Narrative environmental virtue ethics: Phronesis without a Phronimos

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 361-379

  Treanor, Brian ^a  

^a LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 58849159231     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200830440     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 107 (emphasis added).
2. Louke van Wensveen, Dirty Virtues: The Emergence of Ecological Virtue Ethics (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000), p. 8 (emphasis added).
3. Regarding the necessity of a wider view of environmental concern see, in addition to the literature on environmental virtue ethics, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World" (2004). The essay is widely available online. See http://www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death-of-Environmentalism.pdf.
4. Ronald Sandler and Philip Cafaro, eds., Environmental Virtue Ethics (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 4-6.
5. Philip Cafaro, Thoreau's Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2004), p. 17.
6. See Brian Treanor, "The Virtue of Simplicity: Reading Thoreau with Aristotle," in The Concord Saunterer 15 (2007): 65-90.
7. Thoreau, Walden, p. 326.
8. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 31 and 46-47 respectively. Consider, regarding the latter claim, that virtuous action requires the proper balance of emotion as well as the proper balance of action. Clearly, we cannot logically deduce whether or not we feel the proper balance of fear and confidence; it is something we feel, not something we know.
9. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 39 (emphasis added).
10. Thoreau, Walden, pp. 8-9.
11. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 142. See also, among many possible examples, "we must consider happiness (eudaimonia) in the light not only of our conclusion and our premises, but also of what is commonly said about it " (ibid., p. 15).
12. Thoreau, Walden, p. 10.
13. Ibid.
14. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
15. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics, p. 182.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ramachandra Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique," in Environmental Ethics: Concepts, Policy, Theory, ed. Joseph DesJardins (London: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1999), pp. 589-95.
19. Ibid., pp. 591-92.
20. Louke van Wensveen, "Cardinal Environmental Virtues," in Sandler and Cafaro, Environmental Virtue Ethics, p. 182.
21. Ibid.
22. Van Wensveen, Dirty Virtues, pp. 87-95.
23. Ibid., 95.
24. John D. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 1.
25. Ibid. The problem is not unique to van Wensveen's account. Although there are non-Aristotelian accounts of "practical wisdom"-e.g., Kant, Scotus, Aquinas, et al.-in the contemporary context it seems difficult to see how any one of them can avoid the problems identified above.
26. Van Wensveen, Dirty Virtues, p. 91.
27. Ibid., p. 95.
28. Immanuel Kant, "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals," in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 45.
29. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 172.
30. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), vol. 3, p. 246.
31. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pp. 2-3.
32. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. pp. 3, 246.
33. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 170.
34. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pp. 114-15.
35. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), vol. 1, p. 55.
36. Ibid., p. 58.
37. Ibid., p. 59.
38. Ibid, pp. 65-66.
39. Ibid., p. 77.
40. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 71.
41. "Old ways of seeing do not change because of evidence, they change because a new language captures the imagination." Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1996), p. 66.
42. Thoreau, Walden, p. 107.
43. See, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 57.
44. Thoreau, Walden, p. 100.
45. Ibid., p. 102.
46. Beyond a specific concern with Thoreau and simplicity, there is a vast array of environmental issues that can only be understood in a narrative context. For example, it is fairly well established that the debate over wilderness is incoherent outside of the various narrative lenses through which we identify and relate to wilderness. See Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
47. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 59.
48. See, for example, Rosalind Hursthouse, One Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Wong, Moral Relativity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Martha Nussbaum, "Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach," in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 242-69; and, Alisdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).
49. Ibid.,p. 59.
50. Ibid.
51. "Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of 'world history,' but nevertheless it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die." Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79. Jack Caputo claims to have "never recovered" from reading this challenging passage. Caputo, Against Ethics, pp. 16-17.
52. A narrative approach to virtue suggests that the metaethical debate about the existence of absolute truth and/or our access to it will remain an abstract and theoretical because no one behaves, at the end of the day, as a relativist. Thus, even those who are inclined toward relativism of some stripe act as if there are some things that are universally true and that there are criteria for determining which account (of flourishing, virtue, etc.) is better. Truth might be pluralistic- perhaps because of (1) the fact that we never have unmediated access to truth and (2) epistemic fallibilism-but it is not relativistic in the strong or exaggerated sense. I often use a humorous example from the Coen brothers' movie The Big Lebowski to illustrate the untenable nature of nihilism and exaggerated relativism to my students. In the movie, a trio of self-proclaimed nihilists-caricatures of German postmodernists who traipse around Los Angeles insisting, "We're nihilists! We believe in nothing!"-perpetrate a kidnapping hoax. In a climactic confrontation with the movie's main subject, the "Dude," and his friends Walter and Donny, the nihilists demand payment. At one point, Walter screams, "There's no ransom if you don't have a f-king hostage! That's what ransom is. Those are the f-king rules!" To which the disappointed nihilists whine, "but that's not fair!" Walter, justifiably indignant, shouts, "Fair?! Whose the f-king nihilist now?" The point, with apologies for the language, is that no one maintains his or her nihilism (or relativism) in the face of perceived injustice. Nihilism and relativism may be intellectual temptations, but they are not lived ethical standpoints.
53. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2005).
54. Brower's jibe, aimed a big business, was that "there is no business to be done on a dead planet."
55. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of Commons," in Science 162 (1968): 1243-48.
56. Richard Kearney, Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (London: Ashgate, 2004), p. 114. Achilles, Socrates, and St. Francis are Kearney's examples. Thoreau and Leopold are offered as exemplars of their respective virtues by Phil Cafaro in "Thoreau, Leopold, and Carson: Toward an Environmental Virtue Ethics," in Sandler and Cafaro, Environmental Virtue Ethics, pp. 31-44.I offer Muir as a further example.
57. Ibid. See also Paul Ricoeur, "Life in Quest of Narrative," in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1994).
58. Thoreau, Walden, p. 6.
59. Ibid., p. 14.
60. Ibid., p. 69.
61. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 2-3.
62. Ibid., p. 3.