This paper is written within the field of environmental and sustainability education, focusing on the significance of values and norms in education for sustainable development (ESD). ESD is a concept and initiative developed within the context of United Nations as an educational response to the challenge of transforming societies in a sustainable direction. Certain values and norms are formulated by UNESCO as fundamental to sustainable development, among these are respect for the well-being of future generations and respect and care for the greater community of life human beings are a part of (UNESCO 2004, 2006). By UNESCO values and norms are  used interchangeably as in everyday language and even in scholarly literature (Tranøy 1998). Still a distinction may be made between values understood as what is good (like the well-being of future generations) and norms formulating what is right (like paying respect to this well-being), both involved in moral judgment. The values of intergenerational responsibility and respect and care for the nature are pivotal to environmental ethics, as shown by Kronlid and Öhman (2013).

In this work I am examining how and to what extent these values and norms formulated by UNESCO in the context of ESD are expressed in moral education involving sustainable development in lower secondary school in Norway. UNESCO formulates the values as universal claims with global significance. A crucial question is the role such claims may have in a strategy which is implied to have input on every school system in the world. Objections to this undertaking are both of ontological character, insisting that values always are formulated within specific contexts, and of ethical character, criticizing universal values for concealing contextual features like plurality, conflicts and politics. (Sund and Öhman 2014). In my theoretical framework I accommodate for such objections while bringing in aspects of the moral and political philosophy of Seyla Benhabib. Benhabib´s approach includes a sensibility for the formation of moral judgment, precious for the analysis of class room interaction in moral education. At the same time she has developed an analytical framework studying the transfer of universal norms to local contexts. Informed by critical theory, hermeneutics and feminist theory she is suggesting a cosmopolitan position (Benhabib 2011:57-76), but still acknowledging the ethical objections mentioned above, calling for a sensitivity to situatedness involving particularism, pluralism, politics and context.

Decisive is Benhabib´s understanding of moral judgment as an inevitable part of everyone´s life as situated human beings (Benhabib 1992: 125). At the same time Benhabib acknowledges a universal aspect, accentuing an enlarged mentality which brings in the viewpoints of both concrete others, and generalized others in the moral judgment.

As a political philosopher Benhabib has worked thoroughly with human rights issues on an international level, but she still holds on to a foundation of universal values and norms in concrete contexts. Influenced by Derrida, the interactive universalism from Situating the Self (1992) later has been reformulated as democratic iterations, pointing at how an issue being iterated at the same time is “reposited and redesigned via subsequent usages and references. Meaning is enhanced and transformed”. (Benhabib 2006: 4, see also Benhabib 2011: 73). This perspective is enabling the analysis of values emerging, being reposited and redesigned in different contexts, specifically in the local class room interaction.

This theoretical framework, then, opens for acknowledging the specific educational context in moral education both accounting for plurality and conflictual perspectives and even for examining class room interaction as the universalization of moral values and norms from below. At the same time, it challenges the tendency in European moral philosophy to establish moral and politics as to distinct fields.

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