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Must We Always Pursue Economic Growth?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2023

Jeffrey Carroll Open the ORCID record for Jeffrey Carroll [Opens in a new window]
Jeffrey Carroll*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA
*
Email: jcarro@bgsu.edu
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Abstract

Must we always pursue economic growth? Kogelmann answers yes. Not only should poor countries pursue growth, but rich countries should as well. Kogelmann aims to provide a wealth-insensitive argument – one demonstrating all countries should pursue growth regardless of their wealth. His central argument – the no halting growth (NHG) argument – says no country experiencing growth should stop it, because doing so requires undermining the conditions causing it and those conditions are independently morally desirable, so they should not be undermined. For countries not growing, he may argue that they have an obligation to implement the conditions that cause growth because they are independently morally desirable. Call this the implementation argument. I contend that neither argument is wealth-insensitive as each fails to establish an obligation to pursue growth. I attempt to diagnose how this could be and propose that it is a product of attempting to answer three questions about growth simultaneously.

Keywords

economic growthwealthstationary stateinstitutions
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Utilitas , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2024 , pp. 102 - 110
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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