Ethics in practice: navigating moral complexity in energy transitions

The energy transition involves value-laden choices and moral dilemmas that can reproduce or reshape inequalities. Beyond environmental justice, questions of individual and collective responsibility are central to social science debates. This article aims to contribute to the literature on energy ethics by advancing a pragmatist sociological perspective and by clarifying how ethical meanings and justifications are enacted within energy transition processes. It elaborates on this topic from a non-normative critical stance, adopting an analytical approach to unravel the plurality of moral registers that assertive justice frameworks tend to reify. Ethics is conceived as a situated, relational, and dynamic dimension of the transition, emerging through the negotiation of moral values in everyday practices, organisational strategies, institutional arrangements, and policy processes. These unfold in contexts shaped by power relations, historical legacies, and socio-technical imaginaries. Within them, actors mobilise different principles of justification, reflecting a plurality of orders of worth and competing visions of the common good. Ethical and justice-related concerns are thus not externally applied but enacted through practices and reflexive engagement. This perspective highlights the plurality of normative orientations and the tensions involved in translating them into experience, clarifying how ethics and justice are constituted in the energy transition.