Limits to Growth and the Philosophy of Life-Centred Economics

Abstract

Arguing for a sustainability turn, I point out that it requires motivations that are more powerful than material ones. As the 95 Theses of the Budapest Centre for Long-term Sustainability indicated, sustainability requires a comprehensive, life-centered, community-centered and Nature-centered worldview, and the scientific and philosophical conditions are now ripe for it. I introduce the all-comprehensive Principle of Life that enables well-informed rational decision-making, completes materialism by a balanced and more inclusive worldview, aligns it with the Principle of Life and the Principle of Reason, and enables us to align our decision-making with the requirements of long-term sustainable development.

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Keywords:

• Comprehensive science
• healthy environment
• healthy society
• life-centered worldview
• long-term sustainability

Note

Notes

1 “Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness” (Polanyi, 2001, p. 3).