Prof John O’Neill, University of Manchester
CUSP essay series on the Morality of Sustainable Prosperity | No 6
This essay forms part of a series within the work programme of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, investigating the philosophical
understandings of sustainable prosperity.
This paper has been published under Creative Commons, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. You are welcome to reproduce the material for non-commercial use, crediting the author and the publisher with a link to this essay: cusp.ac.uk/essay/m1-6.
ONeill-Life-beyond-capital-online
One Response
Here was I hoping that you were going to challenge the concept of capital in socio-economics generally. Never mind – it was a nice essay, with which I agree, although I think “strong sustainability” was misrepresented at the start, as condoning substitutability within natural capital. I would say that strong sustainability very much embraces valuation ‘de re’.
I particularly enjoyed the observation that offsets make concervation of natural assets in one place contingent on destruction of natural assets in another, and the likening of ‘prosperity ecology’ to ‘prosperity theology’.
But by not challenging the concept of capital in society generally, you missed an opportunity to show TEEB as yet another predatory appropriation by the masters of finance.