Environmental ethics in action: relations between practices, ethics and the culture of consumer society

Abstract

This article investigates how environmental ethics are at play in people’s everyday lives and practices of consumption from a practice theoretical perspective. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews from a larger study, with a selected focus in this article on the biographies and everyday practices of three households. These households were chosen for the analysis in order to reveal the greatest variation in degrees and ways of relating ethically to the environment. Situating ethics in the specific contexts and lifeworlds of research participants reveals how environmental ethics of differing contents are to varying degrees at work in people’s lives. The article suggests that the general understanding of environmental ethics is closely connected to biographical histories as well as to social and cultural contexts. In a practice theoretical framework, environmental ethics are understood as a kind of general understanding that connects to larger scale cultural formations linking provision and consumption conceptualised as teleoaffective formations. In some cases, the general understanding may contribute to the formulation of a cultural critique of modern consumer society and create a vision of an alternative system of provision and consumption connected to an imagined teleoaffective formation.