Fifteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Is sustainability merely a social norm, or can it be normatively justified? That is, does sustainability rest on no more than a claim that “we do it this way,” or can we take it to incorporate an unarticulated grasp of the relations among economic activity, the environment, and human well-being, a grasp that can be defended as being better than others? Since sustainability can be interpreted and misinterpreted in many ways, the normative question is pressing. “Theories of practice” approaches to sustainability offer an account of how to transition to new social norms embedded in the goals of sustainability. However, extant accounts leave unaddressed the justification of the norms, leaving them open to the charge that acting sustainably is a matter only of acting according to contingent, brute norms that we assert are “better.” This is potentially coercive and anti-democratic. I argue there are resources in theories of practice, flowing in particular from Wittgenstein’s remarks on following a rule, that allow us to avoid the implication that we are strong-arming our way to sustainability. Wittgenstein argues obeying a rule is an embodied social practice. On his account, the normativity of sustainability is generated by understanding how to follow a rule, and following a rule is possible only insofar as there exists a regular use of rules, a custom. Custom provides the unarticulated grasp of things that can be defended and explained as the “right” thing to do.