Sustainable World: Humans, Animals and Nature

The notion that one should strive for a sustainable world seems widespread. Nonetheless, making this ambition operational appears to be rather complicated in practice, and implies many normative decisions. For instance, the need to address climate change-related problems is widely acknowledged. At the same time this acknowledgement does not automatically result in clear guidelines of how to deal with questions of food production for 9 billion people in 2050, the use of animals or the freedom to travel around the globe during holidays. 
This course starts with these questions in the debate on sustainability and subsequently deals with their normative background. It focusses on the relation between assumptions at the level of ethical and political theory and applied questions of sustainability. The course deals with problems of sustainability as a normative issue that has direct implications for our dealing with humans, animals, and nature. Therefore, it includes elements from animal ethics and nature ethics, and discusses the relevance of the human rights framework, the problem of uncertainty and political and institutional questions in the context of sustainability.