Ethics and Sustainability: Guest or Guide? On Sustainability as a Moral Ideal

Abstract

In September 2007 the European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics (EurSafe) organized its seventh conference, entitled ‘‘Sustainable Food Production and Ethics’’. The importance of discussing issues of sustainability with respect to food production is almost evident. Sustainability is on the public agenda and will not easily disappear. It has become an issue widely debated in many countries, and many organizations such as the FAO and retail multinationals have their own sustainable development department. From this perspective, it seems an apt choice to organize a conference on sustainable food production from the perspective of ethics. Nonetheless, one can wonder what role ethics has to play in the sustainability discussion and to what extent ethics has real added value. Discussions on sustainability often appear in terms of technical debates on, for instance life cycle analyses, supply chain management or scenarios on climate change. On the one hand, ethics clearly plays a role in these debates, because such complex assessments or scenarios include a number of value assumptions and use concepts such as risk, safety, health, and welfare that all ask for more than mere technical competence. At this stage problems of, for instance, precautionary reasoning pops up. It illustrates that sustainability confronts us with the fundamental question how it is possible to ascribe responsibilities to actions for which we are not able to oversee the consequences. To answer such questions, fundamental ethical reflection is needed next to science. On the other hand, one can argue that in spite of the importance of ethical reflection on these value-laden concepts and the problems of uncertainty and precaution, these activities are not specific for the sustainability discussion.