Spring 2016 77

The Turn to Virtue in Climate Ethics:

Wickedness and Goodness
in the Anthropocene
Willis Jenkins*

Ethicists regularly turn to virtue in order to negotiate features of climate change that seem
to overwhelm moral agency. Appeals to virtue in climate ethics differ by how they connect
individual flourishing with collective responsibilities and by how they interpret Anthropo­
cene relations. Differences between accounts of climate virtue help critique proposals to
reframe global ecological problems in terms of resilience and planetary stewardship, the
intelligibility of which depends on connecting what would be good for the species with what
would be good for an individual life. A pragmatic way of establishing that connection may
need a strong role for respect of nature.

INTRODUCTION

Does climate change alter what it means to live a good life? Does living a good
life matter for responses to climate change? The complexity of global ecological
problems and chronic failure to adequately respond to them have prompted some
ethicists to turn toward virtue. In the face of predicaments that seem to overwhelm
moral agency, perhaps retrieving virtues portends that the consolations of living well
are all that remain to ethics. Or, more hopefully, perhaps the turn anticipates that
reconfigured practices of living well can open new possibilities of moral agency.
Either way, virtues are being used to interpret the expansion of human power into
planetary ecological systems and its meaning for pursuits of a moral life.
In this essay, I follow two lines of inquiry in order to explain how theorists employ
virtue ideas to negotiate features of climate change that seem to overwhelm moral
agency. First, how do individual lives matter (if they do) for the flourishing or failure
of humanity as a species? Some appeals to virtue focus on the character of the spe-
cies (e.g., planetary stewardship), some on goods that individuals should realize in
their own lives (e.g., simplicity), and sometimes they slide between the two registers.
Using virtue across scales of agency raises the possibility that new ecological roles
for the species exert pressure on how the goods of an individual life are interpreted.

* Department of Religious Studies, P.O. Box 400126, Charlottesville, VA 22904–4126; email: willis.
jenkins@virginia.edu. Jenkins’s research interests involve the intersections of religious ethics and the
environmental humanities. His most recent work is on global ethics, usually focusing on climate eth-
ics and questions about morality in Anthropocene conditions. He is the author of two award-winning
books: The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity (Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown, 2013) and Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). He is the editor with Mary Evelyn Tucker and John
Grim of the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (New York: Routledge, 2016).

77
78 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 38

Second, do the virtues offer ways of (merely) coping with anthropogenic trouble,
or do they open ways to develop responsibility and find value in planetary relations?
Whether turning to virtue is pessimistic or hopeful matters for debate over the idea
of the Anthropocene. If pessimistic, the Anthropocene appears as an epoch in which
human domination at the species level undermines moral freedom at the individual
level. If hopeful, anthropogenic changes may stimulate humans to develop new
responsibilities and rethink the form of a good human life.
In this essay, I develop those two inquiries by critiquing uses of virtue in recent
climate ethics. I show how ethicists appeal to virtue in order to negotiate features
of “wickedness” and “incompetence” that seem to defeat moral agency, and explain
why tensions arise between their accounts due to differing ways of connecting
an individual life with species-level agency and due to divergent evaluations of
Anthropocene relations. Tensions between accounts of climate virtue, in turn, help
critique proposals to reframe global ecological problems in terms of resilience,
Buen Vivir, and planetary stewardship—each of which draws on virtue-related
ideas. The intelligibility of those proposals, I argue, depends on connecting what
would be good for a life with what would be good for the species. Because the
latter consideration is unusual with regard to classical virtue ethics, a successful
account needs to explain how and why views of flourishing may change in view
of planetary relations. In the end, I argue that the conduct of one’s life may matter
for interpreting the meaning of climate change and, conversely, that interpreta-
tions of humanity’s emerging planetary role can bear on notions of how to live a
life well. Climate ethics, therefore, rightly includes a focus on practices through
which persons realize goods of an individual life because those practices can help
renegotiate the possibilities of flourishing amidst systemic perils.

WICKEDNESS

Ian McEwan’s darkly comic novel, Solar, helps depict why turning to virtue to
face a planetary problem seems an odd strategy.1 Its central character, a scientist
developing a revolutionary form of clean energy, is himself a puerile mess. An anx-
ious glutton entangled in affairs and suspicious deaths, he becomes a climate leader
only because he steals the breakthrough idea that brings him fame and wealth. In
Solar, it is not denialists and petro-capitalists whose character appears most repul-
sive; it is the would-be heroes. In one scene, which McEwan has said depicts one
of his own experiences, a group of artists, scientists, and other “thought-leaders”
spend a fortnight aboard a ship moored in Arctic ice. The venture intends to inspire
the leaders to create new ways of leading humanity into climate responsibility by
building community in the imperiled landscape. However, as they venture forth
each day to seek inspiration, their equipment room becomes ever more slovenly.

1 Ian McEwan, Solar (New York: Anchor Books, 2010).

Spring 2016 THE TURN TO VIRTUE IN CLIMATE ETHICS 79

Despite repeated pleas for order, it falls into chaos and eventually they start taking
one another’s gear when they can no longer find their own, leading to finger-pointing
and recriminations.
The petty debacle of the equipment room captures McEwan’s pessimism about a
climate strategy that depends on awakening human character. As he has commented
elsewhere, “cleverness has got us into this problem and I don’t think virtue is likely
to get us out.”2 His novel might then be read as realist admonishment that exhorta-
tions for people to become better are pointless for responding to climate change.
Clearing the deck for economics to get to work on coercion without distraction
from ethics, Bill Nordhaus writes that “no realistic progress on climate change
will be achieved by hope, trust, responsible citizenship, environmental ethics, or
guilt.”3 So why bother with ethics, especially in such subjective form as appeals
to citizenship or hope?
Ethics is unavoidable because climate change is not only a very large commons
problem; it is a “wicked problem.” Wicked problems have no formal solution
because they have no definitive formulation, often because they involve puzzling
information, multiple scales, and stakeholder debates over what the problem
means.4 Without an obvious principle of a solution by which the problem could be
“tamed,” what would count as making realistic progress on climate change is an
irreducibly evaluative question. Mike Hulme, in Why We Disagree about Climate
Change, argues that the problem’s structural wickedness explains chronic political
stalemate. A planet-scaled problem without a definitive formulation involves evalu-
ative judgments about what the problems means, and those judgments inevitably
involve views about how humans should relate to one another, to nonhumans, and
to Earth.5
The unavoidability of ethics in fact compounds the problem’s wickedness by
delaying agreement on how to respond. Controversies over how to interpret global
fairness and historic inequality, for example, seem to impede international agree-
ment on shared responsibility. The consequent delay contributes to the cumulative
dynamics of the problem, such that evaluative disagreement intensifies anthropo-
genic forcing in the climate system. By frustrating agents and delaying agreement,
ethical argument itself seems to contribute to wickedness.

2 Quoted in Mike Hulme, “Climate Change and Virtue: An Apologetic,” Humanities 3 (2014): 300.
3 William Nordhaus, A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 20.
4 See Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy
Sciences 4 (1973): 155–69. The concept has been deployed by many climate theorists. In this essay, I
use ideas of wickedness and incompetence to help organize the shift to virtue to climate ethics without
fully explaining why they are suitable, which I have done elsewhere; see Willis Jenkins, Future of Eth-
ics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity (Washington, D.C.: Georgtown University
Press, 2013).
5 Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climage Change (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2009), pp. 334–37.
80 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 38

One reason to turn from debates over principles of fairness to focus instead on
virtue and vice is that doing so may allow climate ethics to confront its own con-
tribution to wickedness. Stephen Gardiner examines perverse feedback between
structural wickedness and the corruption of moral judgment to help explain why
climate change appears overwhelming. “Climate change is a perfect moral storm,”
he writes; like the three storms that converged in the North Atlantic to doom the
fishing vessel Andrea Gail, climate change involves “the convergence of a number
of factors that threaten our ability to behave ethically. . . . Their interaction helps
to exacerbate and obscure a lurking problem of moral corruption that may be of
greater practical importance than any of them.”6 Gardiner sketches a global com-
mons tragedy, an intergenerational commons tragedy, and theoretical ineptitude,
concluding that the convergence of those “storms” makes agents liable to the sort
of vices that undermine responsibility—complacency, self-deception, false witness,
hypocrisy, and others. Wickedness breeds vice (to put it glibly), which permits
complexity to excuse chronic irresponsibility.
Gardiner’s metaphor of the “perfect moral storm” has proven irresistible to
other ethicists describing the challenges posed by climate change.7 However, his
analysis is so strong that it can overwhelm the point of appealing to ethics at all,
since feedbacks of wickedness and vice appear to swamp possibilities of moral
agency. Is responsibility as doomed as the Andrea Gail? Perhaps sensing that his
reader may be discouraged about the prospects for moral action by the end of his
analysis, as he nears the conclusion of his book, Gardiner writes that ethics has
the task of “bearing witness to serious wrongs even when there is little hope of
change.” He appeals to a pattern of action that would be good for agents to adopt,
even if avoiding a bad outcome seems impossible.8 Here virtue seems to offer tragic
consolation: when responsibility becomes impossible, one can at least exercise
integrity by bearing witness to humanity’s failure.
But Gardiner is not actually that pessimistic. His final word in the book is a redoubled
appeal to “ethical motivation,” calling for moral agents to develop the resources to
address and even “neutralize” the perfect moral storm. Gardiner suggests that good
character can forestall and counteract the way wickedness foments vice. Yet, in the
face of his analysis compelling analysis of moral corruption, can good character re-
ally make a difference with regard to responsibility for climate change?
In a short section of the book and an article beyond it, Gardiner debates that ques-
tion in exchange with Dale Jamieson. For decades Jamieson has argued that climate
change presents a “fundamental challenge to our values” because our inherited
moral systems developed in low-population and low-technology societies.9 The

6 Stephen Gardiner, “A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the
Problem of Moral Corruption,” Environmental Values 15 (2006): 399.
7 Including Mike Hulme, Dale Jamieson, Allen Thompson, and myself.
8 Stephen Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 437
(emphasis added).
9 Dale Jamieson, “Ethics, Public Policy and Global Warming,” Science, Technology, and Human
Values 17 (1992): 151.
Spring 2016 THE TURN TO VIRTUE IN CLIMATE ETHICS 81

problems of a dense, global, technological society elude the conventional paradigm

of responsibility, which is organized around discrete acts of harm. Where inher-
ited notions of responsibility organize around discrete acts like Jack stealing Jill’s
bike, says Jamieson, climate change is more like this: “Jack and a large number of
unacquainted people set in motion a chain of events that causes a large number of
future people who will live in another part of the world from ever having bikes.”10
Because it is difficult to identify particular agents and particular victims and even
more difficult to connect them within a clear causal nexus, argues Jamieson, by the
lights of conventional morality “today we may face the possibility that the global
environment may be destroyed, yet no one will be responsible.”11
On that account of the relations involved in climate change, ethics faces what
Mary Midgley has called a “conceptual emergency,” in which indignation over the
destructiveness of humanity’s relation to Earth may be widespread, yet nonetheless
unintelligible within moral systems tailored for person-to-person interactions. In
the absence of adequate concepts, agents will fail to envision possibilities of acting
well.12 So Midgley and Jamieson think that without developing duties to Earth,
ethics cannot fully account for the wrongness in anthropogenic climate change nor
tutor the commitments of agents responding to it.
Although Gardiner’s perfect moral storm includes “theoretical ineptitude,” he
disagrees that rescuing moral agency requires constructing new duties and rela-
tions. The concepts we already have, he argues, sufficiently reveal that inaction on
climate involves more ordinary moral failures. “Perhaps the concepts apply, but
we just don’t want to follow them.”13 It is not for lack of the right concepts that
human agents are not motivated to take action on climate change; the failure lies
in ordinary vices such as hypocrisy and sloth.
Attending to ordinary vices may then allow climate ethics to better make clear
why people fail to do what they should and to help them do better. Investigating
complacency, Michael Doan argues that “philosophers should understand multiple
forms of motivational inertia from within a general framework of motivational
vices.” For Doan, doing so requires inquiring beneath ordinary vices to investigate
“the relational dynamics and structural processes that foster, sustain, and enforce
various forms of motivational inertia.”14 Uncovering those dynamics makes agents
responsible for recognizing and changing the dynamics which make them become
complacent. It turns out, Doan argues, that the genesis of political vice is strongly

10 Dale Jamieson “Climate Change, Responsibility, and Justice,” Science and Engineering Ethics
16, no. 3 (2010): 436.
11 Jamieson, “Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming,” p. 149.
12 Mary Midgley, “Individualism and the Concept of Gaia” in How Might We Live? Global Ethics
in a New Century, ed. Ken Booth, Tim Dunne, and Michael Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 40.
13 Stephen Gardiner, “Is No One Responsible for Global Environmental Tragedy? Climate Change
as a Challenge to Our Ethical Concepts,” in The Ethics of Global Climate Change, ed. Denis Arnold
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 57.
14 Michael Doan, “Climate Change and Complacency,” Hypatia 29, no. 3 (2014): 636.
82 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 38

correlated with participation in the mechanisms that reproduce political domination.

“Those with privilege and power manage to prevent one another from participating
in ongoing efforts to go on differently, stifling cultivation of the courage, humility,
vigilance, and love we urgently need to avoid global catastrophe.”15
Political conflict may be frustrating, then, but it does not release one from respon-
sibility. Investigating it may uncover reasons to change one’s life, but not to doubt
one’s ethical concepts. Democratic political institutions assume that citizens delegate
their responsibility to deal with some problems to representative institutions. When
the institutions fail, the responsibility of the citizenry does not evaporate, argues
Gardiner: “. . . if the attempt to delegate effectively has failed, then the responsibil-
ity falls back on the citizens again, either to solve the problems themselves, or if
this is not possible, to create new institutions to do the job.”16 Wickedness helps
explain why institutions fail and agents become complacent, but it does not excuse
irresponsibility because it does not exceed their competence. Appeals to virtue and
vice can therefore function to confirm and underscore responsibility. In answer to
my first basic inquiry, Gardiner and Doan provide an account of why individual
virtues contribute to collective action on climate change.
As Gardiner defends that account, however, he opens it to a liability of a dif-
ferent inquiry. In defending his appeal to virtue from the criticisms such as those
of Jamieson and Midgley that adequate responsibility needs respect for nature,
Gardiner begins to move across scales of agency by incorporating into his account
of personal agency an understanding of a species-level change in humanity’s re-
lationship to ecological systems. “The basic idea is that we should consider our
relationship to the wider world, and in particular the natural world, as part of an
understanding of our own agency.”17 Now his virtue of responsible citizenship is
indexed to a figure of humanity adapting well to its new role in planetary systems.
But what if an ethicist thinks that species-level adaptation seems unlikely and that
global catastrophe has already begun to unfold? In that case, the courage, humility,
and love to which Doan appeals may not matter for solving the problem, although
they might have a role in helping agents cope with new conditions. What virtue can
accomplish depends on a second basic inquiry: are appeals to virtue pessimistic or
hopeful about the emergent human role in planetary systems?

INCOMPETENCE

In a book culminating twenty-five years of writing on climate change, Jamieson’s

title broadcasts his pessimistic mood: Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle
against Climate Change Failed. The book explains why climate change overwhelmed
our abilities to prevent it and how persons might cope with the world being remade
by that failure. So Jamieson thinks that humanity’s ineptitude goes deeper than

15 Doan, “Climate Change and Complacency,” p. 647.

16 Gardiner, “Is No One Responsible?” p. 54.
17 Ibid., p. 56.
Spring 2016 THE TURN TO VIRTUE IN CLIMATE ETHICS 83

analyses of vice permit. “Our failure to prevent or even to respond significantly to

climate change reflects the impoverishment of our systems of practical reason, the
paralysis of our politics, and the limits of our cognitive and affective capacities.
None of this is likely to change soon.”18 The deep reason for political paralysis,
Jamieson suggests, lies in overwhelmed capacities of moral cognition and practical
reason.
Criticism of existing moral concepts would seem to fall under Gardiner’s storm
of “theoretical ineptitude.” Because our best moral and political theories cannot
deal with fundamental aspects of climate change, Gardiner writes, “we are currently
‘inept,’ in the (non-pejorative) sense of lacking the skills and basic competence
for the task.”19 But in argument with Jamieson, Gardiner pulls back from the posi-
tion that conventional moralities may be incompetent because he wants to avoid
Jamieson’s implication that, by the light of those concepts, agents may not be held
responsible for climate change.
Unimpressed by Gardiner’s attempt to rescue responsibility, Jamieson repeats
the challenge to practical reason posed by a problem in which the aggregate effect
of many independent actions becomes part of a chain of events that worsens condi-
tions for distant persons. That sort of problem simply does not appear as an issue of
responsibility within conventional moral frameworks.20 Jamieson then deepens the
predicament by turning to evolutionary explanations for why climate change does
not stimulate moral responses. “Our biological endowment makes it difficult for us
to solve or even recognize this kind of problem,” writes Jamieson. “Evolution built
us to respond to rapid movements of middle-sized objects, not to the slow buildup
of insensible gases in the atmosphere. Most of us respond dramatically to what we
sense, not to what we think.”21 Evidence from cognitive psychology shows that
probabilistic issues involving indirect causation fail to trigger motivating moral
emotions. When wrongness and responsibility become visible only after several
steps of reasoned analysis, the brain does not light up with motivating indignation
or repugnance.22 The moral psychology of humanity is so ill-equipped for the
moral problems of a high-technology, high-density planet, argues Julian Savulesco,
that we should create “biomedical means of moral enhancement” to overcome the
feebleness of our moral minds. Developing collective responsibilities for problems
that threaten future generations and nonhuman life, on his view, probably requires
genetic and pharmacological therapies for individual moral incompetence.23

18 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why The Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—And What
It Means for Our Future (New York: Oxford University Press 2014), p. 8.
19 Gardiner, Perfect Moral Storm, p. 41.
20 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, pp. 144–50.
21 Ibid., pp. 61, 4.
22 Jamieson cites Kahneman, Gilbert, and Haidt to his view; Reason in a Dark Time, pp. 103, 168.
See also E. M. Markowitz and A. F. Shariff, “Climate Change and Moral Judgement,” Nature Climate
Change 2, no. 4 (2012): 243–47.
23 Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 2.

84 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 38

Others extend the analysis of incompetence from cognitive processes to cultural

repertories. With religious ethics in view, I have written that incompetence holds
“when the moral practices and concepts available to a community do not encompass
the scale or complexity of the situation to which an agent or community needs to
respond.”24 Bruno Latour holds a similar view: where once the idea of agency
marked out the human from nature, now humanity finds itself acted upon by systems
circulating human agency with many other powers in threatening combinations.
The consequence is that “people are not equipped with the mental and emotional
repertoire to deal with such a vast scale of events. . . . they have difficulty submit-
ting to such a rapid acceleration for which, in addition, they are supposed to feel
responsible.”25 The cultural “equipment” for climate responsibility seems missing
from the set of practical strategies available to agents by their culture.
In either form, cognitive or cultural, the diagnosis of incompetence does not
impugn moral agents in the way that the discourse of vice does; it rather explains
why agents feel overwhelmed by climate change. Failure is not fully attributable to
hypocrisy, injustice, or selfishness, in part because our brains have trouble calculat-
ing how climate change matters for our interests and those of others, and in part
because cultures struggle to make practical sense of the multiple scales of agency
involved. Humans simply may lack the moral equipment to develop responsibility
for a problem that emerges indirectly from cumulative, non-intentional effects of
otherwise acceptable practices of everyday life.
Diagnosing incompetence can seem to deflate motivation and increase incentives
to ignore the problem. Especially when made by theorists in the industrial North,
incompetence risks excusing complacency and obscuring political domination.
Ethicists might resist that hazard by appealing to practices by which agents may
develop new competencies, or they might instead begin by accepting a moral do-
main marked by failure and injustice. Latour observes that global anthropogenic
change has a tragic plot: humanity makes itself a role to play, yet arrives into it
too late to change its fate.26 If one interprets the species relation in tragic terms,
perhaps climate ethics turn to virtue to help agents find meaning amidst failure.
Jamieson’s appeal to virtue initially seems pessimistic. Reason in a Dark Time
opens with the premise that understanding why humans have failed to prevent cli-
mate change can help philosophy examine how to live in the world of that failure.
The Anthropocene appears as a perversely ironic epoch: the time of the human
arrives in the historical moment in which agents find themselves overwhelmed and
struggling to regain possibilities of human freedom. Jamieson looks to the virtues
to find ways of living meaningfully and humanely within anthropogenic planetary
change. “The virtues do not provide an algorithm for solving the problems of the

24 Willis Jenkins, “Atmospheric Powers, Global Injustice, and Moral Incompetence: Challenges to
Doing Social Ethics from Below,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 34, no. 1 (2014): 68.
25 Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45 (2014): 1.
26 Ibid., p. 13.
Spring 2016 THE TURN TO VIRTUE IN CLIMATE ETHICS 85

Anthropocene, but they can provide guidance for living gracefully while helping to
restore in us a sense of agency.”27 Cultivating character, it seems, allows individual
humans to flourish even when humanity as a species is failing.
Other theorists make a similar move, appealing to virtue not as ground for a
solution but as a way to find value in one’s own life amidst planetary troubles.
“Morality in an age of climate change, in other words, is not about ushering in a
new material reality but about forging a different kind of human being,” writes Paul
Wapner in Ethics and International Affairs, “one who acts according to principles
or deep-seated values of what constitutes the good life in the midst of climate
hardship, independent of a consequentialist calculus.” 28 To cultivate humanity in
the face of Anthropocene pressures, Marcello Di Paolo turns to gardening prac-
tices. “In a situation of unprecedented geo-power . . . characterised by non-linear
causation and planetary diffusion of responsibility,” he writes, the virtues available
in gardening “enable a deeper understanding and acceptance of our new station
within the wider workings of things and a reaffirmation of our human dignity.”29
For example, the sort of mindfulness developed in good gardening, says Di Paolo,
is apt for helping agents understand their participation in large causal networks. In
these appeals, virtue offers ways for individual persons to live a good life in the
midst of anthropogenic disaster, thereby developing personal resilience for a time
of unsolvable problems.
However, as the example of mindfulness suggests, virtues of personal resilience
may be connected to practices needed for social resilience. When Jamieson begins
to name specific virtues for living gracefully amidst failure, he selects patterns of
action that could, after all, improve conditions. Humility, temperance, and mindful-
ness offer character traits that feel meaningful in themselves and also dispose agents
to make the world better. “These are mechanisms that provide motivation to act
in our various roles from consumers to citizens in order to reduce GHG emissions
and to a great extent ameliorate their effects regardless of the behavior of others.”
Jamieson cheerfully owns this consequentialist rationale for virtue, arguing that
if agents cultivate humility and temperance for their own sake, then they will
adopt behaviors most likely to effect long-term change. “We are more likely to
succeed . . . by developing and inculcating the right virtues than by improving our
calculative abilities.” In answer to worries that individual action makes a negligible
difference to planetary dynamics, Jamieson argues that “our thought and action
can inspire others, change their lives, and even affect the course of history.”30
The function of virtues thus changes as Jamieson allows hope to brighten his dark

27 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, p. 8.

28 Paul Wapner “Ethical Enhancement in an Age of Climate Change,” Ethics and International Af-
fairs 28, no. (2014): 325–34.
29 Marcello Di Paolo, “Virtue for the Anthropocene,” Environmental Values 24, no. 2 (2015): 198–99.
30 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, pp. 186 and 182. See also Dale Jamieson, “When Utilitarians
Should be Virtue Theorists,” Utitlitas 19, no. 2 (2007): 160–83.
86 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 38

interpretation of Anthropocene relations. Virtues not only offer ways for persons
to find meaning in the midst of overwhelming problems, they also help develop
a culture that could become competent to its problems. Consider how Jamieson
incorporates respect for nature into his account of virtue. While he had previously
argued that respect for nature is a duty grounded in its difference from humanity,
Jamieson now accepts that the Anthropocene represents the end of nature as a realm
separate from human domination. So Jamieson re-establishes respect for nature
as a meaning-generating pattern of behavior important for a flourishing life. What
was an ecocentric duty in his early work, he reincorporates as a way of coping
gracefully with conditions brought about by human failure to observe that duty.
“Respect for nature is an important virtue that we should cultivate as part of an
ethics for the Anthropocene,” not only because it offers individuals “the resiliency
to live meaningful lives,” but also because it supports the precautionary prudence
that he thinks necessary for “maintaining human life on Earth”—for the resilience
of global society.31
The ambivalence in Jamieson’s appeals to virtue highlights a difficulty in think-
ing about climate ethics through the logic of virtue. Insofar as a theorist does not
have in view making a difference to a global outcome, virtue can help shift climate
ethics away from trying to solve a problem for which humans lack the competence,
and toward opportunities for a good life within changing conditions. However, as
Jamieson begins to suggest that the virtues can lead to better long-term states of
affairs for global society, his account floats away from a vision of what goods enable
individual persons to flourish toward a view of what behaviors would enable global
humanity to act more responsibly.32 Doing so recruits virtue to what Tal Brewer
calls a “world-making conception of agency” that stands at odds with a classical
account of virtue, which organizes around conceptions of what is good for human
persons rather than what their action could accomplish in external affairs.33 It is
unclear what virtue means in Jamieson’s account because he develops his concep-
tion of what is good for individual persons with a view to how that vision could
motivate people to make the world better.
The key tension arises as virtue moves across scales of agency, from the indi-
vidual to the species. While individual virtues can shift climate ethics away from
a domain of apparent incompetence to focus on resilience of individuals, because
Jamieson does not actually want to give up on global responsibility, he lets his
view of a better species relation to the planet by reinterpreting what it means for
an individual to live a good life. In other words, virtue for the species begins to
reshape virtue for individuals.

31 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, pp. 193, 186, 191.

32 Virtue arguments are not necessarily eudaimonist; it is possible to hold that virtues will not lead
to happiness or flourishing. I cannot engage the distinction here.
33 Tal Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 12.
Spring 2016 THE TURN TO VIRTUE IN CLIMATE ETHICS 87

VIRTUE FOR THE SPECIES?

Appeals to virtue may push ethical focus beyond personal forms of coping with
climate change to a grander challenge of the Anthropocene: who will humanity
become in its emerging planetary role? Focusing on a question like that, argues
Mike Hulme, lets climate change stimulate the mythopoeic, meaning-making
dimensions of culture through which humans rethink the patterns of a flourish-
ing life. If cultures were to take climate change as posing a fundamental question
about human purpose, then there is “the possibility that the ‘wickedness’ of climate
change as a problem demands a flowering of human ‘goodness.’”34
In fact, that sort of flowering may already be unfolding, although missed by
ethicists focused on failure and incompetence. “The remarkable thing,” writes
Sarah Krakoff,  “is that despite the potentially tragic structure of global warming
and the fact that warming’s effects fall disproportionately on poor people, other
species, and future generations, people all over the world, including the developed
world, are trying to do something about it.”35 Why do so many people participate in
local climate initiatives, none of which could seriously hope to alter a planet-wide
tragedy of the commons?
Krakoff suggests that agents are incorporating into their lives the new relations
represented in climate change and, as they do, cultivating new possibilities of self-
hood. “What all of this activity might reflect is a shift in the way that we conceive
of our role on the planet, and the identities that we are constructing to make our
lives have meaning.” As people respond to climate change, suggests Krakoff,
they begin to negotiate the new relations of humanity to its planet, seeking new
possibilities of purpose within them. When people join with others to reduce their
carbon emissions, “we are creating daily habits and rituals that make our lives feel
good and meaningful, irrespective of whether we will succeed at stabilizing our
greenhouse gas emissions.”36
That seems like a point apposite of Jamieson but then, in a crucial shift of scale,
Krakoff refers the real meaning of those habits and rituals to the level of the spe-
cies. Appeals to virtue of the sort we saw in Jamieson, thinks Krakoff, reflect “an
inchoate sense that positive environmental outcomes are more elusive than ever
before, and that we need a reason to be good that does not depend on them.”37 But
Krakoff sees a more fundamental consequence: she thinks that individual responses
to climate change help construct a new relational context in which new virtues might
be formed. All virtues take shape within specific relations and practices; responses
to climate change acknowledge new relations and invent new practices which in
turn shape new virtues. The shift is analogous, says Krakoff, to that which happens

34 Hulme, “Climate Change and Virtue,” p. 303.

35 Sarah Krakoff, “Parenting the Planet,” in The Ethics of Global Climate Change, ed. Denis Arnold
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 156.
36 Krakoff, “Parenting the Planet,” p. 162.
37 Ibid., p. 147.
88 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 38

to a young adult coming into the role of parent. Becoming a parent is not a virtue
in itself, but rather a dramatic new relational context that transforms a person’s
sense of purpose and identity, which in turn gives shape to a new set of virtues and
vices.
Krakoff imagines the Anthropocene relations as the human species maturing
into parenthood: neither good nor bad in itself, but rather a dramatic new relational
context in which to act well or badly. Of course, the metaphor of parenting falsifies
as much as it illuminates: humans have not given birth to a planet so much as we
have domesticated a previously wild planet which in fact gave birth to us. Despite
our moment of power over the Earth, humans remain totally dependent on the
nurturance of the biosphere, which will undoubtedly go on to give birth to other
forms of life after the death of humanity. Other attempts to model the relations
of Earth and humanity run into similar paradoxes. The “physician” whom Mary
Midgley and James Lovelock imagine healing Gaia is also, at the same time, the
illness from which she suffers.38 The “planetary steward” entrusted with Earth’s
care is also the primary threat from which Earth must be protected.
The real difficulty in those metaphorical figures is not their paradoxical dimen-
sions, however; it is the way they shift the register of virtue from the individual to
the species. When Krakoff refers the meaning of individual responses to a shift in
humanity’s relation to the planet, the figure of virtue becomes collective. Whatever
specific virtues parenting the planet might entail, they would not be habits real-
ized within individual action; the parenting virtues would be collective. Does it
make sense to talk about virtue for a species? And, if it does, how should virtue at
the species level inflect the behavior of individuals or their vision of a good life?
Krakoff slides between the two registers, suggesting that ideas of individual suc-
cess will change as persons identify with the relation of their species to the planet.
But why they should remains unclear; how would “good parenting” at the species
level affect the ways that individual persons seek to flourish?
Dipesh Chakrabarty puts the difficulty this way: the category of the species is
necessary for understanding how climate change poses a crisis; yet “we humans
never experience ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or
infer the existence of the humans species but never experience it as such. . . . Even
if we were to emotionally identify with a word like mankind, we would not know
what being a species is.”39 The virtues have their meaning within the experience
of a moral life, but no one experiences being a geological force, even though our
species has now become one.
Can ethics work in both registers simultaneously? For historians, Chakrabarty
argues that “the need arises to view the human simultaneously on contradictory
registers: as a geophysical force and as a political agent.”40 Climate ethics seems to

38 Midgley, “Individualism and the Concept of Gaia.”

39 Dipesh Chakrabarty “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 220.
40 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary
History 43, no. 1 (2012): 14.
Spring 2016 THE TURN TO VIRTUE IN CLIMATE ETHICS 89

need a similar capacity in order to recognize the way that agents belong to multiple,
contradictory scales of moral action. The agents involved in climate change are at
once individuals experiencing a changing world and “a figure of the universal that
escapes our capacity to experience the world.”41 Let me explain how the discourse
of planetary stewardship articulates a figure of the universal and then come back
to the question of its relation to an individual moral life.
Within the environmental sciences, a discourse of species-level virtue has
emerged in the frame of “planetary stewardship.” It shares the general strategy of
other appeals to virtue in climate ethics in that it focuses on a quality of practical
behavior rather than a standard of nature. Moving beyond the adaptive management
philosophies developed in previous decades, advocates for planetary stewardship
call global society to forge a new relationship with Earth. Climate change, write
several prestigious teams of scientists, represents a new human role in planetary
systems.42 Living into that role well, they argue, requires “reconnecting to the
biosphere and becoming active stewards of the Earth System as a whole.”43 They
want to shift the focus of science from managing problems in reference to historic
benchmarks of nature toward “the active shaping of trajectories of change in coupled
social-ecological systems . . . to enhance ecosystem resilience and promote human
well-being.”44 To shape those trajectories well, the scientists appeal to stewardship
as lead virtue of humanity’s new planetary relation. Stewardship shifts attention
from protecting what nature would be without human interference to maintaining
what is required for the long-term flourishing of humanity: to “maintain a global
environment within which humanity can continue to develop in a humane and
respectful fashion.”45
The virtue of ecological management is thus indexed to conditions for human well-
being. Moreover, stewardship is presented as a species-level practice that can reshape
how societies think about the goods of a human life. Actively shaping trajectories
of change includes fostering reconnection with the biosphere in order to support
appropriate ideas of human well-being. Appeal to virtue at the species level thus
drives a spiral of moral development within individual agents: “Earth stewardship
provides a strategy for developing a new ethic of environmental stewardship.”46
However, there are reasons to think that what passes as virtuous may in fact
be vicious. Eileen Crist argues that the discourse of the Anthropocene implicitly

41 Chakrabary, “The Climate of History,” p. 222.

42 Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship,” Ambio
40 (2011): 739–61; Carl Folke et al., “Reconnecting to the Biosphere,” Ambio 40 (2011): 719–38; F.
Stuart Chapin et al., “Earth Stewardship: A Strategy for Social-Ecological Transformation to Reverse
Planetary Degradation,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 1 (2011): 44–53; Chapin et al.,
“Ecosystem Stewardship: Sustainability Strategies for a Rapidly Changing Planet,” Trends in Ecology
and Evolution 25, no. 4 (2009): 241–49.
43 Folke et al., “Reconnecting to the Biosphere,” p. 719.
44 Chapin et al., “Earth Stewardship,” p. 45.
45 Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene,” p. 756.
46 Chapin et al., “Earth Stewardship,” p. 52.
90 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 38

legitimates continued expansion of human power over Earth. Making human rule
of the planet seem an already accomplished fact naturalizes violence, which is
then moralized by appealing to stewardship as virtuous rule. Crist’s critique raises
broader questions about appeals to virtue: do they, like this appeal to stewardship,
shift attention away from ecological integrity toward human agency as inevitable
corollary of the Anthropocene? Criticism of the idea of the Anthropocene thus
raises a possible objection to agent-centered approaches to ethics generally.
Yet Crist has her own role for virtue. She points out how the figure of the human
appears differently within Thomas Berry’s proposal to call this epoch the “Ecozoic,”
which puts an integrated community of life at the center of focus and interprets
the human role in terms of communion. Crist herself prefers a Gaian vision, which
acknowledges the present role of humanity in Earth systems while underscoring
humanity’s smallness within it. Instead of “active stewardship,” a Gaian vision
would support practices of withdrawal from managing, intervening, and manipulat-
ing—which now appear to viciously undermine both Earth’s integrity and our own.
A truer form of human flourishing would emerge, she suggests, through deferential
attentiveness to Earth’s ongoing expressions of life. For Crist, reverence for life
names a virtue more apt to realize the true goods of a human life.47
An agent-centered approach to species-level responsibility thus does not necessar-
ily lead to human domination. It remains formally possible that the goods of other
creatures and systems are compatible with a virtue ethic. Perhaps the flourishing of
nonhuman creatures and the resilience of planetary systems ought to be promoted
because they are constitutive of our own flourishing or our own resilience.48 The
critical South American discourse of Buen Vivir usually follows a line like that in
regard to climate-related issues. While it takes many forms (and several related
names), Buen Vivir discourse typically warns against the ecological infeasibility
of consumerist conceptions of happiness, condemns the injustice or violence of
Northern political structures supporting their pursuit, and interprets the human
good in connection with the flourishing of nonhumans and of all the Earth. Buen
Vivir thus represents a pluralist scene of cultural questioning of the good life that
is compatible with an Aristotelian approach, although it emerges from indigenous
and other non-Western conceptions of human well-being.49
The species-level role may then put pressure on culturally particular visions of
human flourishing. While no individual causes climate change, just as no individual
can meaningfully exercise planetary stewardship nor “parent the planet,” dissat-
isfaction with the general figure of humanity in planetary systems may motivate
attempts to renegotiate visions of individual human flourishing. That seems to

47 Eileen Crist, “On the Poverty Of Our Nomenclature,” Environmental Humanities 3 (2013): 129–47.
48 John O’Neill, “The Varieties of Intrinsic Value, Monist 75, no. 2 (1992): 199–37.
49 Alberto Acosta, “The Buen Vivir: An Opportunity to Imagine Another World,” in Inside a Champion:
An Analysis of the Brazilian Develoment Model, ed. Dawid Bartolt (Berlin: Böll Foundation, 2012):
192–209; Eduardo Gudynas, “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow,” Development 54, no. 4 (2011): 441–47.
Spring 2016 THE TURN TO VIRTUE IN CLIMATE ETHICS 91

explain the kinds of climate actions Krakoff is interpreting as well as the move-
ments encompassed within Buen Vivir.
Could climate-influenced accounts of personal well-being make a difference to
the action of the species? One research team argues that research on Anthropocene
conditions should include tracking the many practices and narratives through
which societies are reconceptualizing human well-being and interpreting how
those reconceptualizations may affect planetary systems.50 If, as they reckon with
the planetary impact of the species, cultures rethink their visions of a good life,
then they might pursue their flourishing through different practices with different
ecological effects. The planetary figure of the human may then change as cultures
interpret the meaning of planet-altering behavior and generate new visions of well-
being. That sort of reflexivity between species behavior and individual behavior
could obviously take many forms, some of them maladaptive or perverse. Can a
theory offer an account of virtuous feedback between flourishing for the species
and flourishing for individuals?

ETHICAL ADAPTATION

A broadly pragmatic approach anticipates that persons may adapt their views of
flourishing in order to account for their participation in the role of humanity as a
species, and may undertake new practices in order realize correlative excellences.
Pursuit of the goods of an individual life may not directly fulfill species-level ob-
ligations in climate change, but the species-level role can inflect how individual
humans understand the goods of a life. For example, implicit notions of freedom
carried in the practices of consumer culture may shift as the planetary effect of
those cultural practices appears increasingly untenable for the species. How closely
shifts in the personal register (e.g., enacting freedom differently) may be indexed
to role requirements in the species register (e.g., stewarding ecosystem resilience)
depends on the extent to which the two registers share common goods.
In their introduction to Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change, Allen Thompson
and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer write that “who we are as humans and how we under-
stand flourishing need adjustment in order . . . for us to adapt well to a new global
climate.”51 Adjusting personal concepts of flourishing to the adaptive needs of the
species depends on persons finding goods of a life within the practices that would
collectively conduce to a better relation of the species to its climate. In his chapter
in the volume, Thompson makes that argument: “. . . a part of human goodness
in the Anthropocene . . . is the disposition to meet well the plurality of normative

50 Gisli Palsson et al., “Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene: Integrating the
Social Sciences and Humanities in Global Environmental Change Research,” Environmental Science
and Policy 28 (2013): 3–13.
51 Allen Thompson and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human
Virtues of the Fuutre (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), p. 7.
92 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 38

demands derived from humanity’s role responsibility qua managers of the Earth’s
global climate.”52 Role responsibilities at the species level, he thinks, mediate ap-
propriate dispositions at the individual level, such that individuals may rightly pursue
responsibility as a trait of character. “Being responsible for the global climate will
be a new environmental virtue because it is well-suited to express human moral
goodness in the emerging Anthropocene.”53
Thompson is pursuing the sort of connection that we saw was needed in the
appeals to virtue in Gardiner and Jamieson: a way to link political strategies of
response to climate change with a naturalist account of human flourishing. Whereas
their connections between individual flourishing and collective responsibility seem
weakly grounded, Thompson’s argument suggests that, as diverse responses to
climate change reckon with questions about the real goods of a life, the species-
level problem may drive adaptation in visions of the good life.
The adaptive process might even overturn inherited ideals of excellence, if it
produces other practices that allow agents to come to better understanding of what
is actually good for a life to pursue. Thompson anticipates rejection of supposed
goods associated with consumerist practices. Yet for this sort of ethical adaption
to remain intact as a virtue approach, the replacement practices cannot appear as
merely instrumental to species-level needs, but must appear to individuals as in-
trinsically valuable practices. Simplicity motivated only by anxiety about depletion
of global resources would remain disconnected from an account of its role in a
good life; for it to function as a virtue, simplicity must be undertaken as a way to
realize goods that have a recognized place within a flourishing life. Along the way
the agent should discover why the supposed goods in consumerist practices were
not goods at all, or should take a diminished role within an overall practice of life.
The process of adapting virtue, I am arguing, takes place through what Brewer
calls “dialectical activities”—practices that allow a person to continuously deepen
his or her understanding of the goods of a practice and revise one’s understanding
of their place within an overall vision of a good life.54
However, Thompson’s account of ethical adaptation runs into difficulty here. His
proposal for a virtue of responsibility involves diminishing the role for respecting
nature within a life, in part because he sees that respect for nature seems less intel-
ligible within pervasive anthropogenic change. Yet Jamieson, Crist, and many Buen
Vivir voices want to restore respect for nature and in fact elevate it. An argument
between them and Thompson would have to debate competing visions of human
flourishing and the relation of those visions to a normative interpretation of the
human species. But Thompson admits that he cannot yet provide such an account
because it is not yet clear how a virtue of responsibility for the biosphere fits into

52 Allen Thompson, “The Virtue of Responsibility for the Global Climate,” in Ethical Adaptation to
Climate Change, p. 216.
53 Ibid., p. 204.
54 Brewer, Retrieval of Ethics, p. 49.
Spring 2016 THE TURN TO VIRTUE IN CLIMATE ETHICS 93

a coherent vision of human goodness. Agents seeking to enact responsibility must

rather act in hope that this responsibility “could somehow fit into a conception
of natural goodness that we don’t yet understand.”55 How then to undertake new
practices that could allow a person to revise or overturn inherited ideas of the hu-
man good?
Thompson appeals to hope. Specifically he follows Jonathan Lear’s account of
“radical hope,” which Lear develops through interpretation of Native American
Crow culture. Perhaps we do not know what it would look like to overturn the
meaning of consumerist freedoms or diminish the place of respect for nature; yet
(it seems to Thompson) the cultural field that supported those virtues is collapsing
under pressure from climate change. Like Crow, persons who survived the destruc-
tion of their culture by white settlers, speculates Thompson, people who are now
facing climate change, are not yet able to imagine human flourishing in the new
cultural conditions of the Anthropocene.
Thompson’s analogy with the Crow genocide illustrates two hazards in the entire
strategy of turning to virtue. First, as I have noted several times, analyzing climate
change in terms of virtue can obscure dynamics of injustice. Thompson’s analogy
between the coming collapse of consumer culture and the historical destruction of
Crow culture obscures injustice in both the differences and the continuities. The
Crow people were victims of genocide at the hands of armed white settlers. There
is nothing they could have done that would have prevented the collapse of the
way of life sustaining Crow virtues. Global consumer societies imperil themselves
by their own excess and its participants are free to choose alternative virtues, as
some in fact do. Maybe some consumers find it difficult to imagine how to live
differently, but that sort of entrapment is quite different from genocidal invasion.
Moreover, the comparison obscures historical continuity between the situations:
the settler culture that overran the indigenous peoples of North America gave rise
to the industrial culture driving climate change, which has become a new form of
dislocation and cultural assault on indigenous peoples.
The second hazard is that virtues depend on a vision of the good. Even a pluralist
and pragmatic use of virtue to generate practices through which to revise, improve,
or clarify our behavior requires an account of goodness sufficiently coherent to
organize experiment and inquiry. “We must suppose that we have a vision of how
it would be good to live that is clear enough to draw upon in order to launch active
experiments in living,” writes Brewer. “Yet we must also suppose that we appre-
hend and critique these experiments in retrospect, with this selfsame vision.”56 A
vision of the good life makes it possible to contend that consumerist freedom was
currectly taken as important to flourishing, or that respect for nature should play a
smaller role than previously thought. Yet, because talk about the good life seems

55 Allen Thompson, “Radical Hope For Living Well In A Warmer World,” Journal of Agricultural
and Environmental Ethics 23 (2010): 55.
56 Brewer, Retrieval of Ethics, p. 49.
94 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 38

irreducibly controversial or at least lacking in intellectual decorum, virtue ethics

appears to its detractors as ill-suited for the problems of modern pluralist societies.
The analogy of cultural collapse intensifies that friction. Revising inherited ways
of acting well in anticipation of adopting virtues whose meaning will be sustained
by a cultural field that has yet to emerge seems to require confidence in a culturally
transcendent sense of goodness. Lear underscores that the possibility of courage
coming to mean something completely different for Chief Plenty Coups depended
on his belief that the same goodness could be pursued in a completely different cul-
tural field. Lear’s point is not that some kind of faith offered Plenty Coups personal
resilience; it is that his confidence in the transcendence of the good afforded him the
possibility of adapting virtue.57 What Thompson admires in Plenty Coups—that he
could act in anticipation of a kind of flourishing not yet intelligible to him—seems
to require a commitment to a culture-transcending conception of the good.58
The point is critical for working across the double registers of virtue. Without
such a conception of the good, the contingent context of the Anthropocene could
overdetermine the virtues, to the point that they would not form part of a recognizably
human life. If the new understanding of courage by Plenty Coups was just a way of
coping with settler violence, then it could not also be held as constituent of a good
life. For the new practices of courage to remain virtuous, even if only in his own
hopeful vision, Plenty Coups needed to believe that they apprehended some real
good beyond the violent powers determining his field of action. Analogously, the
virtues of ethical adaptation in the Anthropocene cannot be totally shaped by a role
relation made by the expansion of human power. For virtues in the Anthropocene
to be real virtues, realizing excellences of a human life, they must be something
more than successful ways of coping with human powers.
“We were neither designed nor destined for this,” writes Thompson of human-
ity’s planetary role, “only the contingent course of history has made it so.”59 Yet, if
fulfilling that role well exerts adaptive pressure on the central practices and evalu-
ative concepts through which persons seek to live their lives well, then it must fit
into some vision of the good that lies beyond the possibilities of our current cultural
field and yet can be recognized as goodness for which we are indeed designed or
destined—or at least suited. For “planetary stewardship” or “responsibility for the
biosphere” to mean anything for the practice of an individual life, the species role
must uncover some facet of goodness important for interpreting how to live an
individual life well. Humanity’s planetary responsibilities cannot instrumentally
remake personal virtues without vitiating their meaning; but those responsibilities

57 Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006), esp. 92–99.
58 The language of transcendence might mislead; a commitment to the inexhaustibility of goodness
would suffice for a vision of the good to anticipate a manifold variety of good-realizing virtues. See
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (London: Routledge, 1970).
59 Thompson, “Virtue of Responsibility,” p. 214.
Spring 2016 THE TURN TO VIRTUE IN CLIMATE ETHICS 95

might be conducted in such a way that individual persons see their own good in a
new way. Species responsibilities could then exert adaptive pressure on received
accounts of virtue, as persons launch practical experiments that seek to deepen
their understanding and realization of the good life.
Rather than diminishing respect for nature, therefore, a pragmatic account of
adaptive feedback between notions of flourishing for the species and notions of
flourishing for individuals might rather need to elevate it. Adaptive feedback between
scales of virtue needs to hold that certain practices of collective agency in planetary
systems conduce to realize goods that could alter how individual persons understand
and pursue the goods internal to their own flourishing. Holding that view seems to
require confidence that an anthropogenic Earth retains the capacity to transform
humanity’s understanding of what is good. One reason why Buen Vivir discourse
usually supports rights for nature is because it holds that “living well” should be
learned, in part, through respect for one’s relations with nonhuman creatures and
systems. Respect for nature, in this context, names a dispositional commitment
to rethink the goods of a life in light of what seems good for the conditions that
support all life.
Respect for the resilient capacity of Earth to teach humans how to act permits
hope that the sort of ethical adaptation cultures develop in response to climate
change might eventually integrate human interests with planetary flourishing. Virtue
ethics has generally attempted to undo the modern sense that one’s interests run in
tension with one’s moral obligations.60 Recovering virtue in the midst of climate
change might go some way toward also undoing modern alienation of humanity
from the life around us. Where it seems common sense that human interests run in
tension with obligations to the Earth, virtue may find the Earth’s goodness implicit
and resilient within the pursuit of human goodness.

CONCLUSION

Rescue from climate change is not likely to arrive by way of an outbreak of

virtue—McEwan is right about that. However, the language of vices and virtues
offers apt ways for interpreting anthropogenic ecological change. Virtue reframes
the challenge of climate change from solving a management problem to asking who
humans are becoming within the roles and relations involved in global anthropo-
genic change—and who we should become. Putting human agency at the center
of an ethic for dealing with global ecological change makes interpreting human
goodness key to understanding Anthropocene responsibilities.
Individual lives may make negligible material difference to atmospheric chemistry,
but, on this account, the conduct of one’s life matters for interpreting the meaning
of climate change and for imagining humanity’s emerging planetary role. Turning

60 See Brewer, Retrieval of Ethics, introduction and chap. 6.

96 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol. 38

to virtue permits ethics to focus on practices through which persons can begin to
renegotiate their relation to and within the Earth. That may be how futures for

Vol. 36, No. 4

ethics are opened, as persons seek the shape of a life that realizes goods for which
HOLMES ROLSTON, III EARLY CAREER ESSAY PRIZE
IN ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL DEDICATED TO THE
PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

they still lack the concepts to fully describe and competencies to fully enact.
The International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) and the Center for Environmental
Philosophy invite submissions for their annual essay prize for scholars in the early stages of
their career. The prize is named in honor of Professor Holmes Rolston, III, for his pioneering WINTER 2014
work in the field of environmental philosophy.
Volume 36, Number 4
THE PRIZE

Rolston Prize Papers are invited on all aspects of environmental philosophy. A prize of
$500 will be awarded to the winning essay. All submitted papers that qualify (see condi- CONTENTS
tions) will be reviewed by an Essay Prize Committee in consultation with the Editorial
Board of Environmental Ethics. The winning essay will be published in the journal Envi- Features

ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
ronmental Ethics. Rawlsian Environmental Stewardship and Intergenerational
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES AND CONDITIONS Justice ....................................................................................... Dominic Welburn
Environmental Ethics: A Catholic View ............................................ John Mizzoni
Closing date for submissions: 15 April 2015
Discussion Papers
Eligibility: Submissions are invited from scholars who already hold a Ph.D. and have Land Ethics from the Borneo Tropical Rain Forests in
earned their doctorate no more than five years prior to the submission deadline.
Submissions must be accompanied by a one-page CV to provide evidence of early
Sarawak, Malaysia: An Empirical and Conceptual Analysis ....... Yee Keong Choy
career status. Why the Standard Interpretation of the Land Ethic is Mistaken ..... Mark Budolfson
Bad Faith, Authenticity, and Responsibilities to
Style and content: Consult the University of Chicago Manual of Style or any recent Future Generations: A Sartrean Approach ................................ Kimberly S. Engels
issue of Environmental Ethics. Essays must be prepared for blind review (cover page Behaviorally Inadequate: A Situationist Critique of
with contact information and email on a separate page). Word limit: 60,000 characters Environmental Virtues ............................................................ T. J. Kasperbauer
(including spaces), including notes and references. An abstract of 100–150 words
should also be included.
Whale Killers and Whale Rights: The Future of the
International Regulation of Whaling ................................................ James Yeates
Submissions should be emailed to: philip.cafaro@colostate.edu. Please put “Essay
Prize” in the subject line of the email submission. If you do not receive confirmation Book Reviews
that your submission has been received within 3 days, please resubmit the paper. Katharine Wilkinson: Between God and Green: How Evangelicals
are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change. .................. Chris Klassen
The essay should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere, and should
Judith A. Layzer: Open For Business: Conservatives’
not be submitted to any other journal until the outcome of the competition is an-
nounced. The decision of the committee will be final. There is only one prize per Opposition to Environmental Regulation .................................... Ben A. Minteer
year and the committee reserves the right not to award the prize if submissions are
not of an appropriate standard.
Dr. PHiliP Cafaro, President Dr. EugEnE C. HargrovE, Director
International Society for Environmental Ethics Center for Environmental Philosophy
Colorado State University, philip.cafaro@colostate.edu University of North Texas, cep@unt.edu

WINTER 2014
7KH&HQWHUIRU
(QYLURQPHQWDO3KLORVRSK\ A Publication of
The Center for Environmental Philosophy
and the
University of North Texas

The Beauty of Environment: A General

Model for Environmental Aesthetics
by Yrjö Sepänmaa
ISBN 0-9626807-2-9, paper: $14.95
xv, 191 pages, index, bibliography
To order by mail, send payment to Environmental Ethics Books, 1155 Union Circle #310980,
Denton, TX 76203-5017. Make checks payable to Environmental Ethics in U.S. dollars at a bank
in the United States. For MasterCard, Visa, or Discover, provide your name as it appears on the
card, the card number, and the expiration date. For faster service, call 940/565-2727 or send a
fax to 940/565-4439. Shipping and handling: In the U.S., $2.50; in Canada, $7.00; all other countries,
$11.00, First Class Mail International. Texas residents: add 8.25% sales tax.
Order Online:
http://www.cep.unt.edu/bookstore