Yesterday I edited and submitted the abstract below to the organizers of the 2022 in-person conference of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS 2022, with the theme "Quality-of-Life for Resilient Futures: Sustainability, Equity, and Wellbeing"), which is to take place in Burlington, Vermont, August 3rd-6th.
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The True Value of ‘Doing Well’ Economically
Recent efforts to go beyond gross domestic product as a measure of economic performance raise important questions about the nature of the economy, including: What is the best measure of a sound, flourishing economy, and what is the purpose of ‘doing well’ in economic terms? One possible measure of the soundness of an economy is the extent to which it results in better lives for humans. In the bigger picture, a sound, flourishing economy should also be consistent with good, and perhaps optimal, lives for non-humans, and well-functioning ecosystems. To go beyond anthropocentric notions of economic performance, a degree of integration between economics, philosophy and biology is required. A merely economic outlook can easily lead to the commodification of each and every organism and natural resource, thus neglecting the agency, interests and intrinsic value of animals and other non-humans. To truly ‘serve all’ in an Anthropocene-era world, economists need to acknowledge that there are economic stakeholders beyond humans. This would make economics more compatible with current outlooks in normative ethics with regard to the value of animals, biodiversity, etc., and could be part of a radical reconceptualization of the nature of the economy in which economic value is situated within value theory in a wider sense.
This paper is based on a published chapter: Tønnessen, M. 2020. The true value of „doing well“ economically. In Piero Formica & John Edmondson (eds.), Innovation and the Arts: The Value of Humanities Studies for Business, pp. 91–109. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78973-885-820201005
