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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.
