The Immorality of Limiting Growth

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The Immorality of Limiting Growth

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Edward Walter - Author

N/A
Hardcover - 186 pages

Release Date: June 1981

ISBN10: 0-87395-478-5
ISBN13: 978-0-87395-478-5

N/A
Paperback - 186 pages

Release Date: June 1981

ISBN10: 0-87395-479-3
ISBN13: 978-0-87395-479-2

Available as a Google eBook for other eReaders and tablet devices. Click icon below...

Summary

The Industrial Age has ended, according to "no-growth futurism," because the finitude of the earth has been reached. Its proponents maintain that technological innovation cannot save industrial society because of pollution, over population, and inflation. They call for a transformed society in which productivity, pollution, and population growth are strictly controlled.

This volume emphatically challenges the no-growth viewpoint on both philosophical and empirical grounds. In it, Edward Walter demonstrates that the interests of those who are socially deprived cannot be fulfilled in a "steady-state" because the privileged classes are able to use their power to prevent redistribution of wealth and to retain their advantages.

Far from equating technology with pollution and the depletion of natural resources, Walter sees it as the means by which resource shortages can be overcome and pollution control can be achieved. He describes and recommends an "essential liberalism," that could provide economic development to all classes in a spirit of international cooperation--without necessitating the transformation of human nature and political institutions.

"This book is clear; it is well written; it is consistent. Above all, it is timely. Walter discusses a problem which cannot be ignored." -- Professor Wilfrid Desan, Georgetown University

Edward Walter is Professor of Philosophy and department chair at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles on philosophical and social questions.

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I: THE TECHNICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS CREATED BY NO-GROWTH FUTURISM

1. The Challenge to Industrial Society: No-Growth Futurism

2. The Likely Consequences of Attempting to Institute a Steady State

3. Counterpoint: The Moral Implications of No-Growth Futurisms and Doubts about the Empirical Claims of No-Growth Futurists

4. Essential Liberalism

5. Liberalism, Material Development, and Industrial Growth

6. Practical Liberal Policy

7. The Promise of Social Science Forecasting

PART II: THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE RELEVANT TO THE PROBLEM OF GROWTH

8. The Availability of Energy Resources

9. The Availability of Mineral Resources

10. Population Problems

11. Pollution Problems

12. Conclusion: A Rational Future

Notes

Index

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Economy and Society

22499/23824(//)

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