The Emotional Heart of Environmental Virtues

Abstract Arguments for environmental virtues ought to include more attention to the emotional characteristics and skills that help constitute such virtues. By now a number of virtues have been suggested as necessary or useful for living sustainably. While these virtues are often persuasively justified and their cognitive and behavioral qualities carefully delineated, their emotional qualities are seldom investigated in any depth. Yet environmental virtues, like all virtues, depend on particular ways of emotionally engaging with oneself and the world, ways of engaging that in turn require advanced skills in working with emotions. Accordingly, arguments for environmental virtues will be more useful if they can help people understand the emotional aspects involved in developing and sustaining the virtues being advocated.