risks being co-opted by neoliberalism.32 Instead, it should attend to how subjects are socially formed and how they can influence this formation. Just like retrospective and prospective aspects of responsibility, understanding environmental responsibility as a virtue also requires understanding social structures. Since virtues are dispositional and embodied, those social theorists and philosophers who theorize the body and its dispositions as socially formed will be good, if difficult, partners in dialogue for environmental virtue ethicists.
approach discussed here looks at lives as narratives or at least narratable wholes.
Any narration assumes a certain background, something taken for granted. A historical novel set in medieval times requires some knowledge of history from its readers, but a skillful writer will interject information about the context of the story without being obviously didactic. Literary scholars working on Chaucer will have to learn a good bit of history because without knowing about the social conditions of fourteenth-century England, they will miss many of the nuances and meanings in the text. Science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy are genres that require world-building both from the writer and the reader. There can be several narrative and extra-narrative (e.g., maps and appendices) devices that allow the reader to familiarize themselves with a new world so they can fill in the gaps with their own imaginations.
Learning to live well according to the narrative approach to virtue ethics is somewhat analogous to the practices of reading and writing novels. In both cases a whole world is assumed in the background. The virtuous or vicious person, like the focalizer33 of a novel, arranges the experience of the world in which they act in ways specific to them. Virtues as dispositions to feel, act, and perceive in ways that are conducive to the good life take part in this arrangement. As such, virtues suppose a world that somehow functions predictably. The virtuous person has a schema of the world which in some sense is like a scientific model; it abstracts and idealizes, but unlike ordinary scientific models, the world-schema is affective and value-laden and, argues Treanor, becomes understandable through narratives (2014, 177–83).
It is not always ethically or morally right to act according to what one takes the world to be like, because other beings can never be adequately represented schematically. Even trying such a complete representation of the other would be not just futile but wrong, because it would entail knowing the other completely and deciding in advance what the other is like.34 This is why practical reason is so important for virtue ethicists. We need the capacity to reflect about the rightness of actions at the right time and for the right reasons, and sometimes this reflection leads us to override our initial reactions. Narratives of the lives of others may help in this and to some extent “open us to genuine, if complicated and partial,
33 The character from whose point of view the story is told.
34 In continental ethics, this idea has been developed at length by Emmanuel Levinas ( [1961] 1969), although environmental philosophers argue whether Levinas’s ethics only applies to human beings or whether it has environmental ethical value (see Edelglass et al. 2012). Adorno’s concept of non- identity has a similar ethical aspect (Freyenhagen 2014).
understanding of other human experiences and worlds [and even] to other non- human experiences and worlds” (Treanor 2014, 146). How we take into account the non-identity of our concepts and schemas of the world and others is an aspect of responsibility. This requirement has always been there, but it comes into the foreground with climate change, when we have to think about future generations, human and non-human, living in radically different conditions.
Virtue ethics gives us a vocabulary for analyzing our agency and the sort of agency that our condition might require. We can ask what virtues and vices appear to be easily cultivated in our context and which virtues would be required for changing our societies and ways of life to allow mitigation and justly adapting to the irreversible effects of climate change. I have argued that there is a gap between these two. In environmental ethical literature, the virtues often promoted are simplicity and temperance (e.g., Gamber and Cafaro 2010; Treanor 2014, 57–58).
This is all well and good, especially if these virtues are seen in a social context and not as suggesting the life of a hermit. Seeing temperance and simplicity socially might mean investigating their social conditions of possibility and understanding having them as communicative, as being public examples of how different ways of life might be both possible and desirable. However, since climate change is a structural problem, we also have to ask which virtues would be required for changing the world together with others. Courage, solidarity, and radical hope are possible candidates.
Courage has been on the list of virtues since ancient Greece, and its connection with both transformative social action and living in the world of climate change seems fairly straightforward until we realize that our models and exemplars of courage are quite ambivalent. While promoting justice or some other worthy good, they are often also concerned about maintaining the status quo, and they may be gendered in problematic ways. If one is asked to imagine a courageous person, possible candidates are police officers and soldiers. Of course there can be counter- models: civil rights and environmental activists, conscientious objectors, Médecins Sans Frontières, climate scientists standing up to denialist campaigns of intimidation, and so on. What we count as courage is a matter of cultural struggle and hegemony. All of these models of courage have to do with solidarity. But conservative courage seems to be solidarity with communities as they now exist and are limited by their boundaries, whereas progressive models of courage are also examples of solidarity stretching beyond all kinds of frontiers. Such courageous, expansive solidarity ties in well with the common environmental ethical insight that
we need to expand our circle of concern to take into account distant others, whether they are distanced by space, time, or species.