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Abstract
This article argues that the dominant sustainable development approach fails to acknowledge the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of social and environmental issues, and that sustainability requires a ‘transformational’ approach, involving a fundamental change in how humans relate to each other and to nature. The authors propose that virtue ethics, grounded in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, provides a framework with which to tackle such a transformation; to redress the human-nature relationship and help foster a more ecological perspective; to facilitate a more holistic and integrative view of sustainability; and to explore questions of how to live and flourish within a more sustainable world. Beginning with an overview of virtue ethics and critique of current approaches in environmental virtue ethics, this article proposes a new virtue, ‘harmony with nature’, that addresses the interconnectedness of our relationship with nature. This is followed by a proposal for the re-visioning of human flourishing as being necessarily situated within nature. The article concludes with some of the implications of a virtue ethics approach to sustainability, and the new virtue, for both sustainability education and moral education.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Ólafur Páll Jónsson for feedback and advice on earlier drafts, and to our annonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.
Funding
This work was supported by The Icelandic Research Fund [Grant number 141,878-051].
Notes
1. The ‘Brundtland Commission’ (formally known as the WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development), chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, produced the ‘Our Common Future’ report which contains the often cited definition of sustainable development: ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED Citation1987, chap. 2).
2. Although we are reluctant to give a single definition of sustainability, since by its nature it varies with context, we will follow Sterling’s (2001) lead and align ourselves with the definition given by Meadows, Meadows, and Randers (1992, 209): ‘A sustainable society is one that can persist over generations, one that is far-seeing enough, flexible enough, and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or social systems of support’. However, both sustainability and sustainable development are used throughout the article in relation to other authors whose definitions will almost certainly differ.
3. Aristotle’s theory of the golden mean contains various complexities which cannot be explored here. For example, some spheres of human activity do not admit of a mean (such as murder); the concept of a mean must be understood qualitatively (mean of good reasons for an activity) as well as quantitatively (mean between too much or too little of the activity); and the mean is considered to be relative to individual constitution, so for example temperance in eating is not the same for the athlete and the academic.
4. For an excellent discussion on the problems with taking deontological and consequentialist approaches to environmental or sustainability issues, see Chapter 2 of Brian Treanor’s Emplotting Virtue (Citation2014). For a general comparison of ethical approaches, see Hursthouse (Citation1999, Citation2012).
5. Ferkany and Whyte (Citation2011, 331) defined a wicked problem as ‘A problem can be described as wicked when it involves deep disagreement and distrust among policymakers and stakeholders (even over how to formulate the problem itself), high degrees of scientific uncertainty, and a lack of any set of solutions that will not be harmful or disadvantageous to someone in some relevant way’.
6. van Wensveen’s (Citation2000) Dirty Virtues: The Emergence of Ecological Virtue Ethics marked EVE as a distinct field of study. She argued that the language of environmentalists was often implicitly virtue-based, and then applied this language to virtue ethics theory.
7. The teaching of intrinsic values can, arguably, be used as an alternative to the teaching of virtues.
8. Urban environmental education, for example, is a growing sub-field of environmental education that seeks to connect students to the local environment, and often includes community efforts to introduce green areas.