Differentiating ethical imperatives of the collective sustainability research community and the individual researcher.

Joaquin (2020) recently wrote a letter to the editor of Resources, Conservation and Recycling in response to our previously perspective article on the interface between sustainability science and environmental policy (Chiu et al., 2020). His letter points out that ethical considerations are inherent to sustainability, and further argues that we missed this fundamental aspect by focusing our discussion on the dichotomy between hard sciences such as physics, chemistry, and engineering on one hand, and soft sciences such as economics, psychology and the social sciences on the other.

We are certainly in agreement with Joaquin (2020) on the point that ethics is one of the key foundations of sustainability. This fact is underscored by the 1987 Brundtland Commission report defining sustainable development in terms of both intergenerational equity ("…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.") and intra-generational equity (“…sustainable development requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to fulfil their aspirations for a better life.”). The concept has brought about the emergence of a coherent and increasingly mainstream worldview (van Egmond and de Vries, 2011). Ethics is subsumed in the environmental, economic and social dimensions of sustainability. It can even be seen at the operational level. For example, the choice and weighting of sustainability metrics involves inherent value judgements (Fredericks, 2012). This is precisely why even rigorous and holistic techniques such as life cycle assessment (LCA) or life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) cannot be reduced to an exact science. In LCA, valuation is an intrinsic part of the life cycle environmental impact assessment (LCIA) process, and thus affects the interpretation of results. When comparing alternatives based on multiple different criteria, it is possible to eliminate those which are clearly non-Pareto optimal. However, it may still be necessary to make a value judgement in the end; consider, for example, the unresolved question of whether the climate benefits of nuclear energy justify the risk of catastrophic reactor failure and the challenges in handling radioactive spent fuel. Such a choice requires a value judgement by governments on behalf of their constituents. Thus, it is clear that all sustainability research is ultimately based on the ethical foundations of sustainable development (McIntyre et al., 2017).

On the other hand, it is important to differentiate between the ethical imperative that drives the sustainability science research community, from the ethical issues that face individual researchers (or research teams). Ethics is relevant to the collective from a strategic viewpoint, providing the research community's efforts with a raison d'etre. The influence of the ethical imperative is felt through community signals such as research funding and publication opportunities. On the other hand, at the operational level, the individual researcher implicitly accepts such a framework as a boundary condition within which his or her work is done. Once the ethical foundations are accepted as a given, the more relevant operational ethical issues have to do with the execution and interpretation of research. While ethical misconduct in research execution is relatively clear-cut and career-jeopardizing, there are more gray areas in the ethical interpretation of research. Very often there will be a well-intended but potentially dangerous temptation to overreach. Consider, for example, the extent to which government responses to the current COVID-19 pandemic have been influenced by research disseminated as pre-prints without peer review. Use of preliminary findings via pre-prints is driven by the urgency of the situation, but by doing so, a critical step in the quality assurance process for scientific knowledge has been bypassed. It remains to be seen if the tradeoff between timeliness and rigor has been adequately balanced. This was the main point made in our perspective article – that researchers should be perfectly unambiguous when it comes to presenting their work in ways which may actually influence decision-making and policy development on issues that will affect the lives of many people.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that we have no conflict of interest.