ABSTRACT
Environmental virtue ethics attempts to use ancient wisdom to analyze the moral dimension of the human–environment relationship. It stands out from previous discussions in that it analyzes this relationship from an aretological perspective. In this way, it supplements previous discussions with questions about the nature of the moral agent and his obligations to the natural environment. The EVE framework is dominated by inspirations flowing from virtue ethics in Aristotelian terms, but the basic concepts of this philosopher are interpreted in the context of a challenge unknown in Aristotle’s time: the environmental crisis. This crisis led to the development of the concept of environmental virtue, which defines the moral dispositions of an individual in the context of his functioning in the natural environment. The way environmental virtues and vices are understood varies greatly. In fact, environmental virtue ethics is an interesting area of research in that, despite being a fairly young discipline, it has developed some very different approaches. The concepts of environmental virtue ethics can be compared to plants that grow in the same soil but each has grown in different conditions, making them different from each other. The soil of each of these concepts is primarily American transcendentalism (mainly the thought of Henry David Thoreau) and Aldo Leopold’s idea of a biotic community of life.
