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Patriotism as an Environmental Virtue

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Abstract

Define “patriotism” as love for one’s country and devotion to its well-being. This essay contends that patriotism thus defined is a virtue and that environmentalism is one of its most important manifestations. Patriotism, as devotion to particular places and people, can occur at various levels, from the local to the national. Knowing and caring about particular places and people and working to protect them is good for us and good for them and hence a good thing overall. Knowing and caring and working less on behalf of more remote places and people is also good, since it allows us to focus our efforts, act effectively, and do more good in the world. Philosophical analyses of patriotism by Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum are complemented by the more “down to earth” understanding of the virtue presented here. While patriotism’s dangers are undeniable, so are the dangers stemming from lack of patriotism. The proper answer to bad patriotism is not cosmopolitanism, but good patriotism: the kind illustrated by environmental activists.

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Notes

  1. Miller (1998) usefully distinguishes differential concern from differential valuation of people: “on the face of it, according equal value to different people’s lives does not entail equal concern for them” (p. 207). Pace Gomberg (1990) and other critics, patriotism involves greater concern for compatriots, but not necessarily a belief in their superiority.

  2. It is of course possible to help people locally or (less often, perhaps) work to protect local places, based on strongly held universalistic moral principles. So every instance of locally-focused altruism does not constitute patriotism, as I’ve defined it. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to define patriotism as action taken with no reference to such universal moral principles or ideals. People often appear to be motivated by particular loves and universal principles, in one and the same commendatory act.

  3. Conservatives also often use patriotic symbols as means to score cheap political points; witness the flap, during the 2008 US presidential campaign, over Barack Obama’s missing flag pin. Such episodes lend credence to charges that patriotism is only for dolts and those who want to control them.

  4. Here I disagree with McCabe (1997), who writes: “patriotism requires… that one believe one’s nation is better, and for this reason deserves more” than other nations (pp. 207–208).

  5. I thus substantially agree with Nathanson (1989) when he writes: “the proper answer to the question, Is patriotism a virtue? is that the moral value of patriotism depends on the circumstances in which patriotism is exhibited and the actions that it motivates. When patriotism is in the service of valuable ends and is limited to morally legitimate means of attaining them, then it is a virtue. When patriotism leads to support of immoral ends or immoral means to achieve otherwise legitimate ends, then it is a vice” (p. 539). If I understand Nathanson correctly, however, I am unlike him in leaving it an open question, whether universal or particular moral commitments should prevail, in particular instances when they conflict. See Schmidtz (1997) for a searching discussion of this issue.

  6. My understanding of the connection between environmentalism and patriotism has been greatly influenced by Nelson (2002).

  7. As applied to the United States, this locally-focused description of “environmentalists” leaves out some top leaders and staff members of large environmental organizations working primarily at the national level, and a few thousand dedicated souls focused on issues far from home (sending high-tech cooking stoves to poor people overseas, for example, to cut back on deforestation and indoor air pollution). But the description does capture the vast majority of serious environmental activists: the backbone of the environmental movement.

  8. “Who cares,” you might ask, “whether environmentalism is life-affirming and personally enriching? Environmentalists’ goal should be to convince people to behave in more environmentally responsible ways—not to make people feel good.” I answer, first, that if doing good doesn’t feel good, or isn’t part of larger changes in our lives that improve them, we are less likely to do good. Many environmental examples could be given. Second, that on my view, virtue proves itself by furthering the flourishing of life, including the flourishing of the virtuous person’s own life. For a general defense of such an environmental virtue ethics, see Cafaro (2005).

  9. Keller (2007), who builds on MacIntyre’s analysis of patriotism as part of a family of “loyalty” virtues, makes this same mistake, when he essentially defines patriotism as a form of self-delusion or “bad faith” regarding one’s country’s good and bad qualities. By defining patriotism as an intellectual disability, Keller sets up a straw man, easily dismissed as a vice. But such trumped-up charges can be made against any of our particular moral commitments. The fact that some parents foolishly see only the good in their children, or even the fact (if it is a fact) that most parents are more inclined to see the good rather than the bad in them, hardly argues against parental commitment—given the importance of such commitment to human well-being. Similar considerations speak for a committed patriotism, because such commitment is the foundation for successful communities and societies. Of course, real patriots must be thinking patriots, just as good parents are thinking parents. Any virtue devolves into vice, when stripped of all reason.

  10. Interestingly, Nussbaum, Gomberg (1990, p. 148), McCabe (1997, p. 218), and others often couple their criticisms of patriotism with demands that wealthy Westerners give more charity to poor people in the developing world. I’m sympathetic to the latter point; some increase in development aid for the world’s poor does seem morally demanded today. But I think this way of asking for it, by disparaging the rights and responsibilities of particular citizenship, disrespects the humanity of everyone involved. It turns wealthy Westerners into cash machines and paints poor southerners as incompetent children, with neither the ability nor the responsibility for governing themselves.

  11. For a more detailed discussion of Thoreau and patriotism, see Cafaro (2004), pp. 198–204. For a full account of Thoreau’s environmental ethics, see the chapter titled “Nature” in the same volume. Many thanks to Ron Sandler, Kris Cafaro and two anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, for detailed comments which greatly improved this paper. Thanks also to audiences at Colorado College, Colorado State University and the University of Tulsa, whose comments also helped focus and improve the final version.

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Cafaro, P. Patriotism as an Environmental Virtue. J Agric Environ Ethics 23, 185–206 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-009-9189-y

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