Sustainability as the core principle of ethical conduct

Abstract

Environmentally sustainable industry practices have an ethical dimension, a sense of "rightness" opposed to the "wrongness" of ecologically destructive practices. Still, we face a challenge in demonstrating to skeptical audiences the connection between environmental ethics and more familiar ethical values: honesty, due diligence, quality assurance, etc. However, we can show, using C.S. Peirce's epistemological model of ethics, that sustainability of practice, in one form or another is the driving principle of all ethical conduct, both in familiar rules such as "be honest" as well as in less conventional contexts such as whether paper, plastic, or reusable cloth is the best shopping bag choice. We will examine ethics policies of various professional-communication societies and translate these collectively into terms of sustainability, showing these codes to be direct analogues of environmental sustainability. Truth, as Peirce defined it, consists of claims that can be repeated indefinitely in the environment of available data. In other words, true claims are propositions sustainable over the long term.