Social justice and sustainable development

Abstract

Rampant urbanization, climate change and growing demands for scant resources are just some of the myriad challenges facing our planet. It is indeed crucial for man to analyse the implications of his actions on an increasingly fragile environment. Present human interaction, with his environment, is clearly unsustainable due to the ruthless and imbalanced act of consumption of natural resources sans any parallel thought of nurturing the environment or protecting the interests of future generations. Against this backdrop, this paper argues that the notion of justice can play a pivotal role in understanding the idea of sustainable development. It concludes that the notion of sustainability can be envisaged, in the course of a critical analysis of John Rawls's theory of justice, as justice as fairness, a concept that contains sustainable behavior as a pertinent trait.