Environmental sustainability as the first principle of distributive justice: Towards an ecological communitarian normative foundation for ecological economics

a r t i c l e i n f o The ecological economic concern with environmental sustainability embodies the normative orientations of the field. This concern is foremost a matter of distributive justice, the definition of which determines the relevance of the appropriate scale and efficient allocation criteria. Yet it would appear that the discipline lacks a shared, internally consistent set of ethical premises by which this concern might be legitimized. Various authors have embraced a Rawlsian conception of liberal justice as the appropriate banner for ecological economics in place of the consequentialist–libertarian foundations of neoclassical economics (including environmental economics). It is argued here that this is insufficient in so far as it is premised on a vision of a discrete, self-sufficient economic actor. Instead, it is posited that an ecological economic ethic must proceed from an understanding of the economic actor as community member — a recognition implicit in recent ecological economic contributions focused on discourse ethics and deliberative democracy. An ecological communitarian conception of distributive justice, which views the well-being of the individual as inseparable from the integrity of its implicate, mutually constituting human and non-human natural communities, is advanced as the appropriate basis for the ecological economic world-view. In this light, the thermodynamic foundations of ecological economics are seen to provide the necessary departure point for normative decision-making oriented towards ensuring sustainability in economic organization. Economic systems embody the rules by which scarce resources are allocated across relevant populations. Allocation presupposes the resolution of distributive norms that both define the constellation of economic actors as well as how and to whom the costs and benefits of economic activities accrue. These norms must thus derive from specific conceptions of distributive justice in material relations. Given that the meaning and application of just distribution must, in turn, be founded on shared interpretations of the right or good, an economic system operationalizes a core component of a society's moral universe. The neoclassical economic model has been roundly criticized for (among other things): its analytical myopia with respect to the foundational role of ecosystem goods and services in economic activity; the attendant environmental degradation resulting from the omission of this consideration in economic policy; and the implications for both economic and environmental sustainability within and across generations. In large part, these failures reflect a fundamental incompatibility between the underlying ethical premises that inform neoclassical economic conceptions of distributive justice, incommen-surability …