Sustainability Science by Harald Heinrichs Pim Martens Gerd Michelsen & Arnim Wiek

Author:Harald Heinrichs, Pim Martens, Gerd Michelsen & Arnim Wiek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

Task: Discuss the relationship between ethics and the concept of sustainability. Exchange your views with other students.

3 Sustainability Ethics: Justice and Responsibility Through Time

Sustainability ethics, some believe, can be defined as ethical reflection from the perspective of a clearly defined and practical inter- and intragenerational principle of justice (Rogall 2008). Although this definition seems to delimit the scope and applications of sustainability ethics, it is a relatively recent area of ethics and its contours in sustainability discourse are still largely blurred. There is little consensus about sustainability ethics, but in the relatively small number of publications dealing explicitly with this topic, there is agreement about which sources and values should be at its core. While sustainability in the widely cited definition of the Brundtland Report is anthropological in the sense that it places the needs and rights of future generations in the foreground (Unnerstall 1999), there are proponents of a pathocentric standpoint that advance the thesis that human beings have an obligation to protect other creatures, as they are also bearers of rights. There are also some who take a biocentric position and extend the concept of moral rights even to plants and other natural objects that are incapable of suffering (Schüßler 2008).

From the question what should be at the core of an ethics – only human beings or also other creatures and their natural environment – we can derive the main difference between sustainability ethics in the sense outlined here and the varied approaches of environmental ethics, with which sustainability ethics is too often mistakenly confused. The philosopher Konrad Ott defines environmental ethics in the following way. “Environmental ethics (synonymous with ethics of nature) enquires on one hand into the reasons and the standards (values and norms) that are derived from them that should determine our individual and collective behaviour towards the non-human natural world. On the other it asks how these standards can be implemented” (Ott 2010, p. 8). Its subject is, as Ott writes in another passage, “the relationship of human to non-human” (Ott 1997, p. 58). It thus relativizes the anthropocentric perspective, as found in most classic approaches to ethics, and contrasts it with an eco- or biocentric orientation” (Ott 1997, p. 59–63). This distinction forms a defining characteristic between environmental and sustainability ethics, since the latter applies an anthropocentric perspective to the ethical dilemmata it examines.

A further defining characteristic can be found in how such an ethics is justified. Ott classifies environmental ethics as part of applied ethics and places it in proximity to business ethics and an ethics of technology (Ott 1997), that is, with the classic hybrid ethics that rely on a corollary science. By contrast, sustainability ethics, as already mentioned, is a principle-based ethics. Even though at first glance the topics seem similar, their different perspectives – anthropocentric versus biocentric – as well as their justifications, principle versus corollary science, form the basis for the difference between the two disciplines. In spite of the lack of consensus in sustainability discourse about possible

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