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Sustainable development and human freedom
Amartya Sen
Economist
Nobel Laureate in 1998
Lamont University Professor, Harvard University (USA)
The understanding that our lives and their quality are frail and may be hard to sustain is not new. Indeed, the precariousness of human life has been amply recognized in the widespread distress and apprehension about the so-called "human predicament", which has been much discussed in different forms in different cultures in the world. Buddha's famous renunciation of his Himalayan kingdom -more than 2,500 years ago- in search of enlightenment was directly a response to his growing comprehension, as a young man, of the diverse maladies of illness, old age and death. We are all individually doomed, and Buddha wanted to know how to understand and respond to the inescapable tragedy that awaits us all. And yet, while the acknowledgement of human predicament is not at all new, it had, until recently, taken the form of seeing it as an affliction of individual life, without particularly focusing on the survival and well-being of the species in general. Even Alfred Tennyson's great "elegy" In Memoriam (which was written in 1850) complained about the partiality of nature, and contrasted the infirmity of individual life with the security that nature provides for our group future:
"So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life."
Indeed, throughout history people have tended to take the robustness of nature for granted, and given this belief, it was sensible to be confident about the future of mankind (and of other species) in general, even when there was such anxiety about the plight of the individual. This belief in the invulnerability of nature was well captured by Horace:
"Though you drive Nature out with a pitchfork,
she will still find her way back".
Nature, however, has started to show its own fragility, and seems quite inclined to leave us in a state of splendid incongruity -pitchfork in hand. Horace's comfortable belief has given way, in recent times, to the growing recognition that the environment in which we live is not only delicate, but it also makes human lives - and indeed the lives of others species - deeply precarious.
It is now manifestly clear how easily we can deplete the exhaustible resources and drive many species to extinction, how rapidly we can warm up the globe or decimate the ozone layer, with what ease we can foul up our rivers and mess up the air we breathe, without even doing anything out of the ordinary. Also, the possibility of environment related health hazards, economic disasters and habitational deprivation are increasingly better understood and cogently feared.
This is where the challenge of sustainable development begins. The concept of "sustainable development" is a powerful general idea that bas been widely used in environmental analysis since its exploration in the Brundtland Report, "Our Common Future" (published in 1987) the pioneering manifesto prepared under the leadership of Gro Brundtland, formerly the Prime Minister of Norway (and former Director General of the World Health Organization). The Brundtland Report chose to define "sustainability" not in terms of preserving the environment itself, but the quality of our lives, or the fulfillment of our needs.
Sustainable development is defined in that report as meeting "the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." The idea has been further refined by Robert Solow, one of the great economists of our times, in his monograph "An Almost Practical Step toward Sustainability" (published in 1992).
His formulation sees sustainability as the requirement that the next generation must be left with "whatever it takes to achieve a standard of living at least as good as our own and to look after their next generation similarly."
Is the Brundtland-Solow approach to sustainability intellectually satisfactory? In many ways, it is remarkably so. In particular, it provides an immediate motivation for environmental preservation. The object is not so much to sustain the environment itself, but the lives we can lead in that environment. It integrates the importance of preserving the environment to the functional role of the environment, thereby avoiding environment fetishism. We may, for example, have no great interest in the ozone layer as an entity in itself, but value it because of its influence on our lives. Furthermore, the Brundtland-Solow approach gives us a very inclusive concept. Any ingredient of a good life, which can influence living standards is taken to be potentially important.
And yet there are problems with an exclusive concentration on this approach to sustainability. First, it is a very anthropocentric concept. This is to some extent inescapable, since who other than human beings can decide what to sustain? But it is also anthropocentric in another -more limiting- sense. The preservation of human living standards need not be the only concern that human beings themselves have. To use a medieval European distinction, we are not merely "patients" preoccupied with just our own quality of life, but also responsible and active "agents" who are capable of judging the world around us and undertaking wider commitments to do what we judge we should do. As Buddha argued in "Sutta Nipata", since we are enormously more powerful than the other species, we have some responsibility towards them that arises from this asymmetry of power. We can indeed make a significant distinction between (1) our ability to preserve the quality of our human lives, and (2) our ability to preserve what we think is worth preserving (perhaps including other species), not just to the extent that they impinge on the quality of human lives.
A second problem concerns the possibility that the Brundtland-Solow approach may be too aggregative. We may attach importance to particular freedoms, even when there is no loss in the overall standard of living. The point can be brought out with an illustration that does not involve future generations, but only a contemporary confrontation. If it is thought that a person has the right not to have smoke blown on to her face by a heavy - and indiscriminate- smoker, the right to be free of secondary smoking need not be compromised merely because the person thus affected happens to be very rich and endowed with an outstanding standard of living (particularly compared with the poor, miserable smoker). The environmental analogue of this issue may be considered in the form of a deteriorating environment in which the future generations are denied the presence of fresh air (because of some specially nasty emission), but where those generations are so very rich and so tremendously well served in terms of other amenities of good life that their overall standards of living are well sustained. The loss of particular freedoms matters, even when we may be doing just fine in terms of overall living standards.
A third issue relates to the ways and means of preserving the environment. If environmental policies lead to the loss of human freedom in the cause of promoting living standards, then that loss has to be particularly acknowledged, rather than either being ignored, or - more plausibly but not plausibly enough - being submerged into an aggregative accounting of the standard of living. For example, even if turns out that restricting human freedoms through draconian policies of coercive family planning (as in, say, the "one-child family" in China) helps to sustain living standards, it must be unequivocally acknowledged that something of importance is sacrificed - rather than sustained- through these policies themselves.
One way of seeing these critiques is to argue that what has to be sustained in not just our living standards, but rather our freedoms, including the freedom (in line with Solow) "to achieve a standard of living at least as good as our own and to look after [our] next generation similarly, " but also our freedom to make the centrally important choices in our lives (for example about family size), our liberty to value objectives other than our own living standards (for example, preservation of some species), and also our ability to guarantee specific opportunities (such as the right to fresh air). The idea of sustainable freedoms can add something substantial to the living-standard-based notion of sustainable development. It integrates the very important concept of sustainability - rightly championed by Brundtland and Solow- with a view of human beings as agents whose freedoms matter, rather than seeing people simply as patients who are no greater than their living standards.