Environmental Ethics In The Perspective Of Virtue Ethics

This essay mainly represents the exploration to the ethical relationships between human beings and nature from the perspective of virtue ethics. The traditional virtue ethics provide a new approach for people to protect environment. In the 1980s, Thomas Hill, the professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill earlier introduced the approach of virtue ethics to the environmental ethics, systematically expounding his thoughts of environmental virtues, who developed his main category of environmental virtue-"proper humility". Proper humility requires the people to value things for their own sake independent of their utility for human beings. Hill inspires the movement to environmental virtue theorizing. By the 1990s, Geoffrey Frasz, the professor of philosophy at the Community College of Southern Nevada in the United States, took up the ideology of Hill, who explicitly pointed out that environmental virtue ethics is a new direction for environmental ethics. Frasz developed another category of environmental virtue-"benevolence", who systematically studied the benevolence as environmental virtues. Benevolence is also an excellent trait regarding the interactions with the nature, which makes flourishing in an expanded, mixed community of biotic and abiotic features possible.What the thought of environmental virtues in the western concerns is "what sort of person would destroy the natural environment", which is different from the central contents that environmental ethics based on the utilitarianism and deontology concerns. The utilitarianism and deontology mainly concern the action of human beings, so does environmental ethics based on them, in other words, concerning "why certain acts destructive of natural environments are morally wrong?" However, The utilitarianism and deontology exist some theoretical predicaments. For example, there is the problem of calculation of interest for the utilitarianims, and it is likely for the deontology to generate duty conflicts when appearing more than one duty. Therefore, environmental ethics based on the utilitarianism and deontology inevitably facing the same problems. Different from the act-centered environmental ethics, what the thought of environmental virtues concerns is the traits of human beings, not interest or duty, so which can avoid the theoretical predicaments of the act-centered environmental ethics.Apart from being theoretically superior to the act-centered environmental ethics, the thought of environmental virtues can also play an important role in the practice. For example, environmental virtues oppose consumerism. Consumerism pursues unlimited consumption, which can not only harm human beings, but also can harm the environment, as well as promoting recognized vices. Because environmental virtues oppose consumerism, environmentally virtuous person will reduce the destruction of the environment. In view of the practice of environmental virtues, we should cultivate environmental virtues. It involves five conditions to achieve environmental virtues as follows:First, stamping out vices with laws; second, with proper view of viewpoint on hardship and happiness;third, following environmental role models; fourth, with proper view of nature; fifth, implementing environmental education.Finally, this essay represents the importance of the thought of environmental virtues to the environmental ethics. It is a new attempt to build harmony between human beings and nature for concerning the nature from the perspective of virtues.