down in cases like this, let us consider its structure more in detail. Clearly, the discounting of lives or environmental assets cannot be justified by the same direct argument that can be used for the discounting of money. We cannot deposit health or threatened animal species in the bank and expect to receive more back after a couple of years. For goods like these, the justification of discounting has to be more indirect. It cannot be justified with an argument that directly combines the two entities: lives today – lives in the future. Instead, the following chain of three commensuration steps needs to be considered:
The first step consists in assigning a monetary value to the loss of human lives today. This step is controversial, but let us for the moment assume that such values can be assigned, as an expression of current willingness to pay. The second step is the discounting of money, which is a standard economic procedure. In the time spans that economists usually work with, it is a highly useful tool of analysis. However, in the longer time spans applied in some economic analyses of climate change and other long-term environmental issues, this step is more uncertain. When the time span is counted in centuries rather than decades it cannot be taken for granted that the economy will function in the same way as today. We can fairly safely assume that there will be interest rates 30 years from now, but will there be interest rates 300 or 3000 years from now? We cannot know. The third commensuration step, that between money and lives at some point in the future, is the most problematic one. Present life values are reports on what we are prepared to pay for saving a life today. We have no reason to believe that our present priorities in these respects will remain the same over a longer period of time. (Historically, our willingness to pay for saving lives seems to have increased dramatically.) Therefore, we have no ground for projecting the trade-offs that we make today between human lives and money far off into the future. Hence, although discounting is reasonable for monetary resources, it breaks down for human lives. How does it fare for the three objects of sustainability analysis that we have identified? Natural-technological resources are for the most part included in the money economy, i.e., they are sold and bought for money. Therefore it makes good sense to apply
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the discounting methodology to them. However, just as for money discounting becomes uncertain in a distant future when the economic system may possibly be very different from the present one. Ecological assets represent the other extreme. When we value for instance a species non-instrumentally, this means that we value it in much the same way that we value a human life. Therefore, the argumentation presented above for human lives applies to ecological assets as well, i.e., they should not be subject to standard discounting. Finally, many aesthetic assets are bought and sold. This applies to artifacts made by humans, such as paintings, and also to some natural objects such as fossils and precious stones. However, it does not follow that the economic values of these objects exhaust their values as objects of human appreciation. Suppose that a rich eccentric spends his fortune buying all the Picasso paintings he can get hold of, and burns them. Probably, some sort of action would be taken to prevent such a destructive practice. This example shows that the money paid for an object of art does not exhaust its value to humanity. The same applies to natural objects of aesthetic appreciation. No price has been set to the Shilin stone forest. Should such a price be set, it would be a report of how much we would now be willing to spend on averting a threat to it, not a price at which someone should be allowed to buy it in order to blow it into small pieces for his own pleasure. This example shows that aesthetic assets in nature are not accessible to standard economic discounting. In summary, the application of traditional economic discounting to natural-technological resources is justifiable, but not in an analysis that covers a very long time period. In contrast, standard economic discounting cannot in general be justified for aesthetic or ecological assets. This puts a clear limit to economic analysis of environmental issues. 5. The spatial perspective Sustainability, as it was conceived by the Brundtland commission, is essentially a holistic concept. Either the global community as a whole is sustainable, or in the end no part of it can be so. As was noted by Dias de Avila Pires and coworkers, it becomes more and more difficult to treat even the most isolated human populations as self-reproducing closed systems [13]. In spite of this, the notion of sustainable development is increasingly often used as an ideal for urban and other geographically isolated systems. This gives rise to coordination problems that have high relevance for environmental policies. The complexity of these coordination problems is accentuated by overlaps, since sustainability is applied not only to geographically defined areas (e.g., sustainable cities) but also to functionally defined systems (e.g., sustainable water supply). A common-sense solution to the coordination problem is what Baylor Johnson calls the Kantian solution, namely that “every commons user should restrict his or her use to a level that would be sustainable if all other users reduced their use in a similar way, and to do this regardless of what others do” [14], (p. 272). Johnson criticizes this as a mistaken solution since it fails to distinguish between
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Table 1 Properties of the three major types of assets to which the concept of sustainability is applied. Type of asset
Source of value
Value expressible in money?
Suitable to discount?
Location of value
Appropriate notion of sustainability
Natural-technological resource Aesthetic natural asset Ecological asset
Anthropogenic Non-anthropogenic Non-anthropogenic
Yes At most partly No
Yes, in the short run No No
Global Local Local
Weak Strong Strong
unilateral action and action that is part of a cooperative scheme to address the problem. Unilateral reductions of use often have very small chances of success. In his view, the focus should instead be on work aiming at a collective agreement to solve the problem. The obligation to adjust one’s own behaviour “does not predate the agreement” [14], (p. 283), although unilateral reductions may in some cases be useful as means to work out new solutions and to convince others of one’s sincerity. But let us return to the basic spatial issue: Is the concept of sustainability applicable to a geographically restricted area, or does it always have to refer to the planet as a whole? It turns out that this issue as well can be clarified with the distinction between three types of assets outlined above. Due to the integration of the world economy, naturaltechnological resources are traded across the world. The processes through which natural resources replace other natural resources (such as in the example of iron ores) depend on worldwide trading. Therefore sustainability in terms of natural-technological resources is essentially a global issue. No city, in fact no country or region in the world, is fully self-supporting for all types of resources. Both aesthetic and ecological assets are much more of a local issue. The ecosystems of the Galapagos Islands have to be preserved where they are, not somewhere else. The preservation of a species in a particular location is of course particularly important if it is the only habitat of the species; but on the other hand, the fact that a species is abundant elsewhere is no reason to take its disappearance from a particular location lightly. Its loss will change the local ecological system, and the repercussions for other species may be substantial. However, things are somewhat more complicated than that. Although different ecosystems cannot replace each other, and each is a separate object of preservation, the ecosystems are nevertheless far from isolated from each other. Global warming and global pollution affect all ecosystems on the planet. Even though the values of aesthetic and ecological assets are local in the sense just described, their preservation has to be discussed and managed not only on a local but also on a global level. 6. Conclusion The major results of the above analysis are summarized in Table 1. In the issues that are most important for applications of the sustainability concept (columns 3, 4, and 6), the distinction between aesthetic natural assets and ecological assets is inconsequential. From the viewpoint of sustainable development, objects of human appreciation and objects whose value is independent of humanity have essentially the same value-theoretical properties. It would
seem to follow from this that the much disputed issue whether non-human nature has a value that is independent of human beings is not as important for sustainable development as it is sometimes conceived to be. The crucial distinction is that between on one hand natural resources that are intended for technological use and on the other hand two other types of assets that are not intended for technological use. Often, one and the same asset belongs, in its different aspects, to two or all of the three categories. In traditional economic analysis of environmental problems, methods such as contingent valuation are employed to include all aspects in the same analysis [15]. (Hansson [16] offers a critical discussion.) The above analysis leads to a different approach. The values of natural-technological resources and the other types of assets fare differently when extended into the future. (The former but not the latter are suitable for discounting.) Therefore, when the time factor is crucial, as it is in issues of sustainability, it is usually better to keep the values of the different types of assets apart in the analysis. In this way, the concept of sustainability emerges as somewhat more complicated and somewhat less unified than what we might have hoped for. But these are complications that we cannot escape. Oversimplified accounts of sustainable development have given rise to the view that we have to choose between using, exclusively, either a weak or a strong notion of sustainability. The present analysis shows that both notions are needed in one and the same analysis. Combining them is by no means a simple task, but it may be a key to improved policy analysis. References [1] World Commission on the Environment and Development. Our common future. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1987. [2] Korhonen J. On the ethics of corporate social responsibility – considering the paradigm of industrial metabolism. Journal of Business Ethics 2003;48(4):301–15. [3] Balakrishman U, Duvall T, Primeaux P. Rewriting the bases of capitalism: reflexive modernity and ecological sustainability as the foundations of a new normative framework. Journal of Business Ethics 2003;47(4):299–314. [4] Skolimowski H. In defence of sustainable development. Environmental Values 1995;4(1):69–70. [5] Munda G. Environmental economics, ecological economics, and the concept of sustainable development. Environmental Values 1997; 6(2):213–33. [6] Beekman V. Sustainable development and future generations. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 2004;17(1):3–22. [7] Ayres RU, Van den Bergh JCJM, Gowdy JM. Strong versus weak sustainability: economics, natural sciences, and ‘consilience’. Environmental Ethics 2001;23(2):155–68. [8] Beckerman W. How would you like your sustainability, Sir? weak or strong? A reply to my critics. Environmental Values 1995;4(2):169–79. [9] Beckerman W. ‘Sustainable development’: is it a useful concept? Environmental Values 1994;3:191–209. [10] Ludwig D, Hilborn R, Waters C. Uncertainty, resource exploitation, and conservation: lessons from history. Science April 1993;260 (5104):17–36.
S.O. Hansson / Technology in Society 32 (2010) 274–279 [11] Roe E. Sustainable development and the local justice framework. Philosophy and Social Criticism 1997;23(2):97–114. [12] Samuelson PA. A note on measurement of utility. Review of Economic Studies 1937;4:155–61. [13] Dias de Avila Pires F, Mior LC, Aguiar VP, De Mello Schlemper SR. The concept of sustainable development revisited. Foundations of Science 2000;5(3):261–8. [14] Johnson BL. Ethical obligations in a tragedy of the commons. Environmental Values 2003;12:271–87. [15] Carson RT, Michael Hanemann WM. Contingent valuation. In: Maler KG, Vincent JR, editors. Handbook of environmental economics, vol. 2. Amsterdam: Elsevier; 1936.
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[16] Hansson SO. Philosophical problems in cost-benefit analysis. Economics and Philosophy 2007;23:163–83. Sven Ove Hansson is a professor of philosophy and head of the Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. He is editor-in-chief of Theoria and member of the board of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. His research areas include philosophy of technology, value theory, decision theory, epistemology, and belief dynamics. He is the author of more than 200 articles in refereed journals. His books include A Textbook of Belief Dynamics. Theory Change and Database Updating (Kluwer 1999), and The Structures of Values and Norms (CUP 2001).