Do we Need a Sustainable Development or Do We Have To Avoid a Sustainable Degrowth

2. Conceptual Reflection And State Of The Art

A priori it was necessary to wait the seventies so that the pure economy with a positive and amoral vocation is charged with on ethos allowing rethinking about its cognitive inheritance by submitting it to normative and ethical criterions. The works of J. Rawls (1972) had allowed to rethink the old social contract theories of J. J. Rousseaux and Hobbs and build a new contract where the cement is “the justice as an equity”.

The theory of justice as an equity has questioned the utilitarianism and the social optimum of Pareto by accusing them as conservatory mechanisms of all forms of inequity and as injustice and as basic criterions which can legitimize all possible sacrifice (maximum of happiness for the biggest number). The criticisms addressed by Sen (1979) to Rawls have allowed giving operationality to the concepts of justice “as equity” and this by supposing that it effective justice would never happen if the individual is never endowed with the necessary capabilities “basic capabilities”.

In addition to this type of problems according to them poverty and inequality are some of the factors blocking and preventing sustainable development anywhere in the world, another kind of problems exist. This concerns the fact that the countries have not the same level of technology (“digital era”) allowing them to reduce (or increase) these inequalities. In this sense González-Prida and Raman (2015) have noted that the developing world faces real challenges when implementing and utilizing environmentally friendly techniques.

These ethical approaches have opened the eyes of economists on the importance of the human dimension, which has long been overshadowed from the realm of their researchers, as well as on the failure of neoclassical growth patterns. To tell the truth, methodological holism (as a favorite logic of macroeconomics) and methodological individualism (as a logic of microeconomics) could not integrate into the same model of reflection, the dimensions of the growth and the human in a single unit of reflection.