Narrative Ethics, Media and the Morality of the Ecological Modern: The Case of Sweden

The Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his groundbreaking analysis of contemporary ethics, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory, asserted that modernity was devoid of a unified moral system. This observation has been noted by, among others, the ecophilosopher Arran Gare as a means of dealing with approaches to contemporary crisis. By characterizing debates about the future as reflexively constructed articulations of modernity, this paper briefly considers how such a perspective is useful when attempting to communicate questions of development under contemporary conditions. Using qualitative examples from modern Sweden taken from a larger corpus of research to speculate on the potential for normative conceptual change, it uses the self-styled enlightened polity as a case study to discuss how environmental knowledge is instrumentalized in self-consciously modern contexts. MacIntyre’s insight thus provides a view into the relationship between discourse and practice which recognizes the situated nature of environmental argumentation over uniform green epistemologies.