Abstract
This essay offers a critical assessment of environmental virtue ethics (EVE). Finding an environmental ethical analogy with Hume’s critique of the sensible knave, I argue that EVE is limited in much the same way as morality is on the Humean view. Advocates of nonanthropocentrism will find it difficult to engage those whose virtues comport them to anthropocentrism. Nonetheless, EVE is able to ground confidence in nonanthropocentric virtues by explicating specific key virtues, thereby holding open the possibility of bridging the motivational gap between anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism.
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Notes
One noteworthy sticking point concerns skepticism with respect to character (Doris 2002). Speculatively, virtue ethics can still make significant use of virtue language for describing enduring moral motivations traditionally ascribed to character, if this concept is eliminable. Such a response is arguably consistent with Hume’s account of virtue.
There is significant divergence on whether and to what extent Hume is a virtue ethicist, and utilitarian and contractarian readings abound. Among those who have drawn insight from Hume on the virtues, Christine Swanton makes use of Humean criteria for determining virtue (Swanton 2003) and more recently has made a compelling case for how to read Hume directly as a virtue theorist (Swanton 2007).
Ronald Sandler provides an especially clear discussion of action and virtue in chapter four of Character and Environment (Sandler 2007).
What the virtue ethical approach can do is use virtues like helpfulness to make the nonanthropocentric worldview more intelligible. For example, many people can understand how biological corridors “help” migratory species. That they care to help such species, however, is to actually inhabit the worldview.
Annette Baier thinks Hume overstates his case here. Most things we acquire are not, strictly speaking, worthless. “Wealth is not worthless” (Baier 1992).
Hume includes prudence among the natural virtues, valued for reducing the effects of contingency on one’s prosperity. Prudence also encourages one to follow local custom (Hume 1978).
Welchman’s argument also assumes that a Humean theory of human nature, if correct, would preclude nonanthropocentrism from ever gaining normative force. Part of this stems from Welchman’s strong internalist reading of Hume on moral value. It is not clear, however, why internalism should necessarily prevent an agent from responding to intuitions of value, especially those associated with the possession of virtues as in Hume’s case. Difficulties with his position notwithstanding, Callicott has at least articulated one way in which subjectivism can accommodate the notion of nonanthropocentric intrinsic value (Callicott 1989). For a discussion of the implications of Humean subjectivism for environmental ethics that develops these within the context of Hume’s theory of virtue, see Haught (2006).
In qualifying this observation, he notes, “No theory of environmental ethics is going to have an overwhelming effect on people’s environmentally related behavior,” referring to data indicating that other factors—e.g., behavioral, resource-contingent, and structural—are often greater impediments to moral development than failure to appreciate environmental values (Sandler 2007).
Sandler’s differential compassion is indeed distinct from what he calls extensionist compassion, but both are arguably nonanthropocentric. The difference, as he describes it, is that extensionist compassion supports decisions to intervene to stop the suffering of nonhumans even when the source of the suffering is not anthropogenic (Sandler 2007).
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Haught, P. Hume’s Knave and Nonanthropocentric Virtues. J Agric Environ Ethics 23, 129–143 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-009-9188-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-009-9188-z