Читать книгу The Wiley Handbook of Sustainability in Higher Education Learning and Teaching - Группа авторов - Страница 57

As mentioned in Section 4.1, socioecological problems call for innovative responses that involve transforming ourselves to embrace new mindsets and behaviors in accordance with the complex nature of those problems. However, this complexity poses a huge challenge for coordinated social action. We argue that a virtue framework provides a coherent and plausible approach for tackling these problems, since virtues include awareness, thinking, and feeling that provide appropriate motives and disposition for appropriate action (MacIntyre 2007). For Aristotle, virtuous behavior, rather than the rightness of action, refers to the cultivation of virtuous character, which will guide the right actions (Carr et al. 2017). This distinction is very important because it highlights the relevance of acting from virtues versus acting in accordance with virtues. For instance, a generous person would act from generosity, which means that they have the internal disposition and motivation for generosity, rather than just in accordance with generosity, which may be due to the expectation of some type of external incentive (e.g. receive a reward or avoid a sanction). When explaining such an agent‐centered approach to behavior, Aristotle argues that doing things virtuously is possible only when certain conditions are present inside the agent (NE 1105b):

First, if he does them knowingly; second, if he deliberately chooses them and deliberately chooses them because of themselves; and third, if he does them from a stable and unchangeable state.

Such a stable character of a virtuous person nurtures their disposition to respond to the right thing, for the right reason, and in the right way, while also having the right feelings about it. As this idea shows, the Aristotelian account of virtue involves both rational and non‐rational processes, thus reinforcing the internal component of virtue that provides orientation toward the right (i.e. societal flourishing). Moreover, emotion, together with reasoned action, is a central product of virtues (Roberts 2017). In this regard, Aristotle believed that virtue of character is “concerned with feelings and actions and it is in these that there is excess, deficiency, and the mean” (NE 1106b). In fact, emotions may be considered as an indicator that reveals the moral quality behind the action chosen by a person with good character (Hartman 2006). In this sense, Aristotle argues that virtuous actions are intrinsically pleasant: “No one would call a person just who did not enjoy doing just actions, or generous if he did not enjoy doing generous ones” (NE 1099b).

Thus, pro‐environmental behavior sourced from good character and framed by the pleasure of acting from the internal source of character rather than from an externally imposed obligation and sacrifice might make a difference in terms of efficacy (Treanor 2014). As a result, virtue ethics may contribute to the much‐needed societal coordination for sustainability problems inasmuch as it is one of the most agreed upon ethical frameworks, both historically and cross‐culturally (Peterson and Seligman 2004; Crossan et al. 2013). The ideas of virtue and vice have been consistently used along history to express stable states of character that reflect praiseworthy or blameworthy behaviors, and that include perception, emotion, desire, deliberation, and action (Kristjánsson 2013). Consequently, this perspective could be easily accepted in a coordinated multistakeholder approach to the management of sustainability problems.