Laszlo Zsolnai’s paper “The Ethics of Systems Thinking” was published in the book “Responsibility, Deep Ecology and the Self—Festschrift in Honor of Knut J. Ims” (2011. Oslo, Forlag).
Zsolnai suggests that quality of life can be served by taking a view of the whole systems. This requires considering all the relevant value dimensions, evaluating the performance of systems using adequate scales of measurement and employing disqualification criteria for blocking trade offs among non-substitutable values. He believes that, in our ecologically fragile, socially disintegrating world, systems-oriented decision making is a prerequisite for survival.