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Sustainability Matrix: Interest Groups and Ethical Theories as the Basis of Decision-Making

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Abstract

During the past few decades, the global food system has confronted new sustainability challenges related not only to public health and the environment but also to ethical concerns over the treatment of farmed animals. However, the traditional threedimensional framework of sustainable development is ill equipped to take ethical concerns related to non-human animals into account. For instance, the interests of farmed animals are often overridden by objectives associated with social, economic or environmental sustainability, despite their vast numbers and influence on contemporary societies. Moreover, sustainability policies necessarily involve an element of ethical evaluation; yet this element is not explicitly incorporated in prevailing frameworks of sustainable development. Our purpose in this article is to address these shortcomings by developing a Sustainability Matrix that recognizes the need to consider food system sustainability from the perspective of all interest groups affected by the issue under consideration, from a plurality of ethical standpoints. Combing sustainability principles with the basic idea of an ethical evaluation tool, the proposed Sustainability Matrix evaluates the sustainability of food-related systems, decisions and policies from the perspectives of three major strands of ethical theory and from the perspectives of human beings, farmed animals and wildlife. In terms of policy implications, the Sustainability Matrix can be applied in deciding on the specific targets of food system sustainability that can then be utilized as a basis for designing policies and measures towards the achievement of these goals.

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Notes

  1. Throughout the text, we will employ the term “food system” instead of e.g. “food production”. This is because the implications of considering farmed animals as an interest group are not limited to the production phase but extend to other parts of the supply chain as well (e.g. transport, retail).

  2. Throughout the paper, we will utilize farmed animals and agricultural animals interchangeably.

  3. This differs from Mepham’s (2000) concept of biota in that our notion of wildlife only includes sentient actors. Our rationale for this choice was that securing the interests of sentient wildlife will lead to wider ecosystem conservation and/or to sustainable mutual coexistence. Yet, we are fully aware of the difficulties in determining which animals, or organisms for that matter, should have moral status and to what extent (see Jaworska and Tannenbaum 2013).

  4. Nearly half of the world’s 200 largest companies report their ethical responsibilities toward animals although they tend to approach these ethical responsibilities in consequentialist, not rights-based, terms (Janssens and Kaptein 2016).

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the reviewers and editor for their valuable comments. This paper was partly funded by the project “Politics, practices and the transformative potential of sustainable diets” (POPRASUS), decision No. 296702. The funding from the Academy of Finland is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Management, University of Tampere, 33014, Tampere, Finland

    Markus Vinnari & Eija Vinnari

  2. Department of Geographical and Historical Studies, University of Eastern Finland, 80101, Joensuu, Finland

    Saara Kupsala

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  1. Markus Vinnari
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Correspondence to Markus Vinnari.

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Vinnari, M., Vinnari, E. & Kupsala, S. Sustainability Matrix: Interest Groups and Ethical Theories as the Basis of Decision-Making. J Agric Environ Ethics 30, 349–366 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9670-y

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