Research On Animal Ethics From The Perspective Of Environmental Virtue Ethics

In recent years, more and more cruel ways treatment of animals, resulting in a sharp decline of a lot of animal species and even many endangered animal species are threatened with extinction. Because of this situation, more and more environmental protection and animal protection movements have been appeared, and animal ethics has become the focus of scholars at home and abroad. In from the perspective of the traditional environmental ethics which from natural logic as a starting point, we have formed by Peter Singer is representative of "animal liberation" and Tom Reagan’s "animal rights" animal ethics thoughts.All of the theories tell us to put animals into the object of moral concern and take the test with rational animal ethical issues. But these theories of animal ethics are mainly through the establishment of a universal code of conduct and ethical requirements in order to ask people to carry out and determine people’s behavior “right” or “wrong”. Therefore the theories are the behaviorism ethics.People must obey these principles. However,when they understand and follow the moral requirements,people still ask “why should I do this”?Therefore, this article describes the main theory of animal ethics and analysis the plight of the existing animal ethics theory. And then put forward environment of virtue ethics from the perspective of animal ethics which is more suitable for China’s actual.And based on the core virtues of animal ethics, which is based on the environmental virtue ethics, it lists some virtues that people should have to treat the animal, such as kindness, humility, restraint and reverence for life.As the environmental virtue is the intrinsic quality, it is the improvement of the moral character of the citizen. Therefore,this paper finally put forward the realization path of the core virtues of animal ethics,including the moral subject’s virtue cultivation and the external civilization environment.As a new perspective based on environmental virtue ethics, animal ethics is not to replace the traditional animal ethics theory, but only to extend the insight into the traditional ethics.Therefore,a complete animal ethics must both have virtue ethics and normative ethics vision research methods, they are two different side of animal ethics and they are complementary. And they promote the development of animal ethics in practice jointly.