Earthkeeping and Character

Exploring a Christian Ecological Virtue Ethic

Steven Bouma-Prediger

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780801098840
• eBook ISBN: 9781493410743
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ecology

Addressing a topic of growing and vital concern, this book asks us to reconsider how we think about the natural world and our place in it. Steven Bouma-Prediger brings ecotheology into conversation with the emerging field of environmental virtue ethics, exploring the character traits and virtues required for Christians to be responsible keepers of the earth and to flourish in the challenging decades to come. He shows how virtue ethics can enrich Christian environmentalism, helping readers think and act in ways that rightly value creation.

1
Mapping the Territory

On Virtue and Vice

If, then, the virtues are neither passions nor faculties, all that remains is that they should be states of character.

Aristotle1

What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

C. S. Lewis2

A Student, His Grandparents, and a Poem

He sat in the back row, quiet as the proverbial mouse. At first he said little or nothing in class, appearing to be the stereotypical introvert. But in his papers and exams, he was anything but quiet. It was clear he had done all the reading, giving careful thought to my “questions to ponder,” and was thinking deep and long about the issues raised in class. The class was Ethics and Christian Discipleship, an introductory religion course at Hope College. Populated mostly by second- and third-year undergraduate students, many of whom were taking it to fulfill a general education requirement, this semester-long course covered the basics of Christian ethics in the first five weeks. Then in the remaining ten weeks we examined a variety of ethical issues—for example, social justice in the presence of poverty and racism, peacemaking in the face of violence, and earthkeeping in a world of ecological degradation.

According to Andre, this was the very first time he had any instruction in ethics. Like most of his college-age friends, Andre had gut-level feelings about what was right and wrong, but he was ignorant about ethics and unsure what was at stake. Nothing in his K–12 education in public schools (or, sadly, Sunday school classes at church) had touched on these issues. When I reminded Andre that one of the purposes of education is to expand the frontiers of your knowledge, he laughed. But as the course progressed, I sensed he was growing more interested in the subject matter of the class.

When we got to the section on environmental issues, Andre became especially excited. He had heard of various topics such as species extinction and global warming but had not studied them. He dove into the reading with great enthusiasm. Indeed, he became more vocal in class discussions and argued eloquently as a member of a team debating a case study on greenhouse gases. It was as if he had become a different person from the quiet, reserved, and seemingly disengaged student sitting in class on day one.

Andre chose to write his ethical analysis project paper on an issue of more than passing interest to him. His maternal grandparents owned a farm, and he had grown up visiting this farm. In fact, as a high-school student, he worked on the farm during the summers. Andre knew the land, the cows and horses, the dogs and cats, the neighbors. He also knew that farming was changing, with fewer and fewer small family farms able to survive in a world where the mantra was “Get big or get out.”3 His grandparents had been tempted to “Get big” by renting more land, but that would require buying larger machinery, using more fertilizers, and hiring extra help; they were not comfortable with such radical changes to their simpler way of life. Getting big didn’t seem right—for them or for the land—so they decided to pass on the chance to get big, betting they would not be forced to get out. Andre knew one more thing: his grandparents were getting older and hoped, if possible, to pass on the farm to someone in the family.

So Andre wrote his paper on the ethical issues concerning his grandparents’ farm. He listed the various consequences (good and bad) of different possible courses of action, going beyond the typical cost-benefit analysis to include costs and benefits not usually included in neoclassical economics. He identified various moral and legal rights at stake and clarified the ethical duties and obligations implicit in those rights. All of this was helpful. But at the end of the day, Andre said what struck him the most about this family case study were the character traits embodied by his grandparents. Beyond the rules and rights, the duties and consequences, were the virtues that marked his grandparents: humility and wisdom, frugality and gratitude, diligence and perseverance. Andre ended his paper, fittingly, with a poem by Wendell Berry.4

The clearing rests in song and shade.

It is a creature made

By old light held in soil and leaf,

By human joy and grief,

By human work,

Fidelity of sight and stroke,

By rain, by water on

The parent stone.

We join our work to Heaven’s gift,

Our hope to what is left,

That field and woods at last agree

In an economy

Of widest worth.

High Heaven’s Kingdom come on earth.

Imagine paradise.

O dust, arise!

Ethics in Our Time and Place

What is morality, and what exactly is ethics? For the sake of clarity, let’s begin with a few basic distinctions. First, what is moral must be distinguished from what is nonmoral. Some judgments have to do with moral rights and wrongs, with what is morally good and bad, while other human judgments do not concern moral matters at all. They are, rather, nonmoral. So, for example, to say that I am wearing a really bad tie is to make not a moral judgment but rather an aesthetic judgment. Commenting that my canoeing technique is not very good is not a moral judgment but a claim about my athletic ability. So we must distinguish between the moral and the nonmoral. Second, what is moral must be distinguished from what is immoral. To say that my act of stealing that bicycle was immoral is to claim that it was not morally right and that I am morally blameworthy. To state that helping that lost child find his way back home was “the moral thing to do” is to make a judgment that my action is morally good and praiseworthy. Third, morality is not the same as ethics. Morality has to do with what is good or bad, right or wrong, with respect to our action or behavior, while ethics is the academic discipline that studies morality. Ethics, in the usual understanding, is the study of what is morally good and bad, morally right and wrong, and how and why we make such judgments.5

But implicit within this understanding are assumptions about the kind of people we are and aspire to be—a vision of the character traits deemed necessary to live a good life. Indeed, one of the primary meanings of the Greek word ethos, from which we get the English word ethics, is “character.” So an alternative way to define ethics is to say that it is about the study of people with good (and bad) character. As David Cunningham puts it, “Ethics concerns the study, evaluation, and formation of people of good character.”6 In other words, ethics can also be defined in terms of character traits (virtues and vices) that result in conduct that is morally good or bad, right or wrong.

In all human cultures, various traditions of moral discernment and ethical decision making have arisen. Patterns of thought and habits of practice have developed over time. In short, ethical theories came to be. For the last 250 years in Europe and North America, the prevailing ethical theories focused on obligations, rights, and goods. In technical language, ethical theory has been dominated by deontology and teleology. For deontology (from the Greek words for the study of that which is needful or obligatory), the central ethical question is: What are our obligations? In other words, what are our duties with respect to others (in most cases other humans)? And this question is often tied to a related question: What are our rights? What legitimate claims do we have, and what duties follow from those claims? For deontology, the good is defined in terms of the right.

For teleology (from the Greek words for the study of goals or aims), the central question is: What are the ultimate goods, and which human actions produce those goods? In other words, what actions will produce the greatest balance of good over evil? Consequentialism is the more common name for this approach since what is morally right and wrong is determined by an assessment of good and bad consequences. In contrast to deontology, teleology defines the right in terms of the good.

The most common form of consequentialism is utilitarianism, which holds that an action is morally right if and only if it brings about the greatest balance of good over bad consequences for the greatest number of recipients. For most versions of utilitarianism, the recipients include only humans, though in recent years the scope of what matters has expanded.7 So the relevant ethical question for utilitarians is: If I (or my company, school, city, or country) did this action, what would be the costs and benefits for the greatest number of people? This kind of consequentialism, often understood solely in terms of an economic cost-benefit analysis, is, as many argue, the predominant ethic of our age.8

These two ethical theories, however, have their critics. Two of the main criticisms are nicely summarized by Clive Barnett, Philip Cafaro, and Terry Newholm:

Both consequentialist and deontological approaches are open to two related criticisms. First, both present models of ethical conduct that appear to be far too stringent in the demands they make on the capacities of ordinary people—consequentialist arguments seem to imagine it is possible to collect, collate and calculate all sorts of information and chains of causality prior to, or even after, action. While utilitarian considerations might be relevant in relation to evaluating collective public decisions, they seem rather unrealistic as complete models of personal choice. Similarly, deontological approaches seem to present an implausible picture of actors rationally judging the degree to which each of their actions conforms to a very abstract principle of universalization. This criticism . . . is related to a second problem with both consequentialist and deontological approaches. They end up presenting models of ethical conduct that are rather inflexible, leaving little room for the complexities and ambivalences of ethical decision making. They therefore present a highly abstracted model of the ways in which people are implicated and involved in their actions.9

In other words, each of these ethical theories has an inadequate anthropology—a faulty view of the human person and what it means to be human. It simply is not the case that most people most of the time, when making an ethical judgment, stop to identify and collect and reflect on all the possible good and bad consequences of each hypothetical action. It is false to assume that most people most of the time, when deciding on whether and how to act, measure the degree to which each of their possible actions meets some philosophically derived principle of obligation. These ethical theories have a highly implausible view of human nature.

There is much support for this critique. Many scholars from across the academic disciplines have shown that we humans are much more than Cartesian thinking things.10 As Mark Johnson puts it, the pervasive view “that regards moral reasoning as consisting entirely of the bringing of concrete cases under moral laws or rules that specify ‘the right thing to do’ in a given instance” is “quite mistaken.” Indeed, the Moral Law Folk Theory, as Johnson calls it, “is premised on bad psychology, bad metaphysics, bad epistemology, and bad theories of language.”11 As he argues more recently, “What we call ‘mind’ and what we call ‘body’ are not two things, but rather aspects of one organic process, so that all our meaning, thought, and language emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of this embodied activity.”12 So Johnson concludes, “Acknowledging that every aspect of human being is grounded in specific forms of bodily engagement with an environment requires a far-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Mapping the Territory
• 2. Living with Amazement and Modesty
• 3. Living with Strength of Mind and Discernment
• 4. Living with Respect and Care
• 5. Living with Fortitude and Expectation
• 6. Digging In
• Appendix A: Brief Survey of Christian Environmental Virtue Ethics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject and Name Index
• Back Cover