Evaluating Life: Working with Ethical Dilemmas in Education for Sustainable Development

Codifications of human rights are widely understood as politically established instruments for evaluating human life. The call for such an apparatus emerges as a response to the age-old problem of social organization, constituting - in extension - a means by which to cope with the overall problem of survival. However, evaluating life is inherently problematic. It is problematic as it presupposes an already existing framework by which to judge all instances of life. In a way then, the impartial evaluation of life seems impossible from a human point of view. Nevertheless, as the problem of survival is one of continuous relevance, attempts to formulate reasonable variables may be viewed as a necessary strategy for organizing a viable society. We aim at investigating the problem of codifying evaluations of life by looking at paradigmatic examples from the discourse of education for sustainable development, using a theoretical framework drawing on the ethics of Nietzsche and Deleuze in particular.