Reading Group: Environmental Virtue Ethics II, Environmental Virtues

Modern environmental ethics is crucial for the global response to ecological crises and demands attention of researchers, decision-makers, students, and stakeholders – all of whom we welcome to join this reading group. At the same time, environmental ethics is a vast field with an abundance of debates that cannot easily be reduced one single and over-arching discourse. These debates pursue different and sometimes complementary strategies in the green transition. Some debates focus on structural issues located at the national, regional or global level — for instance, the on-going debate about global climate justice. Other debates focus on issues keyed to individuals: Given that several problems in the ecological crisis are caused by the choices and actions made by individuals, it is important to the solution of the crisis that future choices and actions of individuals change. In other words, we need to change. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but it is probably fair to say that the former is much better known in Scandinavian debates about green transition than the latter, even though the latter is highly relevant. In this open reading group, we read a series of texts belonging to this latter group.

Virtue ethics was first developed in ancient Greek philosophy, notably by Aristotle. Over the last decades, it has been revived as an ethical theory that regards character traits, or virtues, as central to the ethical value of the choices and actions made by individuals. Examples of character traits are care and curiosity. This theory also holds that character traits can change over time, because they are formed by habituation, which is changeable. Environmental virtue ethics adopts this theory to the environment by asking: Which character traits are climate-friendly? Which of our daily practices support climate-friendly character traits through habituation? How can we become motivated to act in a climate-friendly manner? Environmental virtue ethics has emerged as an important ethical theory in the US and Canada over the past fifteen years but it has not yet enjoyed much attention in Scandinavia. We read texts by authors that have been instrumental to environmental virtue ethics, namely Aldo Leopold, Philip Cafaro and Ronald Sandler, and we end by reading a text that applies environmental virtue ethics on pedagogy. Among the strengths of environmental virtue ethics one can mention that it is keyed to practices of ordinary human beings in a variety of settings (urban landscapes; food production and consumption; pedagogy etc.), and that it offers a human-centered framework and language that is missing in the current discourse about green transition, which is dominated technological and legislative language. The hope is that people from different scientifical fields and different practical contexts will join the group.