Chapter 3:
Making Ethical Decisions
Sustainability and ethics
• Sustainability means taking into account not
just utility but also moral values and goals.
The ethical aspects of sustainability often
remain implicit, however, as most analyses
focus on economic, social, environmental, and
technical issues.
What is ethics?
• Ethics is reflection on the nature and
definition of “the good.” There are both
philosophical and religious approaches
to ethics.
Religious Ethics
Probably the earliest, and still the most prevalent, way of thinking about
values is religious. Religion involves ritual, symbol, community life,
institutions, doctrines, and many other factors.
Human nature?
• Achieving sustainability challenges us to
reflect on the assumptions about human
nature that underlie moral, political, and
economic claims. Many religions see people as
intrinsically dependent upon and responsible
to other people, in contrast to the
individualism of the dominant culture.
Three legs, three kinds of ethics
The traditional “three legs” of sustainability – economic, environmental,
and social – correspond to different subfields of ethics.
Sustainability does not just “cut and
paste” but tries to integrate social,
economic and environmental
ethics.
Environmental Ethics
Environmental ethics addresses the value of non-human nature. It may be
concerned about entire ecosystems or regions or with smaller units such as
species, individual non-human animals or plants, or landscape features such as
mountains or forests.
Stewardship
ethics
• One of the most important
approaches in
environmental ethics is
known as the stewardship
model, which comes from
the biblical injunction to be
good stewards of the land
and non-human animals.
The Integrity of Creation
Another religious principle regarding nature is the
“integrity of creation,” or the notion that because God
created the natural world as well as humans, nature has
its own intrinsic value and is not meant only to serve
short-term human interests.
Social ethics
• Social ethics is primarily concerned with the
ethical dimensions of group decisions,
attitudes, and actions. Sustainability entails a
social ethic because it involves goods that are
collective in nature.
Social Justice
Like the ethics of sustainability, Hebrew and Christian scriptures emphasize
social justice. Martin Luther King Jr. echoed the biblical prophet Amos in his “I
have a dream” speech (August 1963): “… until justice rolls down like waters
and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Economic Ethics
• Economic ethics can be seen as a subfield of
social ethics, one concerned in particular with
the moral foundations, characteristics, and
consequences of economic activities and
institutions. Sustainability involves an
economic ethic that seeks both stability and
fairness.
Economic and
social goals are
intertwined.
• Decisions about economic
processes and institutions
inevitably favor one social
good or another.
Sustainability involves
social and economic
values that are not
priorities in contemporary
U.S. society, or many
other societies.
Philosophical ethics
• Contemporary Western
culture, including its efforts
to become more
sustainable, is strongly
influenced by philosophical
ethics. The secular
tradition in Western ethics
begins with the classical
Greek thinkers, especially
Plato and Aristotle.
Justice
Like religious
thinkers, classical
philosophers were
especially
concerned with
justice. Aristotle
defined justice as
giving to each his
or her due.
Kant
Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804) is the
father of modern
philosophical
ethics.
Deontological Ethics
• Deontological ethics defines good practices as
those that identify and follow the correct rules
or uphold correct duties. The most famous
rule is Kant’s categorical imperative: “Always
act according to that maxim whose
universality as a law you can at the same time
will” (Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of
Morals).
Rights
• Rights are moral claims that certain categories
of persons can make on other persons, who
are, in turn, duty bound to respect those
claims. Human rights theories are important
for the social, economic, and also
environmental dimensions of sustainability.
Human Rights
On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations
adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Full
text is available at http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Consequentialist Ethics
• In consequentialist or teleological ethics,
decisions about what to do and evaluations of
the morality of an action, are based on the
expected or actual consequences of a
behavior.
Utilitarianism
Jeremy Bentham
• The most important
consequentialist ethic is
Utilitarianism, developed by
English philosophers Jeremy
Bentham (1748-1832) and John
Stuart Mill (1806-1873). For
Bentham, the ultimate goal of
ethics should be to create the
greatest good for the greatest
number of people.
Pragmatism
• Pragmatism originated with the work of
American philosophers C. S. Peirce (18391914), William James (1842-1910), and John
Dewey (1859-1952). Pragmatists assert that
knowledge comes from practical experience
and that value must be judged by practical
consequences rather than intentions or
relations to abstract goods.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism poses challenges to both religious and secular ethics by
challenging both the use of reason and divine revelation as means to
identify absolute values.
Ethical decision-making
• Ethics can help people identify the values that are most important to them
and analyze possible actions or outcomes in relation to these values.
Ethics is not just applying rules to clear-cut situations but often requires
asking new questions, seeking out multiple answers, and weighing the
consequences of different options.
Framing
• Ethics is about finding the right questions as
well as the right answers. Better framing of
ethical issues makes it possible to avoid
obstacles that prevent people from arriving at
solutions that maximize diverse goods.
False Dilemmas
Sometimes people see decisions as dilemmas with only two,
mutually exclusive and opposed solutions, either of which
would us to sacrifice of important values.
Freezing
• Another common obstacle
to ethical solutions is
reactive thinking or
“freezing.” In such cases,
people try to cope with a
problem after it has
developed. Instead, we
might think proactively and
ask whether ethical
problems can be changed,
made less serious, or even
eliminated.
Principles of an Ethic of Sustainability
• It should be theoretically coherent.
• It must be both clear and consistent with
regard to its philosophical foundations
• It should address the question of rights or
interests.
• It should be feasible or practical.
Social ethics of sustainability
From social ethics, the most important
principles for sustainability concern justice
and obligations to future generations.
Economic ethics of
sustainbility
• Sustainable economics
considers the regulation of
markets in order to address
the true costs of pollution
and other social and
environmental harms. This
is summarized as the
Polluter Pays principle (also
known as “full cost
accounting”).
Environmental Ethics of Sustainability
• Sustainability highlights principles that integrate concern for both human
welfare and natural systems. Specific environmental principles for
sustainability is the Precautionary Principle and the Reversibility Principle.
Fair trade certification helps ensure social justice and
economic stability for producers of food, crafts, and
other goods, especially in the developing world.
Sustainability integrates diverse ethical principles
in theory and practice. It is not just a patchwork
of disparate values but an integrated system in
which the parts work together to reinforce each
other.