The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity

Chapter Four: Sustainability Science and the Ethics of Wicked Problems

◆ 149 ◆ CHAPTER FOUR Sustainability Science and the Ethics of Wicked Problems ✦ Learn to do good, seek justice. . . . Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord. . . . Isaiah 1:17–8 Truth grows up from earth and righteousness peers down from heaven. Psalm 85:11 Over the last three chapters I have offered reasons to resist the cosmological temptation to do ethics from religious worldviews in order to develop a pluralist , problem-based approach. In this chapter I argue the other side: that, in order to face the most complex problems, a pragmatic strategy needs the cosmological facility often found in religious thought.1 Here I contend with environmental pragmatists who disdain calls for changing worldviews and ignore religious communities in their attempt to build consensus on science-based policy solutions. Their sort of pragmatism, I argue, seems poorly equipped to meet the most difficult problems because it seems captive to ethical incompetency and social injustice. Problems that exceed a culture’s ethical competencies threaten the sciences that research them because societies cannot interpret environmental feedback into revised patterns of action. A science-based, problem-focused ethic of sustainability needs the process of managing problems to drive cultural transformation. It needs communities that can rethink inherited ways of life and invent new cultural possibilities. Consider the problem of managing the Chesapeake Bay. Agriculture and development throughout its watershed have driven ecological changes, CHAPTER FOUR 150 including eutrophication and biodiversity loss, manifest most visibly in the collapse of commercial oyster stocks, loss of habitat for native species, and invasion of nonnative species. How can the diverse and factious political community that inhabits this watershed recognize common goods and forge shared responsibilities?What role should science play in setting objectives? Complicating those questions is the reflexivity of human and environmental systems. As oyster stocks collapse, coastal housing development becomes more important, driving further ecological change and changing social goals. How can a changing watershed community deliberate over the future of a changing bay? In the last chapter I presented sustainability as a concept for negotiating moral pluralism. However, a pragmatic sustainability ethic must overcome the limitations of working within dysfunctional and unjust moral cultures. Without attention to structures of power and the way those structures are supported by popular ethical ideas, accommodating moral pluralism can amount to accommodating social domination.What if the community attempting to manage a watershed is racist and greedy? What if a culture is too anthropocentric and ignorant to rightly understand its problems? A pragmatic strategy would be complicit with social injustice and ecological catastrophe if it were constrained to work with the moral mainstream of corrupt cultures. In those cases, a science-based ethic of sustainability needs facilities of cultural transformation.When religious projects operate as culture-transforming practices, they open imaginative possibilities from cultural inheritances that become important to a broad problem-solving ethic. In this chapter I argue that a science-based pragmatic ethic needs religious imaginations and cosmological questions to make pluralist societies more capable of taking responsibility for their powers. I do not argue here that science needs a religious foundation or must be guided by transcendent values. I claim that the sciences of sustainability need to incorporate the capacities of cultural transformation that religious communities sometimes cultivate.That implicates the sciences in tasks of cultural engagement that they usually prefer to leave to other disciplines. Yet the sciences of sustainability depend on learning from problems as societies manage them,and so depend on societies learning to manage well.Religious reform projects can (sometimes) demonstrate how to make moral sense of humanity’s changing participation in earth systems. Used adroitly, worldviews and narrative interpretations of the changing human context can facilitate adaptive social learning by helping public debates over sustainability host the deeper questions at stake.When that happens, religious ethics finds itself in a newly productive relation with the environmental sciences. Sustainability Science and the Ethics of Wicked Problems 151 At stake in this chapter is the role of culture in the science of sustainability , and with it, the relation of the natural sciences to the moral humanities. This chapter sketches a way for environmental sciences, interdisciplinary ethics, and the religious humanities to work together to create capacities of adaptive learning. After explaining the ethical entanglement of sustainability science, it addresses tensions between science-based management and cultural transformation. Is sustainability about managing problems or transforming cultures? I attempt to...