Notes - Making Ethical Decisions for a Sustainable Future: An Overview

The following are notes for Working Toward Sustainability Ethical Decision making in a Technological World.

Social Sustainability

• The Golden Rule
• We believe we have the right to have our basic needs met
• extend this right to our neighbors, locally and globally, and to those in the future
• The Rights of the Vulnerable
• Care Ethics, obligates us to share responsibility for the welfare of the poor, weak, sick and disenfranchised
• meets the needs of the present
• environmental justice
• The Distributional Principle
• Ensuring that both advantages and disadvantages equitably distributed
• fair processes for decision making
• Chain of Obligation (Expanded Community)
• distributional justice across temporal boundaries
• prospects of future generations based on current behavior patterns
• intergenerational justice for a fair distribution of resources

Ecological Sustainability

• The Land Ethic
• provides a basic guideline to judge morality
• actions must preserve
• basic integrity
• stability
• beauty 
• of a community
• land is not a resource but a community
• The Rights of the Nonhuman World
• addresses the rights of animals, how individual organisms are treaed
• animal rights
• can include plants, and geological formations

Economic Sustainability

• The Polluter Pays Principle
• ethical/legal principle ensuring cost of pollution is justly allocated
• shifts burden to those causing pollution
• Extended Producer Responsibility
• EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility)
• manufacturer's responsible for entire life cycle effect of their products
• recycling required
• The Beneficiary Compensates Principle
• BCP (Beneficiary Compensates Principle)
• compensate parties to those who ask to forgo development
• international community pays
• Full-Cost Accounting
• objective is to ensure all social and environmental costs of a product or process are identified
• costs distributed after identification

Integrating the Dimensions of Sustainability

• The Precautionary and Reversibility Principles
• Where there is scientific uncertainty regarding technology or activity being implemented
• pre-emptive action to avert potential threats
• health
• environment
• Reversibility principle
• ensure that ability to reverse consequences is built into the technology
• Transparency
• Good Governance is essential so force nongovernmental organizations to do greater documentation
• elected officials stand behind campaign promises
• consequences and components of technology made public

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