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    Virtue ethics need not be unavoidably anthropocentric and... — Carmelics
    Home/Environmental Ethics
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Virtue ethics need not be unavoidably anthropocentric and can support genuine moral concern for the non-human environment

    Environmental Ethics
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.A flourishing human life requires genuine friendships, which require valuing friends for their own sake and not merely instrumentally
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    • 2.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
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    • 3.Genuine concern for nature as an end in itself is not reducible to human self-interest
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    Reasons Against

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    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Aristotelian virtue ethics grounds the virtues in the specific ergon (function) of human beings as rational, political animals.
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    • 2.Virtues are excellences relative to the characteristic activities of the kind of being one is, making their normative scope species-relative by definition.
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    • 3.Therefore, extending virtue to non-human nature requires abandoning the teleological eudaimonist framework that makes virtue ethics coherent, not merely expanding it.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.The friendship analogy (philia) that grounds concern for nature presupposes reciprocity: Aristotle's highest philia requires mutual recognition and shared rational life.
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    • 2.Non-human nature lacks the capacity for reciprocal recognition, rational deliberation, or shared conception of the good required for genuine philia.
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    • 3.Without reciprocity, 'love of nature' collapses into a projective sentiment that remains grounded in human psychological flourishing, not nature's intrinsic value—confirming anthropocentrism rather than escaping it.
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    Environmental Ethics

    Related

    A flourishing human life requires genuine friendships, which require valuing fri...Aristotelian virtue ethics grounds the virtues in the specific ergon (function) ...By analogy, a flourishing human life requires the moral capacity to value, love,...Genuine concern for nature as an end in itself is not reducible to human self-in...
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    Non-human nature lacks the capacity for reciprocal recognition, rational deliber...The friendship analogy (philia) that grounds concern for nature presupposes reci...Therefore, extending virtue to non-human nature requires abandoning the teleolog...Virtues are excellences relative to the characteristic activities of the kind of...Without reciprocity, 'love of nature' collapses into a projective sentiment that...

    Similar

    Environmental ethics requires attributing moral concern to non-sentien...85%Utilitarian ethics cannot straightforwardly serve as an adequate envir...83%The moral reasoning that applies to individual natural entities applie...75%Utilitarian ethics is limited to attributing intrinsic value to pleasu...75%

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    SEP: ethics-environmental
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    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
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    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit