Although the concept of sustainability has been known since the beginning of the 18th century, it took until the middle of the last century to be able to create models of a global earth system and its subsystems and run simulations on it to reveal their interconnections.
It was 50 years ago, that "The Limits of Growth" by the "Club of Rome" was published. The theses therein were acknowledged and further developed in the following decades by numerous renowned publications, such as "Our Common Future" - also known as the "Brundtland Report" - by the "World Commission on Environment and Development". Furthermore, the models of the earth system were continuously improved at the same time. As a result, there is currently a widespread consensus in the scientific community, that the habits of mankind have to change in the near future, so that the earth system is not put into a state that endangers life on earth as we know it and may even put the survival of mankind at risk.
Although these topics have already found a common place outside the scientific community and are widely discussed in the media in recent decades, the arguments of science and its forecasts still do not seem to be sufficiently taken into account and measures not taken quickly enough. Since current approaches to solve this dilemma - such as the trust in personal responsibility of the individual, as well as using impulses on the economic level - seem to have little success, this paper tries to take a different approach by looking closer at commonly used arguments and argumentations that seem to hinder the required changes. This way it offers an alternative view of this problem, including the roles of companies and consumers, and thus opens the opportunity for new solutions and strategies.

Keywords: argumentation about sustainability, individual responsibility, social responsibility

The necessity and desire to include ethical aspects into sustainability has led to an increased amount of adaptions and adjustments to sustainability related theories within recent years. These theories cover all aspects and areas of sustainability and the majority of them try to paste ethical aspects to an existing theory. Most of these theories struggle to succeed in this intention for many reasons, mainly because ethical aspects are calculated and put into nameable, measureable and comparable values which will have to stand against and compete with values from economic systems. This way ethical aspects are reduced to their direct and measureable effects and benefits to the economic system which results in a massive tilt between the weights of the ethical and the economical values and their relationship. Based on this tilt and the fast growing amount of theories the question raises if these are the first signs that we have entered the third phase of the process of scientific change – the crisis period – introduced by Thomas S. Kuhn‘s „The Structure of Scientific Revolutions“. This research tries to transform and adapt Kuhn‘s theory from the fields of philosophy of science to the field of the philosophy of sustainability and its underlying fields of economy, society and environment and their interactions with a special focus on the influence of ethics on the balance between these pillars