By analogy, a flourishing human life requires the moral capacity to value, love, respect, and care for the non-human natural world as an end in itself

Finally, as an alternative to consequentialism and deontology both of which consider “thin” concepts such as “goodness” and “rightness” as essential to morality, virtue ethics proposes to understand morality—and assess the ethical quality of actions—in terms of “thick” concepts such as “kindness”, “honesty”, “sincerity” and “justice”. These, and other excellent traits of character are virtues (see the entry on virtue ethics). As virtue ethics speaks quite a different language from the other tw