| Sustainability has become a critical goal for contemporary humanity and sustainable science is widely viewed as the primary means for achieving sustainability. In the modern global world, achieving sustainability has become a central issue. Besides from the emerging challenges of how can we become sustainable, debate continues to emerge over basic issues such as what it even means to be sustainable, why is it critical to address ethical issues when thinking about sustainability, and why has our failure to understand the concept sustainability created serious problems and challenges. It remains unclear, what exactly the nature of sustainability is. The scholars in sustainability discourse, continue to debate whether sustainability is more about economics, ecology, or social science. For example, many ecologists and environmentalists think sustainability is primarily about documenting and protecting ecosystem health, while many engineers working on sustainability premise think sustainability is primarily about more efficiently meeting human needs. These debates, however, failed to appreciate the ethical dimension of sustainability and have almost entirely neglected a fundamental dimension of sustainability hat is “the ethical dimension”. Exclusive perspectives and a lack of concern for ethical issues can be ameliorated by considering sustainability as meeting human needs in a socially just manner without depriving ecosystems of their health. The main argument of this paper is that sustainability has largely been reduced to a scientific endeavour, often motivated or read primarily from a scientific perspective, but if sustainability is understood from the perspective of society and ethics there will be more efficient ways to become sustainable and hence to satisfy human needs.
Keywords: Sustainability, Science, Ecology, Ethics, Society, Human values.
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