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. (shrink)

In earlier work on limitarianism, I argued that setting an upper limit to the amount of wealth that people can permissibly have is justified when decision-makers are unaware of or disagree about the appropriate distributive criterion or if they are unaware of people’s relevant features (or both). Robert Huseby has raised several powerful objections to this presumptive argument for limitarianism. Some of these objections call for a revision of my defence of presumptive limitarianism while others call for clarification, both of (...) which I aim to do in this chapter. I will argue that unless decision-makers have substantive reasons to suggest otherwise, they must act as if there is an upper limit to the amount of wealth that people can permissibly have. (shrink)