Environmental Virtue Ethics

Environmental ethics is concerned with the articulation and defence of what I shall call 'the green belief-the belief, namely, that a fairly radical change in the way we engage with nature is imperative. Environmental virtue ethics, then, is concerned with articulating and defending the green belief in virtue ethics terms, rather than in the terms of its two rivals, utilitarianism and deontology. This chapter is about what an environmental virtue ethics might be like. I consider two significantly different ver­ sions. First, we might have an environmental virtue ethics that seeks to articulate and defend the green belief in terms of old and familiar virtues and vices that are given a new interpretation when applied to the new field of our relations with nature. The second version goes beyond the first by introducing one or two new virtues, explicitly concerned with our relations with nature. (Note, in the description ofboth versions. a stress on the 'new'. It is pretty much agreed ground amongst environmental ethi­ cists that the truth of the green belief calls for 'a new ethic', but just how new, and new in just what way remains unclear and extremely tendentious.)