ABSTRACT
Climate change causes natural disasters, some of them obvious and dramatic. We can begin to grasp at least part of how virtue ethics might influence our thinking about climate change by considering the ways in which we respond emotionally to these disasters. But this should not make us enthusiasts for virtue ethics as the winner of what we might call “the contest of the moral theories”. We should have serious reservations about that contest, as about the notion of a moral theory that underlies it—popular though both are in many people’s thinking about ethics. Virtue ethics need not be (even if it can be) understood as a moral theory in competition with other moral theories—that is, as a view for which the notion of virtue is in some way sufficient for a complete understanding of ethics. It can also be seen as an approach to ethics—that is, as a view for which virtue is necessary to ethical understanding. Furthermore, given the history of virtue ethics, it may face particular difficulty with what I call the timescale objection—though I close by suggesting some ways for virtue ethics to deal with that objection.
