EME 504
Foundations in Sustainability Systems

9.1 What Are the Main Differences Between Values, Attitudes, and Ethics?

Many critical survival issues are related to uneven development, poverty, and population growth. They all place unprecedented pressures on the planet's lands, waters, forests, and other natural resources, not least in the developing countries. The downward spiral of poverty and environmental degradation is a waste of opportunities and of resources. In particular, it is a waste of human resources. These links between poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation formed a major theme in our analysis and recommendations. What is needed now is a new era of economic growth - growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable.

-Gro Harlem Brundtland, Oslo, 20 March 1987, Our Common Future

What are the differences among values, attitudes and ethics?

Values are based on principles about how a situation or relationship between things ought to be. Values are often dependent on each other, for example, valuing contemporary democratic principles also requires valuing (to varying degrees) agency, freedom, liberation, and human rights (which itself is based on 47 articles if looking at the UN UDHR). Values, thus, are the codified principles towards which behaviors are aligned and actions are directed.

Attitudes are the perspectives on a situation based upon the values held by a person or organization (or other form of agent). In other words, people and organizations perceive situations in the world through their values (typically seeking out information that directly supports their values), resulting in attitudes held about a given situation in the world as being positive, negative, corrosive, evil, good, right, wrong, sacred, profane, etc.

Ethics describe the (internal or external) rules, logic, and procedures by which: values are selected, attitudes are generated based on those values, and actions and behaviors are justified. Ethics are often used to describe attitudes and behaviors specific to an organization or institution, for example, in describing how that institution might be aligned with issues such as its environmental impacts from manufacturing processes. However, there are also values, such as sustainability, that would need to override contradicting values and attitudes of any particular individual, organization, or institution. (When held values and resulting actions are aligned with what is widely considered in society as ethical, then those values and actions are considered to be morally proper, and therefore just.)

Example of ordering of social scales--see caption

Figure 9.1. Example of ordering of social scales. The Internet is a global entity. The online education (applying to all accredited programs) is an Institution (meso). The online programs at the Pennsylvania State University is an Organization (macro). This course is an Individual (micro). An individual course assignment is a Transaction (nano).

The values underpinning global sustainability require ethics that are universally applicable (without category, or deontological) to all institutions, organizations, and individuals. Issues concerning ethical imperatives come about, for example, when differences arise between recently developed universal principles of sustainability (1987 Our Common Future) and the much older principles underlying national sovereignty (1648 Treaty of Westphalia). In other words, committing to sustainability requires certain nations to cut back on consumption, change patterns of behavior, and invest in new technological infrastructures, all of which come at a significant cost. These 'sacrifices' required by all nations, (but to varying degrees depending on wealth) would be to intentionally reduce the global impacts of energy use and overconsumption of natural resources that have thus far created problems like acid rain, ozone depletion, climate change, acidification of oceans, collapse of fisheries and spawning grounds, the great garbage gyres, loss of species diversity, etc. Yet, even though addressing these problems would increase medium and long-term global wealth and health, nations consider such demands to act in these universal manners to be a direct affront to their sovereignty as a nation and capacity for self-determination. (Global carbon reduction schemes are basically like trying to implement a global no-smoking policy.)

So, how can we go about resolving the ethical imperatives of needing to address the global problems of unsustainable consumption patterns with the ethical imperatives of ensuring national sovereignty with the ethical imperatives of organizations to provide their essential services with the ethical imperatives of individual autonomy? The answer is not to set out to create a roadmap that somehow reconciles all of these various imperatives at once. Rather, addressing these issue (at various levels) requires arriving at some degree of agreement through pluralistic processes as to how institutions, organizations, and individuals ought to behave if we are to reduce the causes and impacts of global harms.

Global sustainability, because there really is no other kind of sustainability that matters in the long-run, ethically requires a shift in values and behavior from every single organization and individual in the world,

However, and for good reason, people and organizations rarely happily respond to being told what how they ought to behave and go about their business. Regardless, as the article demonstrates, there are common themes upon which we tend to agree globally which can be used as drivers of behavioral shift and guide the choice of appropriate indicators for helping to determine if a plan or policy is on the right path. (Example: CO2 emission limits for nations.)