From Utilitarianism to Evolution in Ecological Economics

Abstract

Global warming is one of the most urgent and serious problems facing humankind.¹ Yet, in no other area are the deficiencies of utilitarianism and neoclassical welfare economics so serious and dramatic. Any welfare approach based on the presumption that individuals are always the best judges of their own interest falls at the first hurdle: many people neither understand nor accept the conclusions of the science of climate change. For example, climate change skeptics are prominent in the United States, with only 49 percent saying, in a 2008 Gallup poll, that rising temperatures were a result of human activities. Only 44 percent of the US population think that their government should make the problem the highest priority, according to a 2009 survey. Similar percentages can be found in some other developed countries.²

Indeed the really important problems of economics are questions of collective decision-making which cannot be dealt with in terms of a calculus deductively derived from a formal concept of individual rationality under hypothetically assumed and transparent conditions.

(K. William Kapp, 1978, 288–9)