Consume with care : ethics,economics and over-consumption in the industrialized world

Over-consumption in the industrialised world is a significant factor affecting global sustainability, both at the level of environmental impact and at the level of social equity. In mainstream research on sustainability and sustainable development, it has long been acknowledged that although it is in principle possible to reduce resource consumption in the industrialised world to the degree required via technological innovation and new patterns of service delivery, in practice, widespread value change will be required to support and facilitate this. However, discussion of precisely what such value change might consist in, and entail, has been largely confined to environmental philosophy, and is conspicuously absent from mainstream sustainability discourse. In this work I bring the former to bear on the latter. This almost exclusive focus on supply-side strategies (technological and service innovation, and so on) in the mainstream sustainability literature hints at the perspective upon which it is based: rational egoism. Would taking a different perspective reveal other, further options? I begin by presenting the arguments for seeking what I call 'complex sustainability': deep environmental sustainability and social equity. This perspective, because it is based upon ethical concern for human and more-than-human others, allows us to directly investigate an entirely different kind of strategy: consumer demand reduction. There is relatively little discussion of demand reduction in the sustainability literature, probably because consumer demand is so tightly linked to the central cultural and economic role of consumption in the industrialised world. The issue of value change cannot be avoided here! The task of this work is to explore the relatively neglected cultural and economic possibilities for demand reduction; such possibilities both enable a critical perspective on, and provide a complement to, supply-side strategies pursuing sustainability. I focus in particular on the integration of ethical value change with economic theory and practice. The ethical heart of the thesis is the development of an understanding of 'a good life' that is compatible with demand reduction. In developing this understanding, I use and extend the work of philosopher Raimond Gaita in order to explain the links between ethics, meaning in life, and love for particular human and more-than-human others. I want 'consume with care' to urge primarily that our consumption be guided by love and ethical concern for the others it affects rather than by its dangerous practical consequences for ourselves (although the latter - more common - warning remains relevant). Where the most important aspect of a good life is that it be meaningful, the role played by consumption will be secondary, although still important; development theorist Manfred Max-Neef's account of human need is shown to be useful in this connection. This framework for a 'good life under complex sustainability' is then descriptively expanded through a discussion of friendship and frugality as important 'post-consumer' virtues. Finally, I demonstrate that of the major types of economic solutions proposed to the 'sustainability problem', ecological economics is conceptually much the best aligned with my proposed framework for a good life under complex sustainability