Raworth’s Doughnut, IPCC carbon budgets, Rockström’s planetary boundaries, degrowth manifestos, and circular-economy diagrams—all promise that science can finally abolish ethical conflict. Stay within 1.5°C, cap material throughput, replace GDP with well-being indices—and moral legitimacy is supposedly secured. This is philosophy’s oldest category error: descriptive science repackaged as normative authority.
Hume settled the point in 1739: an “ought” cannot be derived from an “is”. No pile of facts—no carbon charts, no biophysical curves—can dictate what should matter. Ecosystems cross tipping points: that tells us what happens, not what should be prioritised. Why should saving coral reefs outweigh electrifying 600 million Africans without power? Why should social housing automatically trump capital's hunger for ROI? Science can warn us about consequences; it cannot adjudicate between competing goods.
Values are irreducibly plural: ecological integrity, human development, autonomy, prosperity, local tradition, intergenerational justice. There is no single metric—neither GDP nor carbon budgets—that can compress these into one optimisable “safe operating space.” Ethics is not engineering. It's a field of tragic choice where every ordering of values sacrifices something real.
Heterodox economics often defaults to conventional morality—rule-following enforced by expert authority. But “universal limits” are never truly universal—they always conceal ideological choices about which values take priority—nor is there any global authority capable of imposing them. Rules based on "planetary boundaries" quickly collapse into ineffective technocratic coercion or empty voluntarism.
Legitimate authority requires subsidiarity, with accountability running dialectically to those both competent and affected. Practical wisdom arises from habituated contextual judgment, not algorithmic compliance. Universal limits can’t tell a particular government how to weigh the conflict between energy for local human development and global ecological preservation. A post-conventional ethics must ask harder questions: What is flourishing here? Which values take precedence, and why?
Ethics begins where metrics end—in communities exercising judgment, accountable to a higher Good, pursuing human excellence rather than system equilibrium. Societies mobilise around ideals: justice, prosperity, dignity, meaningful labour, stable communities; negative injunctions—“do less harm”—cannot substitute for a positive telos.
Planetary boundaries are the Enlightenment’s exhausted dream: that rational measurement can replace ethical deliberation. But we can't calculate our way to wisdom. Ethical maturity demands humility before tragic trade-offs, courage to choose without certainty, and institutions able to justify choices publicly rather than outsource morality to boundary scientists.
#leadership
Selective Q&A
Q- I agree entirely that we commit a category error when we treat planetary boundaries, carbon budgets, or the Doughnut as if they were moral authorities. Measurement is not morality, and science cannot adjudicate between competing visions of the good. But dismissing measurement because we have mistaken it for ethics is no solution either. If anything, the mistake is assuming that metrics should replace ethical judgment. Their proper role is far more modest and far more indispensable: to illuminate the consequences of our choices so that ethical deliberation can be honest rather than imagined. Without biophysical accounting, we slip into the opposite fantasy—that values can be pursued in a vacuum unencumbered by material reality. We may not be able to derive an “ought” from an “is,” but we also cannot decide the “ought” without knowing the “is.” Ethical judgment that ignores biophysical limits is as delusional as technocracy that ignores moral pluralism. The challenge is not to abandon measurement but to re-situate it: to put it back in service of democratic deliberation, subsidiarity, and practical wisdom. Planetary boundaries cannot tell us what to value. But they do tell us when certain value-combinations become mutually incompatible. They expose the tragic structure of collective choice—the point at which “everything good at once” is no longer possible. That does not eliminate ethics; it intensifies it. So yes, we cannot calculate our way to wisdom. But neither can we deliberate our way to flourishing without knowing the consequences of our actions. Measurement and morality must be disentangled, not opposed. Ethics begins where metrics end—but it cannot begin if they aren’t there.
A- very well said! But there are some subtleties. This quickly becomes some sort of a conciliatory middle path—rejecting “metrics as morality,” while insisting on the indispensability of measurement for ethical judgment. But meta-ethically, the argument is conceptually inconsistent, and insufficiently attentive to the normative colonisation of ethics by technocratic epistemologies. “We cannot decide the ‘ought’ without knowing the ‘is’” is trivially true in the thin sense that ignorance can distort deliberation, but the way it is deployed smuggles back in the very conflation the post attacks. Meta-ethically, knowing the “is” does not resolve any ordering of values, and knowing consequences does not adjudicate between incommensurable goods. Data about material limits can NEVER determine which sacrifices are justified. We need to be careful of the covert normative implication that facts quietly structure what ought to be prioritised. They don't. The reframing of the argument as a false dichotomy—either pure ethics or pure metrics- becomes a strawman. I am not “dismissing measurement" - I am critiquing the moral authority wrongly attributed to metrics and the reduction of plural values into a single optimisable space.
In meta-ethical terms, we must distinguish between epistemic preconditions for action (descriptive understanding) vs normative authority (which science cannot supply). Specifically, you suggest that “planetary boundaries tell us when certain value-combinations become mutually incompatible.” No, they do not. Planetary boundaries may tell us when biophysical thresholds are crossed. They do not tell us which values to trade off, which suffering is acceptable, which communities may bear the cost, how justice should be distributed, what counts as flourishing. To call value-incompatibility a “scientific exposure” is to reintroduce crypto-normativity under the guise of neutral constraint. “Metrics vs morality” Is NOT the tension at stake here. Ethics never ignores material reality; material reality is always abducted through thick normative interpretation. There is no ethics in a vacuum because ethics is the interpretation of material and social reality. We cannot simply "put metrics back in service of democratic deliberation” - democratic deliberation itself, as a procedural approach based on pluralistic relativism, fails any test of ethical legitimacy - beyond the evident failure on its own immanent preconditions.
Q- I appreciate the clarification. I think we’re mostly talking past each other. I’m not claiming that planetary boundaries decide values or trade-offs. I fully agree that they don’t tell us what counts as justice, who should bear costs, or how to weigh incommensurable goods. My point is simply that biophysical limits set the conditions within which ethical and political choices have to be made. They don’t determine values, but they do constrain the landscape in which values can be realised. Beyond that, I completely agree that ethics can’t be derived from metrics, and that any interpretation of limits is already normative. So yes — measurement can’t ground moral authority. But it can help us understand the reality we’re working within. The rest is moral and political work, not scientific prescription. And if we start mistaking knowledge for wisdom, we fail on both fronts.
A- A qualified yes. Again, we need to be clear that the "boundaries" are model-dependent abstractions; their selection and parameterisation embed normative and political choices (what counts as a limit, what risks we accept, what baselines we choose); and their translation into policy functions as a governmental technology, not just as background constraint. Saying that planetary boundaries constrain the landscape is like saying that “GDP just constrains the budget” and calling it politically neutral. Which “limits” we foreground is already a value choice, how tight the constraints are defined implies a risk ethic, who gets to define the constraints is a question of authority. By presenting “biophysical limits” as a neutral we reproduces a sanitised technocracy. We quickly revert to textbook liberalism: neat division of labour between science and politics; facts as neutral input; ethics as a separate, later layer. But facts are already normatively loaded, science is already a political actor, and “limits talk” itself narrows the space of the thinkable before ethics even begins. Wisdom isn’t just knowledge + ethics; it is a different mode of apprehending reality, including absence, tragedy, and the good.
Q- The scientific approaches are each attempting to find a way to explain to people the depth of widespread human suffering that will arise if we carry on as we are, and look to inspire something to change. Rather than coming only with the problem, the authors of these frameworks offer ideas for solutions. They themselves generally accept there is no perfect answer in this complex world. The author of this post has done the same. He has spotted a problem, raised it, and suggested another way to think. The problem is that the mere existence of these debates, casting doubts, delaying action, means more people will suffer and die.
A- The problem with comments like this is that they do not engage the argument and are meta-ethically irrelevant. You try to ideologically reframe the post into a different discourse—one about communication, suffering, and urgency—while bypassing the precise philosophical claim: scientific frameworks cannot ground, justify, or replace ethical reasoning. The idea that “scientific approaches try to explain suffering and inspire change” is a complete category error. What we ought to do cannot be settled by models and the implicitly utilitarian stance that suffering is supreme moral bad is highly simplistic. The assertion that “the existence of debates means more people will suffer and die” is a political and rhetorical claim, not a moral or epistemic one. Meta-ethically, this is extremely shallow: It treats deliberation as delay. It assumes moral conflict is an obstacle, not the substance of ethical reasoning. It implies that speed > justification. It implicitly endorses technocratic urgency over ethical legitimacy. But ethical maturity requires facing tragic conflict, not bypassing it. To suggest that ethical disagreement is harmful; therefore silent compliance is better is technocratic moralism disguised as compassion.
Q- The initial premise is false — none of those in any way “promise that science can finally abolish ethical conflict”. I invite you to find a quote from proponents of any of those approaches that says what you claim. Best to avoid sensational exaggeration. Each does propose a way to approach normative social behavior change within positivist limits from the natural sciences. Each offers a framework for the very ethical deliberation you are promoting. Each offers multiple metrics, and several offer qualitative guidance, for action and assessment of progress towards common goals.
In opposing all of them, there is an implication that you are against normative action guidance, or quantitative goals in general. Is that the case? Unless quantifiable and qualitative methods can be combined, then deliberative process has potential to descend into subjective bickering on priorities and directions, as we see so commonly in society today. How do you propose we avoid that?
A- I’m not entirely sure what you’re proposing. You say these approaches do not claim to resolve ethical challenges, but then you suggest they pursue normative—that is, ethical—behaviour change “within positivist limits.” But that is precisely the naturalistic fallacy that every undergraduate ethics textbook warns against. No amount of empirical “is” can generate a moral “should.”
The deeper issue is that many people slip into normative claims without ever engaging in any meta-ethical inquiry to validate the legitimacy of their arguments. The result is a lot of ideological posturing that continuously seeks to unduly deploy descriptive science to resolve normative questions.