Sustainability as a Moral Value Requires New Ethics

Everything one wants to sell you is said to be sustainable. But what is sustainability? Is it a value, does it have a price or both? After the official definition appeared in 1987, more than 300 definitions to the concept have appeared. Sustainability emerged in the second half of the twentieth century as a moral value: it is difficult to be unanimous about what it is, but it is often easy to claim that a given action or practice is unsustainable. Values precede ethics. Modern ethics is Kantian that emerged largely as a reaction to the control of religion. Strongly humanistic, Kantian ethics is largely about the present, and for humans. German philosopher Hans Jonas, in the 1970s, claimed for an ‘ethics of responsibility’, concerned with beings who are not on this planet yet: future generations of humans and non-humans. This chapter claims that this kind of ethics is not quite in practice, but there are positive signs of change in this respect. It discusses Environmental Ethics, Rights of Nature and Earth Jurisprudence as early symptoms of the emergence of a new sustainability ethics.