Page 33 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

16 K. Ott et al.

Table 2.1 Levels of the strong sustainability theory (Ott and Voget 2007)
Status in the theoretical
Level framework
1. Idea Core of theory
(Theory of intra- and intergenerational justice)
2. Concept
(Strong or weak sustainability, mediating concepts)
3. Key principles Bridging principles
(Resilience, sufficiency, efficiency)
4. Fields of action Practical application
(Nature conservation, agriculture and forestry, fisheries,
climate change etc.)
5. Target systems, specific concepts, indicators
6. Implementation, institutionalisation, instrumentation

for a fruitful exchange with policymaking, praxis and socially participatory actions.
The third level aims at bridging theory and practice. By means of this structure it is
also possible to identify different fields for communicative actions at different levels
of the discourse.

Sustainability as an Ethical Concept

The ‘ethics’ of sustainability should not be equated with a comprehensive ethical
theory (e.g. discourse ethics), a theory of justice (e.g. the theory of John Rawls 1973)
or with environmental ethics. Instead, it presupposes that certain assumptions from
discourse ethics, theories of justice and from the argumentative framework of environ-
mental ethics can be used to elaborate the idea of sustainability (Ott 2004a).
The core of the idea of ‘sustainability’ consists in the issue of intra- and intergen-
erational distributive justice and encompasses duties towards currently living genera-
tions and future generations regarding different goods (see Norton 2005), with a
special focus on natural resources (Ott and Döring 2008). The idea of sustainability
thus links the obligatory dimension of moral reasons with a teleological perspective
that takes different distributions of goods into account. Deontological obligations to
posterity can be combined with an assessment of the consequences and side-effects of
current actions and institutions in order to constitute a teleological perspective of how
sustainable development might be established in policy- making. The deontological
assumptions must be made explicitly. In terms of the responsibility of justice towards
future generations, at a minimum the following questions must be addressed:
• Are there any obligations to future generations at all?
• Should responsibility for the future be based on an egalitarian-comparative stan-
dard or on an absolute standard?
• What can be considered a ‘just’ legacy?