Introduction: Is Environmental Virtue Ethics a ‘Virtuous’ Anthropocentrism?

The field of environmental ethics has been built as a response to environmental blindness. For about half a century, it has continuously worked through the internal contradictions embedded in different ethical traditions throughout history. These include utilitarian or consequentialist ethics, deontological or principalist ethics, and virtue or aretaic ethics. Because of its historical dominance and its close connection to the legal domain, deontology has played a prominent role in shaping the global issues related to the protection of biodiversity and natural ecosystems. For instance, the notion of intrinsic value has now become quite popular beyond the community of ethicists and lawyers and has reached a wider audience. Virtue ethics (VE) has been less influential, which may seem paradoxical. When considering its historical position at the root of all later ethical developments, environmental virtue ethics (EVE) may appear to simply surface an implicit component of environmental ethics that was initially left out. This special issue of Philosophies endeavors to clarify whether EVE contradicts the foundational goal of environmental ethics by asking: “Is environmental virtue ethics a ‘virtuous’ anthropocentrism?” This provocative question underlies two main issues: the relation between EVE and anthropocentrism (Section 1); the political implications of EVE (Section 2).

The criticism of “anthropocentrism” lies at the foundation of environmental ethics and is pivotal for EVE as well. However, according to some analyses, EVE could be doomed with an anthropocentric bias, or worse, it could be a Trojan horse for a dangerous kind of anthropocentrism threatening to undermine the whole endeavor of environmental ethics. For instance, Holmes Rolston [1] (p. 61) considers that EVE is “half the truth but dangerous as a whole”. The fact that anthropocentrism, here equated to human egoism and environmental blindness, has had a pervasive influence in every corner of ethical reflection over the last centuries is quite clear. Yet, why should virtue ethics be more affected by this bias than deontology? The reflection on EVE seems to be much concerned with overcoming this bias and possibly even more aware of its hidden fall-traps. In response to the criticism of anthropocentrism, proponents of EVE have argued that it is “non-anthropocentric” [2,3,4]. Yet, adding the qualification non-anthropocentric to environmental ethics as a whole would certainly be considered by many researchers in environmental ethics to be a pleonasm or even a tautology. So, why should terminological redundancy be necessary in the case of EVE?

The debate on the anthropocentric content of EVE seems to reach beyond environmental issues and stems from deeper theoretical disagreements between virtue ethics and deontology. Interestingly, the global scale of the ecological threats, in particular climate change, makes it difficult to isolate one single issue to be addressed without scrutinizing its systemic or even paradigmatic content. It is necessary not only to conceive norms but also to address the many inequalities that global changes accelerate. In this regard, the distinctive theoretical implications of EVE and deontology also have wider consequences regarding political decision making. Because virtue ethics is grounded in a political understanding of human identity and action, one might expect that EVE would bring the anthropocentric bias to a transformative threshold apt to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene and to ground environmental virtue politics. So, how do we fill the gap between the singularity of individual biographies and the large or even global scale of environmental challenges?

1. Relations Between Anthropocentrism and EVE

The provocative question behind this special issue of Philosophies, “Is environmental virtue ethics a ‘virtuous’ anthropocentrism?”, is related to the presumed anthropocentric trend underlying all forms of VE. Not only does virtue refer to a specifically human character trait, but its moral dimension is also closely tied to the supreme good targeted by VE, namely human flourishing, in other words a good human life. Therefore, one may ask whether EVE is doomed to be morally anthropocentric or whether it can be ‘non-anthropocentric’, and if so, in what sense. In their diversity, all the articles in this Special Issue address this question—implicitly or explicitly. We suggest that each of them can map onto a specific position within the landscape of EVE, as presented below.

To clarify the diversity of moral anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric positions permitted by EVE, it is useful to first distinguish moral anthropocentrism from other forms of anthropocentrism. Ecological thinking has repeatedly pointed to the paradigm of modernity associated with the rise of the natural sciences from the 17th century onwards. This paradigm has led to what is known in anthropology as the “great divide”. On the one hand, nature in all its manifold manifestations (animals, living beings as a whole) is conceived as inert and valueless matter. On the other hand, the human world and culture is seen as a totally different reality, the source and purpose of all values. This ontological separation between two substances—or, at least, between entities (the human and the non-human) with very different properties—one physical (nature), the other mental or psychic (human)¹ defines a type of anthropocentrism that can be described as “ontological”.

On the other hand, there is a type of anthropocentrism associated with our representation of the world, which seems difficult to avoid. It is undeniable that the concepts, values, and norms about the human and non-human world that we develop through knowledge and ethics are a product of our psycho-physical make-up. We apprehend the world in a certain way that depends on our bodily constitution (our sensory organs and brain) and our mind. Although there can also be a reality for putative extraterrestrials, these would, without doubt, conceive of reality differently from us. This type of anthropocentrism can be called “epistemic” anthropocentrism.

Finally, “moral anthropocentrism” differs from both ontological anthropocentrism and epistemic anthropocentrism. It expresses the moral position that only humanity or even only part of humanity possesses intrinsic or moral value, i.e., a value that is not merely a means to an end other than itself. In this respect, VE seems to be indisputably moral anthropocentrism, because the excellence that virtues seek is supposed to contribute to and form part of the supreme good, namely human flourishing. In this case, the natural environment would be at most a condition for the realization of this good. However, the good life and intrinsic value are not interchangeable notions. For instance, clean air, nonpolluted water, fertile soil are conditions for the flourishing of all living beings, whether human or non-human. Even if they are considered to have no intrinsic or moral value, it seems difficult to disentangle their flourishing from that of human beings. Thus, the bare argument of moral anthropocentrism does apply to EVE only under a misunderstood concept of flourishing equated with intrinsic value. On the contrary, a sound understanding of flourishing leads to emphasizing its inherently unsaturable and mutualist or synergetic quality (see below).

Four contributions in the collection defend a more or less anthropocentric approach to EVE, with different shades of virtuously relevant arguments. In particular, an important nuance needs to be introduced depending on whether or not EVE relies on an ontological anthropocentrism, as described above. There is a “centric” version of EVE that is based on ontological anthropocentrism. In this Special Issue, Nin Kirkham seems to be defending such a conception of EVE. With reference to Aristotle, a virtuous relationship to the environment must be based, in her view, on a correct conception of human nature, i.e., on certain essential characteristics that define our identity and our vision of what sort of lives we live and what sort of ends we seek. Interestingly, this apparently centric version of EVE seems to reverse the extension of ethics to include nature and to work the other way around by extending the scope of EVE in order to defend a VE approach of bioethics.

This leads to identifying a “centered” form of moral anthropocentrism that EVE can adopt. Sylvie Pouteau and Jean-Philippe Pierron seem to endorse such a stance, which does not separate humans from their environment by assuming a specific essence for the former that would differentiate them ontologically from their environment and epistemologically as an object in itself. Pouteau explicitly claims an anthropocentered (but not anthropocentric) stance by re-assessing the notion of anthropos and giving pride of place to agriculture and the relationship with plants in the conception of EVE. As for Pierron, his anthropocentered vision of EVE emphasizes the centrality of a biography that, in the Anthropocene era, shapes a lifestyle that cuts across both the private and public spheres and brings to the fore such virtues as humility, temperance, and hospitality.

Marcello Di Paola’s paper provides a wide-ranging examination of environmental ethics (which is mostly deontological, as already pointed out) and VE, showing that there are in fact many ways in which these two fields can overlap. These overlaps highlight the fact that EVE can mobilize the intrinsic value of nature as well as existence and instrumental values². It is not necessarily a matter of moral anthropocentrism. However, taking the unprecedented case of climate change, Di Paola observes that EVE does not seem to abandon the idea that the supreme good does indeed lie in human flourishing, with the exception of the possibilities offered by approaches inspired by Spinoza’s ontology. In so doing, Di Paola is halfway between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric EVE.

The five other contributions in the collection defend more openly a non-anthropocentric approach to EVE. By focusing on the capabilities of ecosystems, Cristian Moyano-Fernandez draws on both an in-depth knowledge of ecosystem ecology and a “synergetic” conception of flourishing. By promoting the virtue of ecological justice, the author combines—through the interdependence between one and the other—the human good with the non-human good and thinks that he can thereby resolve potential conflicts between human autonomy and ecosystem autonomy. Moyano-Fernandez’s position on EVE illustrates a moral non-anthropocentrism of the “naturalist” type. While rejecting a human/non-human ontological dualism (ontological anthropocentrism) in favor of a relational ontology, it nevertheless presupposes the inevitable subject/object epistemological dualism on which the objectification of scientific knowledge is based. Yet, it is precisely this knowledge that justifies defending the virtue of ecological justice by adding non-human flourishing (that of ecosystems) to human fulfilment.

Another contribution to a naturalist moral non-anthropocentrism of EVE comes from Rémi Beau. His thinking focuses not on ecosystems as such but on ecological human communities. While this approach is also based on ecological knowledge, it also emphasizes the collective and communitarian nature of certain virtues such as solidarity and conviviality. The ecological communities in which such virtues can be developed and nurtured are those that take account of the human and non-human interests of their members.

The paper by Esteban Arcos occupies an intermediate position by supporting a non-anthropocentric EVE that is halfway between a naturalist version and, so to speak, an “anti-naturalist” version. On the one hand, he recognizes the flourishing and autonomy of the non-human world as an ethical end in addition to the end of human flourishing. This is why the purpose of EVE is redefined here as “mutual flourishing” between humans and non-humans. On the other hand, the use of narrative ethics and the predominant place given to the virtue of love steer Arcos’s EVE towards an anti-naturalistic form of moral non-anthropocentrism. Here, it seems there is a desire not to rely (or no longer to rely only) on the objective knowledge of science (and ecology in particular) but on a more subjective ecological perspective, which claims lived experience in the first person as a source of knowledge and action.

Finally, the last two contributions venture to explore non-anthropocentric and anti-naturalist forms of EVE. Gérald Hess reflects on human agency and endeavors to identify an anthropocentric bias that leads him to distinguish environmental virtues from ecological virtues. While the latter aim at the flourishing of a properly ecological self, based on the agent’s experience of a radical decentering of self and of participation in nature, the former assume the differentiation imposed by human/non-human relations in the meaning of the concept of flourishing. The article by Damien Delorme, Noemi Calidori, and Giovanni Frigo is also based on a conception of the ecological self, inspired in this case by the cosmopsychism of ecofeminist Frey Mathews. This holistic understanding of the ecological self leads the authors to extend the notion of virtue to the non-humans. In their view, there are “functional ecological virtues” of non-human agency. These are not moral virtues practiced by human agents, but they can have a positive practical effect on them.

As we see, the range of moral postures in the field of EVE is vast and opens new avenues to the ongoing criticism of anthropocentrism. It ranges from morally anthropocentric to morally non-anthropocentric variants and from “centric” to “centered” and “anti-naturalist” versions of moral anthropocentrism and of non-anthropocentrism.

2. Political Implications of EVE

What could then be the political implications of EVE with respect to environmental issues? This question underpins the recurrent criticisms of VE that claim that, because it is agent-centered, it is bound to linger in the private sphere and cannot satisfy the requirements at the social and political levels. This criticism is in fact misunderstanding VE, since from the outset Aristotle argued that ethics and politics are tightly linked and should not be thought as external to each other. The virtuous agent should thus be considered to be also a political agent, exerting agency within and for the City. Accordingly, “EVE is also environmental virtue politics” [6] (p. 13). The issue is thus: “How good are virtues that concern individuals and not institutions, local authorities or States?” [7] (p. 11). Two questions can be addressed: (i) are there virtues that have a wider political reach than others?; (ii) how can the scalability of virtues be enforced in society?

To answer the first question, the emphasis can be placed on social virtues, which rely inherently on interdependency and collective action and relate to the functioning of society as a whole. As pointed out by Cristian Moyano-Fernández, the virtue of justice is pivotal for political issues. By encompassing other than human living beings and ecosystems, ecological justice expands the limited scope of anthropocentric justice beyond human beings and provides the grounds to establish EVE as a leading framework to address major environmental issues. Ecological justice is about how to achieve synergetic or mutual flourishing; thus, it is what needs to be assessed by the virtuous political agent. Other virtues have an inherent social and mutualistic scope, in particular, solidarity and hospitality. Rémi Beau reminds us that the structure of society in ancient Greece was very different from that of our time; thus, the intertwinement between virtue and politics needs to be re-examined. Following Val Plumwood and Chaone Mallory’s analysis, he reckons that collective virtues such as solidarity can contribute to new forms of politization, where members of an ecological community care for the flourishing of the diversity of living beings within it. Jean-Philippe Pierron also reminds us that we all start our life as foreigners who need to be hosted on the Earth by human and other-than-human communities. Thus, hospitality appears as a foundational, even ontological, social virtue, implying from the beginning a form of mutualism, which later in life is reversed as we turn to be hosts for others, in particular, climate and political migrants. Ecological justice again is underpinned by the social mutualistic virtue of hospitality since we all share a common dwelling.

Apart from social virtues that from the outset rely on mutualistic premises and concerns for others, whether human or other-than-human entities, most virtues eventually have a social reach and do not remain solitary, since their excellence will be demonstrated in practical situations fleshed out with concrete encounters. To emphasize this specificity of VE, one may insist on the fact that there is no theory of virtue, only a practice of virtue. Marcello Di Paola reminds us that even the strongest deontological framework based on intrinsic value will eventually need to be attended by VE in the encounter with a specific unique context. The meta-virtue of practical wisdom will be indispensable to identify the adequate course of action. The other meta-virtue of fortitude or strength of character will also be needed as a bastion against the akrasia that threatens to undermine any possibility of action. Furthermore, the hierarchy of values will prove to be reversed from the highest to the lowest. Thus, instrumental value will not rank at the bottom anymore, for it is only when agency takes place that the good can be demonstrated. Sylvie Pouteau gives an example of this necessary complementarity between deontology and VE by analyzing the decisions taken at the COP15 in December 2022. The target to protect 30% of the land and sea and water borders tends to demonstrate that deontology cannot reach beyond a no-interaction standpoint. However, for the remaining 70% of the land and waters that will not be under protection, only VE can provide the basis for adapting agency to every single specific situation where human activities happen to be developed.

Along another line of thought, Jean-Philippe Pierron reminds us of the importance of temperance, another cardinal virtue that amounts to having one’s whole mind about oneself. This self-knowledge, knowing who one is, can also translate into knowing one’s place on Earth—the initial meaning of the word anthropos, as recalled by Sylvie Pouteau. Temperance can only be exerted through the encounter with others, be they human or other-than-human entities. Eventually ecological temperance may be considered to conflate with ecological justice in the quest of mutual flourishing. Finally, the source of virtue itself needs to be social or mutualistic from the outset. Thus, Gérald Hess argues that the kind of self that underlies VE needs to be thought of not as an atomistic egotic self but as an ecological self. With the premise of an ecological self, every virtue eventually translates into mutualistic tenets apt to contribute to a virtue-based politics. One may also recall that in the Magna Moralia, Aristotle [8] (1212b, Book II.14) contended that the virtuous agent cannot be said to be selfish: “He is therefore a lover of good, not a lover of self. For, if he does love himself, it is only because he is good. But the bad man is a lover of self”.

Even if ecology was not a subject of concern in Aristotle’s time, this argument finally rules out any further attempt to equate EVE and, more generally, VE to a vicious kind of environmental ethics, which would be paradoxical of course. This vicious curse is more certainly the one that may affect the unilateral use of deontology. The reason is that the latter may lead to a moral disburdenment of agents simply requested to conform to rules that they have not had an opportunity to adopt by themselves. EVE or ecological virtue ethics is what is currently needed to overcome the growing indifference towards nature. To this end, it is necessary to first overcome the belief that global problems require global solutions, hence coercive regulations. Ecological virtue ethics means a shift in the appraisal of the political decisions that may apply. This does not mean that we do not need norms but rather that we need to balance them with an ecological virtue policy.

To answer the second question concerning the political scalability of EVE, three directions can be inferred from the contributions of this volume: (i) developing empirical education; (ii) deriving alternative models of moral exemplarity; and (iii) mediating collective action initiatives. The empirical education implied by EVE is concerned with learning, not only how to practice in what is presumed to be the “right” way but, more specifically, how to develop a delicate kind of empiricism, apt to support recognizing attitudes. As a first requirement, empiricism implies that concrete encounters with nature are involved, which is the case in the field of agriculture, for instance, or gardening and ecological art practice. Furthermore, Esteban Arcos draws our attention to the syntactic component involved in recognizing other-than-human entities based on attestation and/or ascription. The way we literally ascribe subjectivity or agency to nature should be given more emphasis, since this already conveys awareness and attention to what matters, not merely as commodities but also as genuine others. Attestation moves one step further by actualizing the recognizing attitude in the way we act in practice. Gérald Hess also emphasizes the pivotal need for a phenomenological training that goes beyond behavioral training in superficial eco-gestures and that may raise the recognizing attitude in order to reach beyond our current scientific objectifying knowledge.

The human standard of good action implied by EVE is neither an absolute model to be imitated, i.e., a practical norm, nor a mere particular case to be considered, only one among many others. It is based on a consistent conception of moral exemplarity in which the wise person is the “measure” (metron) of moral conduct [9]. This means that virtuous models are to be found not in discursive theories but in fleshed out recognizing attitudes based on individual, yet universal, golden means. According to this conception of moral exemplarity, the virtuous person will not remain isolated neither be merely imitated, s-he will stand as a catalyst of change for others, so that they also become the measure of their own moral conduct. This moral conception also provides a rule of thumb regarding the emergence of social movements, such as degrowth movements or initial organic and agroecological movements.

Finally, the political scope of EVE may be further appreciated through its unique “metrology” of the good action, reflected in the propensity to self-organization demonstrated by various eco-social movements. This new understanding of collective action may lead to support spontaneous initiatives from the ground, not only top-down public policies that involve heavy multi-scalar institutional tools. Since virtuous and normative strategies may conflate at times but also enter into conflict, e.g., hospitality with regard to migration policies, mediation of collective action will be needed. Regarding the major issue of global climate change, Marcello Di Paola considers that EVE might be a few steps ahead compared to normative environmental ethics as it provides ground for climate-wise environmentally virtuous experiments in living. These may include networked food-producing urban gardening or the creation of non-institutional potential institutions such as a river parliament or folk assembly, social initiatives that are currently being explored in different countries [10].

Interestingly, none of the contributions to the volume has ventured to defend a strong position regarding the initial question as to whether a virtuous anthropocentrism can make sense. Most of the contributions bear potential arguments to defend this position, but their focus is elsewhere, surfacing still unexplored avenues of EVE. This conclusion can be mitigated by two exceptions, which both expand on major domains of applied ethics, domains in which anthropic effects on the environment cannot be bypassed because they concern our most immediate vital needs: (i) agriculture; (ii) bioethics, hence medicine.

In the 70% of the planet that will not be under ecological protection in 2030, including farmlands and production forests, different visions will have to cooperate, so that conformation by institutional norms does not preclude transformation by social movements, which have been the pioneers of agroecology in different parts of the world. Thus, Sylvie Pouteau proposes that EVE could expand into agroecological virtue ethics by developing a “metrology” of the good action in the field of agriculture, thus implying a shift towards “anthropo-centeredness”, a more sophisticated kind of anthropocentrism based on plant-centered topology. Along another line of thought, Nin Kirkham argues that the “argument from nature” could provide the basis for a “virtuously anthropocentric” EVE, meaning that the reach of EVE could also cover bioethical issues, e.g., extended human longevity, which links environmental and human issues—and more generally, euthanasia, abortion, and transhumanism. Drawing on this argument, one may also speculate that EVE could be applied to our internal ecosystems, by considering the billions of microorganisms that constitute our human microbiota—these being continuously connected to the wider environmental microbiota, including those coming from food production systems.

Finally, the notion of “virtuous anthropocentrism” might appear too provocative, and yet, it may be apt to trigger a renewal in the field of environmental ethics at large, including EVE as one of its most promising strains. Further to the initial question at the origin of this volume, one may ask whether EVE could be better defined as a political virtue framework in which the human egotic self is turned into an ecological self. This would imply that the anthropos is no longer seen as an atomized entity but also encompasses its surroundings, leading to a re-appraisal of what is meant by the notions of anthropocentrism and anthropo-centeredness and, by the same token, the meaning of non-anthropocentrism. No doubt further refinements will need to be added to this contribution to the field.