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

I. Introduction: Problems with Evaluating Life

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. And as Nietzsche rightly observed, to be able to evaluate something without prejudice one has to occupy a position from where everything is visible; a position elevated above or beyond the social world. ¹ In a way then, an 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.

In this context, it is interesting to note that (in recent times) the discourse of human rights has acquired a privileged position as a – largely unquestioned – framework for evaluating life. Human rights, as all normative generalities, functions by freezing the world as it follows a tradition of thought that presupposes non changeable categories. From our perspective, this is problematic as it, in doing this, appears unwilling to acknowledge the inherent denial of everything that does not readily fit into the already established categories; that which refuses to be identified as something whole, as one thing. As Alexandre Lefebvre notes, this has given rise to a framework of judgment assuming “that everything encountered can be recognized” as “another identifiable instance of an existing concept,” thereby excluding the possibility of encountering and recognizing something entirely new. ²

This article aims at investigating the effects of individualizing the general norms of human rights in the context of education for sustainable development (ESD). Sustainable development, as a response to what is widely conceived of as a pending ecological and humanitarian crisis, represents a major challenge for the international community and has, as such, been embraced by the human rights discourse. ³ This is particularly visible in the emerging practice of ESD which fuses Agenda 21’s ⁴ call for a special focus on the younger generation in terms of raising environmental awareness, with human rights issues. ⁵ ESD, in line with the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) Report ⁶ and Agenda 21, deals with the problem of sustainable development as being essentially a question of proliferating higher values such as equality and solidarity as a means by which to reach ecological sustainability. ESD is an internationally endorsed instrument for implementing sustainable development and therefore an influential part of a powerful normative structure. Positioned at the intersection between two major social institutions – the law and education – ESD makes for an illustrative example of some of the risks involved in implementation; i.e. the individualization of normative generalities.

What does it mean, in this intersection (the practice of ESD), to rely on a common for all moral framework facilitating complex ethical decisions by relating them always to a fixed sense of right and wrong/good and evil? We aim at linking discursive statements – expressing the general norms of the human rights framework as individualizations – to the episteme making them possible. We do this in order to highlight what we conceive of as potential tensions and power struggles within the discourse – power struggles that inevitably render certain perspectives dominant and others more or less invisible. This does not mean that the subordinated perspectives are necessarily better or truer than the dominant one. However, it appears justified to continuously scrutinize the predominant evaluative framework in order to avoid the naturalization of the dominant perspective. Consequently, we are interested in raising the issue of whether an evaluative framework of human rights must be inherently excluding and hierarchical in order to function smoothly, or if such a framework could be made more sensitive to change and instability.

II. Green Flag: Education for Sustainable Development in a Swedish Context

The Green Flag program is a Swedish implementation of ESD. It makes for the largest Swedish educational network dealing with environmental issues and sustainable development. ⁷ The project is structured around six electable themes that are described as “broad enough to be adjusted to all pedagogical practices and all age groups.” ⁸ The idea is for the work with Green Flag “to permeate all of the preschool/school to the greatest possible extent” and to make it “a self-evident part of the practice.” ⁹ The range and depth of the six themes suggests that any conceivable aspect of the human experience can be quite readily fitted into either theme for evaluation in accordance with the overarching rationale of sustainable development. In the guidelines to Green Flag the themes are presented together with suggestions for suitable discussions which place them within a broader ethical and social context. For instance, “child labor,” “equity,” “what is a good life?,” “how do we feel?,” “camaraderie,” “gender,” “health,” “safety,” “housing” and “governing values” are suggested topics for discussions within the themes of “consumerism,” “life style and health,” and “immediate surroundings.” Besides providing the actual themes together with a few indications in so far as how to go about working with these, ¹⁰ Green Flag also encourages working with three specific methods. These methods are variations of informal group learning activities and include so-called values exercises (Swedish: värderingsövningar), outdoor pedagogy and storyline. As methodological tools they provide a fairly loose framework. While leaving much of the actual working out of the details up to the pedagogues involved, a few overarching principles are given. This particularly pertains to the importance of participatory decision making when working with the project and the presupposition that there are no right or wrong answers to the questions raised. ¹¹

Clearly, the work with Green Flag is conceptualized as being much broader than the general conception of a subject matter in traditional Western schooling. According to Skolverket (the Swedish National Agency for Education) this is a natural and welcome consequence since sustainable development should be perceived as a truly holistic approach to life and not only as a body of knowledge serving as a protective measure for the environment. ¹² As indicated above, it is not solely about working interdisciplinary but also, and more importantly, about linking environmental education to principle moral values which are assumed to lead to an ethical – and therefore sustainable – way of life. Skolverket explicitly endorses this approach, authorizing it as an outcome of international legal obligations within the global discourse of environmental protection. Skolverket claims that:

The core of the mission, given by steering documents and international agreements, is that the learners are to develop a knowledge-based approach to important ethical questions regarding the relationship between human beings and humanity’s relation to the natural environment. ¹³

Altogether, it seems evident from looking at the remarks made by Skolverket that we are concerned here with an emancipatory project aiming at shaping children and youth into ethical subjects. This is supported by the fact that international law concerned with children’s rights and the global environment endorse the idea that children are to be treated as prospective responsible citizens sharing a common set of fundamental values ¹⁴ and that they are equipped with a natural ability to support the environment. ¹⁵

Part of the purpose with a project like Green Flag seems to be to provide and to automatize a moral blueprint for individuals to be able to cope with difficult ethical decisions in life. This blueprint functions to automatize ethical dilemmas by facilitating the abstraction of particularities into generalities. We wish to investigate the conditions that are allowing ESD to facilitate the automatization of ethical decisions and by doing this we wish to problematize the individual’s assumed freedom of action within the discourse of sustainable development. It is not the existence of a structure as such that concerns us (in fact it seems difficult to conceive of social life without one) but the tendency within ESD in particular and the human rights framework in general to seek to constrain (by equating ethical sustainability with ecological sustainability) and thereby naturalize complex ethical decisions.

As a first step, we will look at Green Flag in terms of an instrument by which children are taught to evaluate life in accordance with the moral framework of human rights. We will then target child labor – making for one of the ethical dilemmas to be solved by the values exercises of Green Flag – as a phenomenon revealing the conceptual limits of the framework. We will do this by comparing the conception of child labor within the official human rights discourse, with the conception propagated by organized child laborers. Before doing this however, we will introduce our theoretical point of departure.

III. Identity, Subjectivity and Values

For a concrete value judgment – a particular statement: child A should not work – to be treated as an infinitely repeatable instance of an abstract and universal principle – a general statement: children should not work – the principle in question must be assumed to precede and be superior to the particular utterance of the value judgment. If not, there would be nothing to support the decision beyond the decision itself. This, in turn, requires a primary source – a transcendent – that is typically conceived of as both ahistorical and objective, and more importantly, as having a greater value than the particular instance. This model for evaluating life appears to rely on the assumed existence of two separate and hierarchically ordered substances in the universe; the conceptual divisions of genus/species, God/world, mind/body, subject/object all reflect this idea. The superior of the two substances (the Platonic Forms/God/Universal Reason) provides the subordinated substance (the particular instance/the individual body) with a motive for striving to do better in terms of working towards an ideal world. ¹⁶ This model places existence always in relation to a set of higher values; higher in the sense that they can never actually be reached and are therefore to be understood as transcending. As such:

It [the transcending substance] offers significance to a substance that would otherwise be nothing more than a wound in space and time. That is why it is a moral duty to seek the Forms or to follow God, why it is that human subjectivity is the highest form of (finite) being. ¹⁷

Historically, the superior and transcending substance can be traced from the Platonic Forms to the Judeo-Christian idea of God and has since then been invested into the idea of a universal reason; the universal part of the self that all rational beings supposedly have access to. Thus, the rational (conscious) part of the mind has gradually taken the place once held by God as the constituting entity of the world. ¹⁸ The world, in this sense, refers to the conceptual rendition of the material world. It is this material world that is made meaningful and ordered through the idea of a rational human being believed to be inherently capable – with access to the transcending substance of universal reason – of recognizing and identifying particular instances as belonging to general categories by right in order to evaluate them accordingly.

In line with this, individual subjectivity – as derived from universal reason – must be thought of as inherently conditioned by the process of identification and as a result, struggles with the difficulty of conceiving of anything that is not readily recognizable. Any evaluation of life based on the existence of two substances then (such as it appears in the human rights framework – as a codification of normative generalities – for example) seems to require that what is unfamiliar must be familiarized and fitted into an already existing identity. While this is part and parcel of relying on a system of signification and of believing in communication as a means by which to organize and improve the world, naturalizing the process of identification can be problematic however. It can be problematic when it presupposes that humans have a natural ability to make connections between the universal and the particular which hides the fact that the structure – being positive law – is actually arbitrary and thus negotiable. When the process of identification and evaluation is automatized and thus naturalized, grey zones and deviations are rendered difficult to account for, making them subject to the risk of exclusion from the overall episteme. ¹⁹ The practical problem therefore has to do with the normalizing (constraining) effects of the evaluative framework which proceeds by measuring every instance in accordance with what is already familiar.

Another aspect of the problem with naturalizing the process of individualization – which particularly pertains to an evaluative framework presupposing universal norms – concerns the inherent partiality of any evaluative framework. ²⁰ As partiality appears unavoidable – following Nietzsche’s claim that every judgment of life must be passed from within life – universal documents produced within the human rights discourse and the practices that they give rise to (such as Green Flag) are always linked to a particular (historical and geographical) origin and affected by the familiarity of the local gaze. From this point of view, Green Flag (as a concrete practice relying on a universal framework) becomes interesting to investigate. In relation to this material we will pose some interrelated questions addressing the issues of origin and the problem of automatized identification.

In sum, there is a question regarding the value of values. In dealing with this question, which will concern Green Flag as an expression of ESD, we will argue that if we posit that every value has an origin – in line with the Nietzschean critique of value judgments – it follows that the universalization of such values becomes problematic in itself. ²¹ This is so as it obscures relations of power within the discourse. This, in turn, results in the disappearance of any identifiable motive behind the political proliferation of these values, making a political counter position difficult to conceive of. ²² As such, in questioning the naturalizing process which turns perspectival values into universals we aim to problematize the normative practice of judging a concrete situation based on its “degree of proximity to or distance from an external value.” ²³ Instead we will propose an evaluative system that is more willing to acknowledge its origin (its inherent perspectival nature); one that aims to deal with universal issues in a more localized way.

Moreover, there is an issue concerning the inherent conceptual limitation of the process of identification functioning within any evaluative framework relying on normative generalities. This limitation concerns the excluding mechanism of such a framework. The problem of exclusion may be understood in terms of a consequence of measuring actions and thoughts in relation to principles established a priori. This turns into a practical problem when we consider the limitation of the range of variables that are possible to utilize in a framework with universal claims. When working with this aspect we will target child labor as an illustrative example of the consequences of these limitations. This example is connected with Green Flag as it makes for one of the suggested work areas related to consumerism as an ecological issue. It will serve to demonstrate how the human rights framework is forced to utilize purely material variables in its evaluation of life as these are quantitatively measurable and therefore possible to treat as generals in a manner that intensive variables – connected to more unpredictable forces such as preference and taste – are not.

IV. Green Flag as an Instrument for Evaluating Life

Green Flag is the Swedish rendition of Eco-Schools which is a part of the international ESD framework. Eco-Schools “developed as a response to some of the needs identified at the UN Conference on Environment and Development of 1992.” ²⁴ In the introduction to Chapter 25 of Agenda 21: Children and Youth in Sustainable Development, it is stated that “[t]he involvement of today’s youth in environment and development decision-making and in the implementation of programs is critical to the long-term success of Agenda 21.” Moreover, the United Nations General Assembly has declared the period 2005–2014 as the Decade for Education for Sustainable Development in Resolution 57/254. Hence, there is an explicit link between education and international law and policy concerned with sustainable development. At the Rio conference, the concept of sustainable development – usually claimed to originate in the so-called Brundtland Report ²⁵ – was established ²⁶ as the overarching normative principle concerning the protection of the natural environment. Since the Rio Declaration does not in itself provide a definition of sustainable development – it merely states (in Principle 1) that human beings are at the center of concern for sustainable development and (in Principle 4) that this implicates that environmental concerns always should be integrally considered when states formulate their development objectives – the Brundtland Report is usually referred to when attempting to define the concept.

The definition of sustainable development given in the Brundtland Report reads as follows: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This formulation allows for a wide variety of interpretations as it seems to be able to include all kinds of different aspects of human experience. On the one hand, this definition has been the target of criticisms largely due to this vagueness. On the other hand, the open-endedness of the concept has allowed it to acquire a key position as a guiding principle providing a moral map for almost all international political programs. In attempts to further clarify the concept it has been explained in terms of three interrelated parts; an economical, a social and an environmental dimension. The environmental dimension focuses mainly on resource allocation and issues of conservation (reflecting the traditional use of legislation concerning environmental protection); the economical dimension deals primarily with private actors’ accountability and responsibility for environmental damage and poverty reduction on a global scale; and the social dimension involves environmental protection as a human rights issue and as an aspect of social justice and equality. The mainstream interpretation of sustainable development treats the three interrelated parts as mutually constitutive and equally important for the understanding of the concept. ²⁷ It could be argued then, that as a result, social justice, for instance, cannot be fully understood today unless linked with aspects of economic development and environmental protection. Hence, the foundational value of social justice provides environmental protection and economic development with an ethical norm linking all kinds of environmental practices to the evaluative moral framework of human rights (being the lowest common denominator of human ethics by global standards).

In the context of ESD, the social dimension of sustainable development has been given a prominent position. With reference to Agenda 21 and its call for sustainable consumption patterns, the European Panel on Sustainable Development (EPSD) Report argue for a focus on social equality and human rights. ²⁸ This idea of social rights – as appealed to in the EPSD Report – is derived from a liberal political theory presupposing a framework of judgment relying on familiar identities determined in relation to a transcending source. ²⁹ The idea of social rights rests upon the concept of a social contract which is a theoretical model for evaluating life developed by enlightenment philosophers such as Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke and subsequently incorporated into modern political theory by thinkers such as Rawls. ³⁰ This conception of a social contract is conditioned by the idea of an autonomous individual. The idea of an autonomous individual, in turn, appeals to the image of universal reason supposedly capable of formulating unprejudiced principles by virtue of its transcendence. Could the practice of Green Flag – through its connection to the human rights framework – be understood in terms of a practice conditioned by the assumed existence of a transcending source (naturalizing the perspective from where the norms of the practice stem)?

Assuming that it can, this tendency is visible in the EPSD Report where the theory of social justice is referred to as providing “major principles of contemporary philosophical and political consensus.” ³¹ In the report, the social contract is taken to provide the most persuasive argument for organizing society as a “level playing field,” an organization in extension thought to lead to all individuals’ equal opportunity to a successful life. The problem here is that the Report relies on an idea that individual success can be de-contextually measured which presupposes a position from where everything is visible and that its variables are universally measurable. In order for these variables to be measurable according to a common standard they need to be quantifiable and understood to be based on conscious (rational) choices (appealing to the idea of a universal reason). In this sense, individual success (translated into the concept of quality of life in the example of Green Flag) must be conceived of as being determined by relations and variables understood as purely material and consciously elected in the sense that they are extensive (that is, physical additive relations) and related to the will. This becomes problematic if we leave open the possibility that individual success may also be understood in terms of a product of internal power struggles between forces (intensive as well as extensive); processes that may be described as unconscious productions of desires. ³² Hence, from our point of view, these unconscious processes – always propelled and conditioned by contingent variables such as the historically and geographically conditioned contexts etc. – render “[p]erspectival seeing [...] the only kind of seeing there is, perspectival ‘knowing’ the only kind of ‘knowing.”’ ³³ Arguably then, the problem with supposing that values and norms originate from a will capable of transcending the material world – and not a consequence of the productiveness of our unconscious drives – when evaluating instances of life (in legal as well as in moral terms) is that the evaluative system is only ever able to acknowledge already existing values due to the assumed stability of universal reason (which is rendering the will stable to begin with). This is evident from the remarks on the conception of individual success made in the EPSD report. Nietzsche questions the naturalization of such a limited conception of life when he criticizes the correspondence and hierarchical order of the general (the truth) and the particular (appearance) in the modern episteme. He argues that: “It is nothing but a moral prejudice to consider truth more valuable than appearance; it is, in fact, the most poorly proven assumption in the world.” ³⁴

How then are we to understand norms aiming at reaching a common good; norms heralding values such as success, quality of life and sustainability, as they appear in the documents concerning ESD? In order to begin to answer this question we will look closer at the concept of quality of life within the context of ESD. For quality of life to be quantifiable and measurable according to any kind of fixed scale – as it is construed in Green Flag and in the EPSD Report ³⁵ – it has to be conceived of in terms of either a universally shared experience or a transcendent knowledge. If, however, we suppose that a scale that is dependent upon knowledge of a transcendent substance or a universally shared experience is not ontologically credible then quality of life can never be conceived of outside a particular context and the particular configuration of desires and drives at work within it. The question then becomes: is it the context of the Swedish child or the imagined context of a child laborer, for example, that provides the parameters for quality of life as a goal to strive for when dealing with this issue as part of ESD? If both life situations are to be measured against the same scale, it seems that one will always be more proximate to the norm than the other. That is, the norm will always reflect the configuration of desires, will and drives at work within the dominant perspective.

Turning to a passage regarding an evaluation of quality of life in the EPSD Report, we find an argument claiming that

levels of violent crime, mental illness, drug addiction, illiteracy, obesity etc. are almost always higher in more unequal societies and that even the most affluent are adversely affected by inequality. Their [Wilkinson and Pickett] study of 30 years of statistical data suggests that in rich countries the smaller the gap between rich and poor the happier, healthier, and more successful the population is in terms of established indexes. The following graph shows that the US, the UK, Portugal, and New Zealand in the top right of this graph, are doing much worse than Japan, Sweden or Norway in the bottom left. ³⁶

The graph referred to in the quote illustrates how Sweden, due to its low income inequality, is better than, for example, the US on the chart of total quality of life. Hence, quality of life is construed as a direct result of the level of income equality. The essence of quality of life in this study; that is, its measurable variables (quality of life in itself cannot be made concrete in any other way of course), are life expectancy, math and literacy, infant mortality, homicides, imprisonment, teenage births, trust, obesity, mental illness including drug and alcohol addiction and social mobility. Based on the graph, the authors of the study present a prediction of how a more equal UK would turn out in terms of hard numbers and facts. They suggest that

in a more equal UK the population would have a significantly better quality of life. For example, the data suggests that if inequality was cut by half: levels of trust would increase by 85%; rates of imprisonment and teenage births would fall by 80%; mental illness would decline by two thirds; and murder rates and obesity would halve. The analysis shows that rather than economic growth leading to a happier, healthier, or more successful population, there is no statistical relationship between income per head and social well-being in the rich countries of the world. It’s not just poor people who would do better in a more equal society either. The evidence suggests people at every level would benefit. The poorest would, however, gain the most and the analysis shows that these findings hold true across developed nations, or, for example, across the 50 states of the USA. ³⁷

The above passage is interesting as it illustrates the arbitrariness in the configuration of the variables constituting quality of life. What are the effects of electing these specific variables at the expense of other possible ones? It appears as if the election of purely material variables makes quality of life generally measurable at the expense of the differential nature of desire and the unpredictability and contextual dependency of our unconscious drives. As such, the presentation of the elected variables as universals (i.e. being equally applicable regardless of context) requires that we understand individual interpretations of quality of life as automatically corresponding to those variables since they are recognized as true reflections of the norm. This has been described by Deleuze as a process of subjectivation produced by a normativity that is conceptualized as a positive and productive force reaching beyond the formal authorities of society. ³⁸ This would mean that even at the level of the individual there are struggles between different drives determined by the norm of the evaluative framework; a norm that in this case subordinates the issues of preferences and taste to the issue of material standard. It seems important to note that it is notoriously difficult to establish, in any final sense, the relation between the individual’s multifaceted experience of life and a particular matter of fact, such as obesity or young parenthood. Since we are concerned with a relation that is impossible to establish in any empirical sense, the EPSD Report has to rely on transcendence – as an implicit ontological presupposition – in order to communicate the perspectives of the welfare state as universally valid in a convincing way. Giving precedence to a specific political model does not necessarily have to be considered problematic unless, which is the case here, it is communicated as universally valid. A more locally grounded (embodied) framework – still working towards normative goals but without presupposing the universality of their variables – has the potential of being more susceptible to the inherent differentiality of ethical values such as quality of life.

Looking at how the notion of child labor is being represented within Green Flag, through teaching programs presupposing that quality of life is a coherently measurable entity, we will continue tracing the effects of an unreflective individualization of normative generalities.

V. Determining Child Labor: An Example from the Theme of Consumerism

One of the six electable themes of Green Flag deals with the issue of consumerism. In the short description of the theme – supplied in the online material – pedagogues are instructed to encourage critical discussions with the pupils about how we live in our modern society by asking the following questions: “what is it that I buy?,” “where do the products come from?,” and “how does my behavior at home affect people in other parts of the world?” ³⁹ These questions are then linked to problems such as the production of food, child labor, equity, advertising and pocket money. This enumeration of problems goes to illustrate that the issues dealt with in the program are primarily ethical rather than ecological or scientific. Hence, children’s acquisition of knowledge about the natural environment is intrinsically linked to a foundation of ethics. This is further supported within the European discourse of educational policy concerning sustainable development:

One effective way to bring about the cultural shift from consumerism to sustainability is to work with families and young children in their early years. Research shows that, in early childhood, the human brain and the biological pathways develop rapidly and set trajectories in health, learning and behaviours that last throughout life. As young children begin to construct their meanings and understandings, those around them should support the formation of attitudes, values, behaviours and habits that favour sustainable practices and develop abilities and skills that serve them to question consumerism and seek alternative lifestyles. ⁴⁰

Following the short introductory text on the Green Flag web page is a hyperlink leading to another web page offering inspirational material providing a basis for concrete educational work. On this web page the theme of consumerism is situated as an environmental issue subordinated to the ethical framework of human rights. At the top of the page it is stated that:

Questions of consumerism are more interesting and important than ever as shopping increases every year. This has effects on the environment as well as the people of the countries of the Global South where the products we buy are often produced. Get inspired to work interdisciplinary with these broad issues in your work with Green Flag and let your pupils acquire a changed view on theirs’ and society’s patterns of consumption. ⁴¹

This overarching declaration of intent is completely in line with the focus on consumerism (as related to environmental issues) recommended in the international political discourse:

For most early childhood practitioners, parents and children in Europe the day-to-day activities most significantly influencing sustainable development are at the level of consumption. Sustainable consumerism is therefore the most appropriate area upon which to focus. ⁴²

Following this recommendation, Green Flag suggests a list of appropriate work areas in connection with the theme and a few accompanying methodological materials to choose from. Echoing the short description of the theme from the previous web page the work areas listed are: leisure-time activities and consumerism, production of food, clothes and fashion, consumption of electronics, culture and consumerism, resource utilization and resource allocation, world trade, wages and pocket money, transports, poverty, equity, solidarity, child labor, quality of life versus consumerism, happiness and consumerism, the global environmental footprint of Sweden, and advertisement. ⁴³ Below the list of work areas are links to suggestions of suitable educational material for handling these issues practically. These include a detailed educational material providing examples of exercises dealing with packages and packaging, spanning from everyday mathematics (how much does a litre of milk weigh?) to consumer’s influence (how many consumers need to boycott a certain product in order for it to be removed from the store’s supply?). Furthermore, values exercises are suggested as the preferred method by which to tackle these issues. Following the hyper link to the web page on values exercises, there is a key statement saying that:

No right or wrong. Values exercises can come in many different shapes and forms. They share the fact that they all emanate from a question to be answered based on the opinion you hold. Thus, there is no right or wrong. ⁴⁴

Going back to the list of work areas, it is apparent that it – when read in the light of the declaration of intent – is incommensurable with the purpose of the values exercises in that it clearly indicates what a good life in fact ought to be; an ideal state where consumerism is constructed in opposition to quality of life and happiness (quality of life versus consumerism). Again, it is not the normative aspects of stipulating what quality of life is (in an educational setting) that primarily concern us, but the naturalizing and unreflective process in determining this (on a case by case basis) that the material at hand seems to produce. It produces this as it posits that if left to your own devices you will automatically choose that which is right, when in fact it appears that this has already been decided given the key concepts and suggested questions of the theme. The polemical image of quality of life versus consumerism finds support in the EPSD Report which calls upon the various institutions of education to enable children to “question consumerism and seek alternative lifestyles.” This claim seems to correspond with the findings of the instrumental evaluation of total quality of life referred to in the EPSD report (as indicated in the previous section). That is, in both instances quality of life is measured by rates of purely material (and consciously governed) variables structured in an accumulative manner. For example, if you gain weight your quality of life will automatically be decreased correspondingly. And similarly, a high number of young mothers will render a country’s total quality of life to be lowered regardless of individual, social, or cultural preferences. Or, in the case of consumerism in Green Flag, quality of life is equated with a material asceticism on an individual basis in that Green Flag posits that if you shop less you will automatically be happier knowing that you have contributed to making the world a more sustainable place.

The ambition to successfully provide an individual – through education – with the ability to govern its desires in accordance with a material asceticism appears to be a primary goal of Green Flag (and ESD) when considering the project as an educational means for establishing the common ethical framework of human rights. This is interesting as it seems to contradict the claimed reliance on principles of democratic participatory action as is particularly visible in the values exercises stipulating that there are no right or wrong answers to the ethical questions at hand. ⁴⁵

Taken together, these discursive statements reveal the practical conditions of the norm of quality of life relied on by the evaluative framework of human rights. It is the act of recognizing the variables in their concrete manifestations, as relating to the evaluative norm of quality of life, that simultaneously produces the overall evaluative framework and the subjects it accepts. ⁴⁶ This is so as the act of recognizing a particularity as an instance of a general category presupposes the existence of non changeable identities. As we suggested earlier, a logical consequence of relying on an evaluative framework of normative generalities is the familiarization of the unfamiliar. However, to be able to familiarize an individual requires the erasure of any incoherent traits regardless of how constitutive those traits may be for that individual’s idea of the self. Even if this appears unavoidable and largely unproblematic, naturalizing the process tends to perpetuate the current order in an unreflective manner. Looking at different discursive conceptualizations of the identity of the child laborer will allow us to trace some of the consequences of naturalizing an identification process based on familiarity.

Going back to the material on the theme of consumerism then, the issue of child labor is dealt with as one of the unfortunate consequences of “unsustainable” consumption patterns. In a short video, intended to spark a discussion that will result in the making of an “anti-commercial,” child labor is portrayed as the negative effect of Western consumption patterns. ⁴⁷ Images of overstocked shelves and huge shopping malls, logos of multinational companies and wealthy Westerners shopping are contrasted with stark images of ethnic child laborers involved in various types of hazardous work. The images of children working are intercut with images of containers filled with toxic substances, unregulated garbage dumps, and x-ray pictures of damaged lungs. The linking of these images – in combination with an increasingly dramatic musical score – suggests that child labor is a direct result of unsustainable consumption patterns in the West. Consequently, it suggests that by changing consumption patterns in Sweden the situation of children in the Global South will be automatically improved. ⁴⁸ In the video, individual children at work (there are children from Africa, Latin America and Asia being represented) are treated as instances of the same; as universal child laborers. As such, the only reasonable way to conceive of them – in this context – is as victims of oppression. From this perspective, child labor is viewed as a preconceived category which can be successfully combated as a phenomenon unaffected by contextual relations. The conceptualization of child labor in the example from Green Flag relies on the dominant interpretation established by the International Labor Organization (ILO). ⁴⁹ However, this conceptualization is being challenged by another interpretation forwarded by organizations for working children. This discrepancy suggests the existence of a power struggle over whose perspective is to gain the right to define the category of child labor; a power struggle that is interesting as it demonstrates the naturalizing mechanisms at work in the evaluative framework which, as we mean to illustrate, results in the exclusion of any incoherency threatening to reveal the arbitrariness and instability of the category of child labor.

In 1996, in Kundapur, India, 29 working child delegates from three continents met and formed the International Movement of Working Children (IMWC). Together they drafted a declaration consisting of 10 key points summarizing their common agenda. IMWC now makes for an oppositional force, challenging the ILO with regards to the policy making concerning these issues. One of the noteworthy features of IMWC is that it is a coalition of national and regional organizations for working children, which means that those who speak through IMWC are those who are directly affected by the debated policies. This is interesting, not so much because their statements would automatically allow us access to the true conception of child labor (in the sense that they are more authentic than that of the ILO) but because it testifies to the differential aspects of identity within an official discourse where child labor is perceived of as a universal; as being one thing. Given this background it makes sense that ILO refuses to recognize the views of IMWC. ⁵⁰ In a statement made by the Latin American and Caribbean Movement of Working Children and Adolescents (MOLACNAT), a regional division of IMWC, they comment upon their involuntary absence from the negotiations of the ILO conventions on minimum working age (C. 138) and on the worst forms of child labor (C. 182) in the following way:

It is unacceptable that we, the legitimate representatives of organized working girls, boys and adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean, were not invited to the conference since the subjects under discussion are parts of our reality. The exclusive attendance by adults, most of whom are quite distant from the realities of our lives, once again confirms that the approach taken to working children and adolescents continues to be adult-centered and child and adolescent participation is relegated to lofty intentions and legal texts. We condemn the violation of our right to participate as children and adolescents as accorded under Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly given the observations and recommendations made by the Geneva Committee on the importance of complying with this article. ⁵¹

In order to improve the situation for working children, IMWC sets out to question the predominant conception of child labor by emphasizing, on the one hand, the difference between various types of work and, on the other hand, the difference between what is to be considered work and what is to be considered criminal activities. These two aspects tend to complicate the understanding of child labor as perpetuated by ILO and the human rights discourse. In the view of ILO, all activities involving the transaction of goods and services employing children under the age of 14 is to be considered child labor and per definition considered unallowable on an international level. ⁵² IMWC, in contrast, promote the concept of working children in order to stress that the effects of ILO’s definition is the creation of a deviating subject in the sense that childhood and work is construed as mutually excluding. Moreover, IMWC claims that ILO – in grouping together all forms of child employment under the common concept of child labor – makes the mistake of treating serious crimes as merely forms of child labor, deemed for abolition by states but not for criminalization. Accordingly, IMWC notes the importance in separating between exploitation of children through criminal acts (prostitution, slavery, trafficking etc.) and forms of work less obviously detrimental to the health of children. MOLACNAT states that: “We are clearly against all of these phenomena [criminal acts], but calling them ‘labor’ creates dangerous confusion and leads to purely repressive practices as opposed to truly liberating alternatives.” ⁵³

The unwillingness of ILO to recognize IMWC is understandable given the position taken by IMWC in certain fundamental issues. For instance, in the second point of consensus of the Kundapur Declaration it is stated that: “We are against the boycott of products made by children.” In order to understand this controversial claim we need to consider the possibility that individual child workers actually may value their work effort in addition to being in need of the financial compensation that it brings. This is supported by the Berlin Declaration from the second World Meeting of IMWC in 2004 stating that: “We value our work and view it as an important human right for our personal development.” This position can only be rationally understood given that values are intrinsically connected with experiences and practices and cannot be fully comprehended by appealing to a will determined by a universal reason. The Berlin Declaration goes on to say: “In our lives our work allows us to resist with dignity the economic, political and suppressing model that criminalizes and excludes us and continues to worsen the living conditions of ourselves, our families and our communities.”

This confirms the problem of relying on a framework of judgment unwilling to acknowledge its inherent limitations (in so far as in passing judgments it assumes a position from where all of life is visible). IMWC may be understood as an effect of the excluding mechanism of such a framework in that it illustrates the arbitrariness of its norms. In declaring that what they do is to work (as opposed to being exploited) and in suggesting that working is in fact what allows them to resist the worst forms of poverty, the authors of the Berlin Declaration challenge the stability of the notions of childhood and work as established by the predominant framework of human rights. It appears then that a universal system for evaluating life (moral or legal) requires the denial of arbitrariness and the perspectival nature of its norms. As such, it makes for precisely the kind of evaluative apparatus that Nietzsche dismissed as an impossible construction; impossible because of the inherently perspectival nature of statements. The human rights discourse seems to attempt to do so in any case, sometimes by appealing to a transcending and superior source – as the author of the norms (nature and science) – and sometimes by assuming that the gaze of the transcending source can be recreated by humans through communication. For this kind of communicational devise to function smoothly (in terms of the production of norms) it has to respect certain foundational identities as already existing and stable. If the notions of childhood and work did not automatically amount to a certain conception of child labor as exploitation of children (something they can do only by relying on stable identities) then the legal norm prohibiting child labor in general would appear difficult to apply universally. This may explain why, in this case, working children’s right to participate must be overruled as they refuse to be wholly identified as members of the category of child labor.

VI. Conclusion

All of this can be understood as an effect of the individualization of generalities visible in the Green Flag material. We have seen how the structure of the theme of consumerism presupposes and furthers an unreflective system for evaluating life in that the ethical dilemmas presented within the values exercises come with ready-made answers that tend to reflect a particular social organization with claims of universality without acknowledging their inherent perspectival nature. Because, what the example of child labor points to is that only in a society which can afford to treat children as children (as an especially protected category of humans) at all times can the ILO convention work smoothly. That is, when the social infrastructure of a society is unable to ensure that schooling and housing, for example, are equally supplied to all children, clumping together prostitution and car-wash becomes problematic. As such, the norms of children’s rights appear to be formulated from a very local (and un-negotiated) perspective even though they are communicated as universals.

Opposing consumerism (individual actions of unnecessary shopping) to the overall quality of life of the population of the world (as conceptualized by the principle of sustainable development), Green Flag teaches children to opt for a material asceticism which is entirely conditioned by the stability of the notion of child labor. Thus the evaluation of life as enacted by Green Flag is problematic to the extent that it freezes the conception of child labor without acknowledging this move. While relying on stable categories appears unavoidable as such – if we are to continuously address the problem of survival collectively – treating these categories as universals may lead to us overlooking that which is not readily recognizable; that which is new in the sense that it deviates from the perspectives of the authors of the norm. To recognize the excluding mechanism inherent in the existing human rights framework has the potential then of creating a sensitivity to the fact that identification is linked to an unconscious production of desires within individuals and societies and not simply a matter of rational choice. ⁵⁴

This conclusion draws on Deleuze’s engagement with the ontological question. An engagement in which he seeks to respond to and develop Nietzsche’s critique of an evaluation of life based on judgment by adding the notion of desire into the topology of reason. By this token, Deleuze questions the sufficiency of conscious processes to interpret and connect a particular signifier to a particular signified. ⁵⁵ He criticizes this system of signification on the basis of its inherent bluntness:

There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense. A thing is sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something more complicated – depending on the forces (the gods) which take possession of it. ⁵⁶

In terms of mapping out an alternative evaluative framework better equipped for noting and accounting for deviations to the norm, we may, in line with Deleuze, emphasize the importance of acknowledging that the production of knowledge is conditioned by processes of identification which in turn are always affected by perspectival forces (social and individual desires) as opposed to being completely determined by universal reason. For example, depending on the forces at work – unconscious desires mutually producing and being conditioned by factors such as the will of the individual, social and cultural norms, biologically and historically determined formations etc. – the experiences of working children may or may not conform to the universally established sign for child labor. Considering the fact that statements such as the Berlin Declaration – by simply existing – appears to trouble the very foundation of the process whereby human rights individualizes normative generalities, it may be productive – in aspiring for a viable international community – to reassess some of the conditions for such a process. To this end, an evaluative framework should be more inclined to discover and care for deviations to the norms of the framework and fissures within the chain of signification. It would need to be a more localized and differentializing framework, stable in the sense that it provides a functioning communicational and prescriptive devise and instable in the sense that it acknowledges its inherent arbitrariness. Such a system it would seem, should manage to be self-reflective in so far as it is aware of the fact that all processes aiming at individualizing normative generalities relies on the idea of a transcending source and are therefore always more or less dogmatic in the sense that they must presuppose their inherent capacity to familiarize that which is unfamiliar.