Ecological Economics - Abridging the Gap between Conventional Economics and Ethics

Abstract

What role do ethics play in differentiating Ecological Economics from conventional Economics? How much ethical underpinning do various blazing environmental issues have? These are the question that this paper tries to answer.   Conventional Economics focuses on the efficiency of resource allocation giving less weight to distribution and scale. But many economic problems have important ethical dimensions or implications. Mainstream economists have always ignored ethics as a key issue in economic theory.  On the contrary, ecological economics argues that, in the face a severe environmental problem it is normal and natural for human beings to have concerns about the crisis and a healthy survival and to adopt a position of precautionary rationality. Ethics has important policy implications for market-based solutions, valuation, various environmental issues, the business world and its environmental responsibility, globalization, financial crisis etc. Ethics should not be analyzed in isolation of other factors affecting the economic phenomenon concerned. Future research should focus on how to formally incorporate ethics in standard economics model of various forms.