Session 5. (Week 3). (1) The Promethean Argument from Substitutability against Survivalism: Once a Resource Is Depleted, We Can Often Substitute to a Replacement, And We Can Increase the Productivity of Our Remaining Resources through Market Incentives. (2) The Precautionary Principle of Risk Management: "Better Safe than Sorry!" Can the Principle Be Used to Salvage Survivalism? Should We Think That Where an Activity Poses Some Risk of Serious Harm to Society, However Slight, then the Burden of Proving that We Should Continue as Usual Rests with the Risk-Skeptic?
Come prepared to discuss:
Robert M. Solow, "Is The End of the World at Hand?" in The Economic Growth Controversy, ed. A. Weintraub et al (International Arts and Sciences Press, 1973), pp. 39-61, READ pp. 39-55 ONLY. [Available on Moodle.]
Famously challenges the survivalist predictions that prolonged further growth without radical changes will spell catastrophe, on the ground that they falsely assume that natural resources will not become more productive, and that we cannot substitute to other resources once a resource is depleted.
Cass R. Sunstein, “Beyond the Precautionary Principle,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 151 (2003): 1003-1058, READ pp. 1011-1035 ONLY. [Available on Moodle.]
Kristin Shrader-Frechette, “Review of Cass R. Sunstein, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge UP, 2005),” Ethics & International Affairs 20 (2006): 123-125. [Available on Moodle.]
So you'd like to know more...
Mauro Boianovsky and Kevin D. Hoover, "In the Kingdom of Solovia: The Rise of Growth Economics at MIT, 1957-1970," Working paper, Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke (2013)
Hans Jonas, "[The Duty to Ensure a Future]," The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (UChicago Press, 1984): 25-46. [Available on Moodle.]
Hans Jonas, "Responsibility Today," The Imperative of Responsibility, pp. 136-142. [Available on Moodle.]
Ulrich Beck, "On the Logic of Wealth Distribution and Risk Distribution," Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992): 19-51. [Available on Moodle.]
Roger Scruton, "Radical Precaution," Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the Planet, pp. 104-136. [Available on Moodle.]
John Lemons, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, and Carl Cranor, "The Precautionary Principle: Scientific Uncertainty and Type I and Type II Errors," Foundations of Science 2 (1997): 207-236. [Available on Moodle.]