>Life itself depends on sustainability. "Life" isn't a sentient being with values, people are. Humanity makes decisions based on some aggregate of the preferen

>Life itself depends on sustainability. "Life" isn't a sentient being with values, people are. Humanity makes decisions based on some aggregate of the preferences of living humans. If most humans want to enjoy a good life now at the expense of the future environment, there's no objective standard to say they're wrong. It's a classic argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument , as noted by Sextus Empiricus, the founder of empiricism. There's no way to empirically justify a moral judgement. >Or not have a system of infinite growth at all. This betrays a misunderstanding of what growth means in an economic context. If your barber learns how to cut your hair twice as fast, that's economic growth. If the paperboy adopts a more efficient paper route to deliver papers faster, that's economic growth. If enough paperboys adopt more efficient routes, that shows up in GDP growth. >This is also objectively measurable. They're talking about externalities. Is economics also a bunch of value judgements now too? Yes of course it is. It's based on utilitarianism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism), basically the philosophy that there is some quantitative form of value that we should aim to maximise. That's why there are different schools of economics: they disagree on the foundations.