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With the emergence of the environmental crisis (discussed further in chapter 2), many of our received social and political ideals face profound challenges in accommodating new facts such as ecological limits to growth, or new kinds of transnational and intergenerational threats such as climate change. The existence of ecological limits to growth, along with the real possibility of approaching or transgressing such limits within our lifetimes, appeared as the kind of event or scientific discovery that would disrupt many of our received ideas and ideals. Not only could economic growth no longer feasibly be taken as an indicator of social progress (as discussed in chapter 5), but the crisis associated with the planet’s finite ability to generate the ecological goods and services upon which human societies and their normative aspirations depend now requires a broader reassessment of the role that social and political ideals, such as liberty and equality or democracy, play in orienting collective life. Long-settled norms of sovereignty are challenged as the system of states or resistance to international cooperation in protecting the global environment is viewed as a possible contributor to the environmental crisis. Conventional assumptions about agency and responsibility appear ill equipped to grapple with some drivers of environmental degradation or frustrate some promising environmental solutions. Attachments of community are likewise challenged as complicit, with new constructions of community offered as potential remedies. The crisis has required a rethinking of conventional theories of justice, with new conceptions and novel hybrids between existing ones allowing us to conceive of and articulate environment-mediated injuries and construct solutions in creative new ways. Examination of each of these ideals and its role in intensifying or diffusing the crisis forms the basis of this book’s eight substantive chapters.

Sustainability can be regarded as a kind of social or political ideal, growing out of the events and discoveries of the environmental crisis and ecological limits, to be added to the list of the eight treated within this book. Whatever else is constitutive of the good society, it must be a sustainable one if it is to persist over time, with impacts of increasing scarcity threatening to undermine or destabilize the other eight ideals. As we shall see, impacts of unsustainable institutions and practices often disproportionately affect the disadvantaged, undermining ideals of equality and justice, while also potentially threatening democracy and sovereignty. We may in this sense view sustainability as essential for other social or political ideals, as well as an ideal in its own right. Insofar as personal virtues describe character traits that tend toward the common good, it may comprise an essential aspect of the good life for individual persons, as well as having value for collectivities.

Since societies must soon transition to becoming ecologically sustainable, as we shall consider in more detail in chapter 2, sustainability captures a set of objectives for social institutions and practices, with the ideal orienting the present toward a future that is possible, necessary, and desirable. While few may find attractive the sustainable society that does not also embrace other ideals like justice and democracy, in many ways the sustainable serves as a vital complement to these other ideals, seeking to maintain the material preconditions for society to perform its most basic provisioning functions, as well as realizing the other aspirations that we see expressed in its various ideals. The other ideals thus also serve as important constraints upon sustainability – for example, in maintaining its humanitarian aspirations.