We live in times of sustainability crises, referring to climate crisis, ongoing degradation of biodiversity and ecological systems, persisting global inequity (United Nations, 2015), and the lack of sufficient mitigating measures. Reflecting on this situation within the context of education, this paper rests on a basic assumption. The call for an educative response to the sustainability crises (UNESCO, 2019) necessitates exploration and reimagination of the ethical dimension. This assumption is drawn from the observation that the ethical dimension distinguishes and provides meaning and significance to the sustainability agenda (United Nations, 2015). The overall aim of sustainability is ethical (Kemp, 2011), aiming at safeguarding and protecting life on earth, prompting the transformations from harmful to sustainable human practices and the adaptations to the crises that are already here.

In education policy documents this ethical dimension is increasingly expressed in discourses referring to shared responsibility, societal values and the common good, including both UNESCO documents (UNESCO, 2015, 2021) and OECD publications (see for example the OECD Learning Compass (OECD, 2021).

On the other hand, the field of ethics education (also referred to as moral education, values education, and character education), has traditionally aimed at fostering individual responsibility for other human beings within stable nation states. This characterizes all three traditions often referred to (Althof, 2014), that is the values clarification approach, moral reasoning and character education. This conclusion should not be made without nuances. In a review of research contributions in Journal of Moral Education over a period of 40 years, Lee & Taylor state: “Moral education, however individual in its research orientation, has pro-social ends and means” (Lee & Taylor, 2013: 423). Still, a predominant individual focus is persistent within this tradition.

The limited interest within ethics education to extend individual responsibility to the communal and political field, may more broadly be conceived of from the perspective of political philosophy and moral philosophy (Larmore, 2013). Historically moral philosophy (or practical philosophy), with Aristotle as the classic proponent, has been seen as the more general discipline, dealing with the good and the right in all its manifold aspects, including the realm of politics. Another approach departing from Hobbes, sees political philosophy as an autonomous discipline. People tend to disagree on what is the right and the good, and a society necessitates the establishment of authoritative rules that are binding. This is the task of political philosophy distanced from moral philosophy.

Considering both the shift within the education policy field pointed at above with reference to UNESCO and OECD, and the complexities and pervasiveness of the present sustainaibility crises, I suggest that ethics education should be re-imagined as ethical-political education. There is certainly individual responsibility involved, but the challenges that become visible in environmental and sustainability education are societal and political in character.

This is a theoretical paper, discussing the relationship between ethics education and the political aspect of education. Two examples from the research literature are brought in that elicit the challenges involved and are well-suited for the re-imagination that here takes place. The first example is taken from the debate of character education in England as it has been promoted by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues. While character education in a neo-Aristotelean account definitely involves a societal dimension, it has still, by philosopher of education Judith Suissa, been criticized for glossing over the political aspect, adapting to the present order (Suissa, 2015). In a rejoinder, Kristján Kristjánsson (2021) defends the position of the Jubilee Centre, making a case for Aristotelean flourishing being a shared, communal activity and virtue a societal practice. Together the contributions of Suissa and Kristjánsson demonstrate some important challenges and contradictions that emerge in times when unsustainable societies call for environmental and sustainability education, and will be subject to further elaboration. The relevance within this paper is not reduced by considering Kristjánsson´s contribution to the field of environmental and sustainability education with Karen Jordan (Jordan & Kristjánsson, 2017). The other example is drawn from Swedish research contributions addressing the ethical and political dimension of environmental and sustainability education. Here a main ambition has been to develop frameworks with regard to the ethical tendency (Öhman & Östman, 2008) and political tendency (Håkansson, Östman, & van Poeck, 2017). Several pertinent categories are established, enabling the identification of the ethical and political dimension. At the same time the distinction in itself is appalling. The difference between the ethical and political tendency is made particularly visible with regard to the key categories of moral reaction (positioned within the ethical tendency) and political moment (within the political tendency). The former is distinguished by being situated in the private sphere and the latter in the public sphere (Håkansson, Östman, & van Poeck, 2018). In the context of this paper this distinction is explored, looking for possible overlaps, interrelations and mediations between the ethical and political dimensions. On the other hand, a part of this exploration is also to discuss reasons for upholding the very same distinction between the ethical and the political.

As stated in the introduction to this paper, the ethical dimension is decisive for making sense of what is at stake in the current sustainability crises. However, the tradition of ethics education demonstrates how responsibility here may be unequivocally individualized, and even isolated from a political dimension. This is a risk and a problem with regard to environmental and sustainability education, precisely because the response cannot be reduced to individual behavior, but must be a shared responsibility and subject to political decision-making. My ambition is here to bring some clarity into how the relationship between the ethical and the political may be understood. Finally, the issue that here is at stake is what kind of educational response environmental and sustainability education may hope for in times of sustainability crises.

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