Behaviorally Inadequate: A Situationist Critique of Environmental Virtues

Abstract

* Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen, Rolighedsvej 25, 1958 Verplanken Frederiksberg C, Denmark; email: tjk@ifro.ku.dk, Kasperbauer’s research interests include applied ethics (particularly animal and environmental ethics), moral psychology, philosophy of psychology. He is grateful to have received helpful comments on this paper from Mike LeBuffe, Clare Palmer, Gary Varner, Jake Greenblum, and David Wright. 1 John Doris, “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics,” Nous 32 (1998): 504–30; John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 2 Gilbert Harman, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 119 (1999): 316–31; and “Skepticism About Character Traits,” Journal of Ethics 13 (2009): 235–42. 3 Environmental ethicists have contributed to theorizing about virtue with great zeal. Louke van Wensveen, Dirty Virtues: The Emergence of Ecological Virtue Ethics (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000), for instance, counts 189 virtues and 174 vices proposed in the environmental literature from 1970 to 2000. There is no shortage of candidates for environmental virtues, or the solutions they are meant to provide: there are patriotic environmental virtues, social justice environmental virtues, historical fidelity virtues, and many others, all of which are said to protect some aspect of the environment. This stands in contrast to recent skepticism about virtue ethics from Doris, Harman, and others. Philip Cafaro, “Patriotism as an Environmental Virtue,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 23 (2010): 185–206; Paul Haught, “Environmental Virtues and Environmental Justice,” Environmental Ethics 33 (2011): 357; Ronald Sandler, “Global Warming and Virtues of Ecological Restoration,” in Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change, ed. Allen Thompson and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), pp. 63–80. According to situationism in psychology, behavior is primarily influenced by external situational factors rather than internal traits or motivations such as virtues. Environmental ethicists wish to promote pro-environmental behaviors capable of providing adequate protection for the environment, but situationist critiques suggest that character traits, and environmental virtues, are not as behaviorally robust as is typically supposed. Their views present a dilemma. Because ethicists cannot rely on virtues to produce pro-environmental behaviors, the only real way of salvaging environmental virtue theory is to reject or at least minimize the requirement that environmental ethics must provide protection and assistance to the environment. Virtue theory is often favored by environmentalists precisely because it does matter what one's reasons are for acting, even if one's actions are ineffective at producing positive results. However, because endorsing behaviorally ineffective virtues, for whatever reason, entails that environmental ethicists are abandoning the goal of helping and protecting the environment, environmental ethicists should consider looking elsewhere than virtues and focus instead on the role of situations. T. J. Kasperbauer*