Ethics in Agenda 21

Abstract

Although environmental ethicists often focus on applying ethics to policy, the ethics embedded in policy documents such as Agenda 21 are also significant. Though largely ignored by ethicists after early responses to the document focused on intrinsic value, Agenda 21's ethics are particularly valuable for their ability to resonate with many people and link politics, technical studies, and ethics. For instance, their use draws attention to the need to ethically evaluate sustainability indexes and identifies limitations of existing indexes. At a broad level, this study of the ethics of Agenda 21 also suggests that the ethics of international environmental policy documents deserves more attention.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Forrest J. Clingerman and Nick Sarratt as well as anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Notes

¹ Exceptions include Callicott (2009) and Rolston III (1994).

² An earlier version of this section which relates the ethics of Agenda 21 to the history of the sustainability movement can be found in Chapter 2 of my book Measuring and evaluating sustainability: Ethics in sustainability indexes. New York, NY: Routledge (2014).

³ Yes, such a principle does raise questions about how to make decisions and act in the face of the limits of knowledge, a subject addressed to some degree in the principle of adaptability.

⁴ Gustafson (1965) makes a similar point that can be extended to a multicultural setting (Fredericks, 2008).

⁵ Undoubtedly, many ethicists will argue that waffling on intrinsic value will lead to massive environmental destruction yet it is not clear that appealing to intrinsic value actually yields different results than instrumental value coupled with weak anthropocentrism.