Oldal 82 [82]
80 | THe Puitosopny or Eco-Pouirics
from the answer of all other humans as well: this shows us the
irrepeatable, irreplaceable and incomparable uniqueness of our
personality. But conscience itself merely confronts us with the "terrifying
limitlessness” (Schweitzer) of our responsibility and does not necessarily
provide any direction regarding what we must do. To do well, i.e., to
decide well, man must above all else acquire accurate self-knowledge
and, for this, special abilities: virtues.
What do virtues have to do with nature? Potentially quite a lot,
actually. When the forerunner and role model of all greens, Henry
David Thoreau, moved to the shore of Walden Pond to spend his time
alone far from civilisation in a hut built by himself, wandering, reflecting
and observing nature and meanwhile live from what the earth was
capable of providing without coercion or unnecessary effort, the
protection of nature did not even occur to him — or that it should even
need protection. ‘The inhabitants of the nineteenth-century American
small town surrounded by the wild indeed had no cause for such
thoughts. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to
front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it
had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not
lived", he writes. His main work, Walden, is about the search for the
good life and draws Aristotelian conclusions: he convinces his reader
that only they can find the meaning of life who has acquired the virtues
needed for the search of the good. The adherents of environmental
virtue-ethics rightly see in him their predecessor.
Their point of view could be held selfish by “true” environmental
ethicists, since they do not intend to use their virtues for the protection
of nature. Quite the reverse: they live in an intimate relation with nature
so that they might acquire the virtues indispensable for happiness. What
good does this do nature? Nothing less, one might reply, than if one
were to attribute some kind of inherent ethical value to nature itself.
When a vile act triggers our moral outrage, we do not necessarily take
the time to consider whether it truly harms biodiversity or the right to
life of the unnecessarily felled tree or the animal species brought to the
edge of extinction. We simply feel disgust at the perpetrator and think
“what kind of human being behaves like this?” The authors who revive
the position of classical virtue-ethics, such as Thomas Hill Jr., measure
goodness not through the effect on others of individual acts. Rather,
they see it as an ability that either characterises one’s personality as a
0 Henry David Thoreau: Walden or Life in the Woods, p.68 Library of America.