Conference Report

In Search of Agreeable Conception of Sustainable Well-Being

Kotaro Suzumura

It was during my interview with Paul Samuelson, which I conducted at MIT on the evolution of welfare economics and social choice theory, that he invoked the following parable when we were discussing the problem of compatibility between social efficiency and personal rights:

A young man is walking down St. James Street in London, swinging a cane into a curve. An old passerby speaks to him: “Hey, white bear, you are swinging your cane.” The guy replies: “It's a free country, isn't it?” The old passerby retorts: “Your freedom ends where my nose begins.”

Recollect that John Stuart Mill asserted in his On Liberty that everyone is equipped with his personal protected sphere into which no outsider may be allowed to intrude even for the sake of promoting the well-being of all other human beings taken together. Samuelson's parable was intended to emphasize that human beings sharing a finite planet earth must recognize that others too are endowed with the same rights as themselves, and that a key issue in designing and implementing social institutions must be to ensure that every individual has equal access to scarce resources to be shared by all individuals.

The global environmental problems, with which we are currently facing, pose considerably more complex issues than the social limits on individual freedom a la J. S. Mill. Global warming, to cite a single salient example, is caused by the massive emission and accumulation of greenhouse gases, the history of which may be traced back at least as far as to the Industrial Revolution. This being the case, logical thinking forces us to require that past generations should also be held responsible for the accumulation of greenhouse gases. However, these past generations have already hidden themselves behind the veil of history, and we have no effective means to impose due responsibility on them. We are also informed that the most serious impact of global warming will surface only in the distant future, so that the most serious “victims” of this problem do not yet exist now.

These two features of the problem of global warming cannot but create serious consequences. Suffice it to observe that there exists virtually no means which allows the “victims” of global warming either to seek for compensations from those who are held responsible for this problem, viz., “culprits”, or to persuade them to adopt measures to prevent the problem from becoming serious. Another feature of the problem of global warming, which differentiates this problem from other instances of environmental disruption, is that there exists no obvious way to distinguish the “victims” and “culprits” of the problem of global warming. This is because greenhouse gases are generated not only from production activities, but also from consumption activities. Indeed, the crucial aspect of the problem of global warming is that everyone on the planet earth cannot but be a “culprit” as well as a “victim” thereof. These features should be firmly borne in mind in designing and implementing institutions to cope with this problem.

There exists yet another intriguing issue of long-term environmental problems such as global warming. As is shown in the following diagram, the identity of present generation is uniquely determined by the decisions made by preceding generations, but the identities of future generations emerging at various future points in time will be altered in accordance with the choices made by all generations from now through to that point in time. For example, whether or not the current generation chooses to stop using private cars and instead commits to using public transportation as a means of coping with the problem of global warming is likely to produce major differences over the long-run in people's social lives and life perspectives, thereby creating marked disparities in the personal identity and well-being of the future generations. This is the intriguing problem of malleability — the property of being easily molded — of future generations. It is this problem that presents a novel issue of the informational basis for understanding the well-being of distant future generations. In particular, it makes us wonder how we can invoke the utilitarian sum of discounted future utilities when we cannot even be certain about their personal identities.

The Science Council of Japan (SCJ) is an official organization that represents Japan's scientific community encompassing the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Ever since 2003, the SCJ has been organizing annually the International Conference on Science and Technology for Sustainability. These conferences have tried to explore ways in which the whole spectrum of scientists could contribute to designing and implementing sustainable social mechanisms and institutions for the promotion of human well-being.

The sixth sustainability conference, which was held in September this year with the support of Nikkei Inc., focused on sustainable well-being and sought to generate a common understanding on the mechanisms and policies for the promotion thereof. In what follows, I would like to outline the conceptual framework for the analysis of sustainable well-being which emerged through this conference.

To begin with, the concept of sustainability can be traced back at least as far as to the 1987 Report drafted by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. It was subsequently adopted by the UN General Assembly. The basic idea underlying this concept is that sustainability hinges squarely on the notion of intergenerational equity to the effect that intergenerational resource allocation should be such that the needs of the present generation should be met without compromising the capability of future generations to meet their respective needs. This definition seems to echo the classical concept of intergenerational equity developed by the 19th century Cambridge philosopher, Henry Sidgwick, who argued that people should not be treated differently simply because of differences in the point in time of their existence. Basically, we support and sustain this egalitarian perspective.

Going back one step further, we should be reminded that there is no universal agreement on the concept of well-being as such, which can be presupposed in the search for sustainable well-being. It is true that the standard conception of well-being held by economists as well as many other social scientists is deeply rooted in the utilitarian tradition, which can be traced back all the way to Jeremy Bentham, but the recent upsurge of criticisms against welfarism in general, and utilitarianism in particular, makes it necessary to think deeper than just following this utilitarian tradition. Instead of tacitly associating personal well-being with subjective achievement of happiness, preference satisfaction, or desire fulfillment, a recent trend among economists and philosophers alike is to focus on the extent to which the resources, environment, and social capital are fairly distributed among people who are trying to fulfill their respective needs. These resources and other means for satisfying needs are non-welfaristic in nature, so that this important shift of emphasis in the analysis of personal well-being may be construed as a gradual shift towards non-welfaristic framework of well-being analysis. We should also point out that this recent shift of emphasis resonates with Amartya Sen's theory of functioning and capability.

Given the issue of malleability of future generations, we hope that this new non-welfaristic perspective in the analysis of personal well-being will provide a way forward for the development of sustainable well-being that goes beyond the utilitarian tradition. The success of our conception of well-being will rest substantially on whether our focus on non-welfaristic informational basis can acquire broad acceptance among scientists.

The Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development also made an early call for serious awareness of the limits of environment's ability to accommodate human activities as a serious constraining factor on the sustainability of resource allocations. It would be obviously inappropriate, and indeed ultimately impossible, to ignore these limits in pursuing material opulence for the promotion of human well-being.

We should also keep in mind that the ongoing accumulation of common social capital, such as the development of urban environment and the provision of rich eco-system services and biological diversity, have both the instrumental value as a means of expanding potential well-being, and also the intrinsic value as crucial constituents of sustainable well-being.

Even if a general consensus were to emerge on the concept of sustainable well-being, numerous problems would still remain to be analysed.

In the first place, there are the dual risks that endanger the pursuit of sustainable well-being. The type I risk is nothing other than persistent poverty that cannot but hamper the sustained achievement of well-being. The type II risk consists of those natural and social hazards that specifically assault one generation or one location, such as major natural disasters and sudden — and unpredictable — accidents. It is hardly necessary to point out that the task of designing social safety measures to deal with these dual risks should be a high priority issue in the scheme of science and technology for sustainability.

In the second place, various inequalities exist among different countries within a single generation, such as the stages of economic development and differences in natural resource endowments. Within the same country, there also exists a diverse range of conflicts, including disparities among the young, mature, and elderly generations, as well as gender inequity. Last but certainly not least, there are serious conflicts of interest between generations separated along the time axis, such as the preferential use of scarce resources and the problem of global warming. For all these reasons, the wisdom of the humanities and social sciences, which should draw on the precise knowledge of natural sciences in unraveling complex conflicts of interest and exploring possible solutions, is at this point in time absolutely critical in realizing sustainable well-being.

It is my pleasure to report to you that the sixth sustainability conference could accomplish this much of clarification on the problems to be faced and the conceptual framework to be utilized in the future analysis and policy design in search of sustainable well-being. Needless to say, this is just the first step in the relevant field of collaboration.

Note: This conference report is based on the article entitled "Systemic Design of a Sustainable Society," which was published in Japanese in Nihon Keizai Shimbun on October 28, 2008. Thanks are due to Nihon Keizai Shimbun for their kind permission to reprint this article in English with a few minor modifications.