Session: S-210
Seafood Ethics: Moving Beyond Sustainable Management to Ethical Governance

Current resource management approaches, such as traditional fisheries and even attempted ecosystem-based management, are failing to ensure ecological sustainability balanced with societal welfare. In this symposium, we introduce seafood ethics as a nascent field that aims to enhance marine resource sustainability by embedding values and ethics into the management framework. Seafood ethics is the descriptive and normative study of the... [ view more ]

Current resource management approaches, such as traditional fisheries and even attempted ecosystem-based management, are failing to ensure ecological sustainability balanced with societal welfare. In this symposium, we introduce seafood ethics as a nascent field that aims to enhance marine resource sustainability by embedding values and ethics into the management framework. Seafood ethics is the descriptive and normative study of the pro-social attitudes, value-based trade-offs, and ethical dilemmas of stakeholders and citizens along diverse seafood value chains. Values are reference points for evaluating something as positive or negative. They are rationally and emotionally binding and give long-term orientation and motivation for action. Values govern all human activities and their explicit articulation in resource management can aid decision-makers in resolving policy trade-offs that emerge at the science-policy interface. By thus considering the values and moral principles that govern individual and group behaviours, ethical governance fosters the equitable distribution of benefits and harms of shared resources. How marine resources are used, allocated, and conserved has ethical implications for diverse stakeholders and local and indigenous communities, as well as broader society and the environment. We argue that explicit consideration of values and ethics can facilitate more transparent, accountable, and inclusive public decision-making in marine policy and governance. The dominant challenge for ethical governance is how to inform decision-making when the system is complex, the facts are uncertain, values are in dispute, and yet decisions are urgent. The symposium speakers will address these issues, illustrated with case studies, after an overview of the topic.