ABSTRACT
his introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The primary topic of the book is the contribution of Buddhist conceptions of the virtues to environmental attitudes and practice. This is a topic we have been inspired to address by two striking and accelerating tendencies in recent moral philosophy. The first of these tendencies is the revival of interest in so-called virtue ethics. The second tendency that has prompted the topic of this book is peculiar to that branch of moral philosophy known as environmental ethics. This chapter explains how we are going to understand the nature, scope and limits of both environmental ethics and virtue ethics. We may characterize virtue ethics, on our understanding of it so far, as follows: virtue ethics takes as serious and central the everyday concern of people with the evaluation of character and motivation.
