ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ethical and religious case for sustainability. There are three ethical traditions that would struggle to give full support to such sustainability. First there is the one that bases ethics on a contract, whether an historical contract or a hypothetical one. Another tradition attempts to base all ethical considerations on rights and the responsibilities. Some of these theorists restrict rights to human beings, and for these the problem of provision for nonhumans applies just as much as it did for contractarians. A third tradition has problems with sustainability. The approach that makes rightness depend on impacts is consequentialism. The best-known version of consequentialism is utilitarianism, which seeks to maximize the balance of happiness over misery, and to this there are numerous well-known objections. There is nothing to prevent the religious ethic of stewardship being harnessed to the secular ethic of biocentric consequentialism, a consequentialism that can also be one of beneficent practices and virtues.
