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Aristotle Thomas Hill Analysis

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Aristotle has a firm belief that human being’s actions need to be aimed at and end with some sort of good. With this is mind, he further explains that happiness is the end result of our actions. Thomas Hill, although similar in view, advocates for the importance to not only preserve our environment but connects how the preservation of nature directly relates to human virtue. In this essay, I will argue that Thomas Hill’s beliefs on human virtue along side with the preservation of our environment goes hand in hand with Aristotle’s views of the development of human virtue. Both Aristotle and Thomas Hill believe that human virtue not only has the power to control our actions positively or negatively but can also influence whether human beings …show more content…

Thomas Hill has an interesting perspective when it comes to human being’s relationship with the environment. Hill proposes that human beings should start looking at the problem of environmental destruction from a different view point. Instead of asking questions that pertain to the relativity of the environment to human beings, plants, God, and their intrinsic value, it must be asked what type of person, and their character traits, lead them to want to destroy the environment. More specifically, Thomas Hill raises the question of “What sort of person would destroy the natural environment--or even see its value solely in cost/benefit/terms?" (Hill 2008, pg 211). Hill’s perspective on the environment turns the argument to assess human being’s morals in relation to environmental issues instead of an an argument directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining. In this way, Hill believes that people who are destructive towards the environment are missing key traits in their moral virtue. Hill does not believe that it is enough to persuade human beings that their actions are wrong in themselves. He has a strong belief that human beings who cannot see the impact that their decisions have on the environment cannot truly see what good other people hold. In this he describes how human beings who support the destruction of the environment cannot posses the traits of true human virtue. To dive in deeper, Hill wonders if someone, “one who had a broad and deep understanding of his place in nature really be indifferent to the destruction of the natural environment?” (Hill 2008, pg 217). Hill argues that human beings need to understand that they are merely specks in the entire universe’s history. If they cannot do this, they will not have

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In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the human good is the soul’s activity that expresses virtue. Aristotle concludes this from an invalid argument. On the one hand I do agree that the activity expressing virtue is a requirement for the human good. But on the other hand, I insist that the human good is a state and not an action. By modifying this argument, I believe we can reach a new conclusion that will help us better understand what Aristotle meant by these concepts.

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This paper has great ethos, it gives an example of what is to come if we do not care for our environment and people. The paper states, “Once the battle is lost...man can not wonder at nature; his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted” (Lyndon B. Johnson).

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When it comes to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, I believe that he has found a common thread in humanity in the fact that humans strive for the moderate in living virtuously. However, I would argue that the thread is varied enough to have no true worth in discerning the aspects of humanity. People have too different moralities and goals. Because Aristotle allows for these “local variations”, as Martha Nussbaum later terms in her defense of Aristotle, he is acknowledging that there cannot be an overarching analysis of humanity.

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Our environment had been endangered of becoming unsafe, threatening, and even deadly. “The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.” Johnson stresses that the health of people and environment is at risk because Americans have allowed for the destruction of nature to get out of hand, and causing both the Earth and human health at risk of becoming an ugly America, due to –as Johnson references- the “Ugly American” (“Great Society”).

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as being considered as happiness, as they often by nature accompany stipulated happiness as the activity of virtue. This Aristotle goes on to consider, 1) the general nature of the good character and good action, then 2) the principal moral virtues, the virtues of that part of man which can follow the plan laid down by reason, then 3) the virtue of intellect (Shimomissé). He also examines the ideal life or the idea of the life of in agreement with virtue. Aristotle notes that all of us possess the good character by nature in the form of power, but it has to be sufficiently developed to an actuality by practice. So what we have to do is to develop a habit of doing virtuous acts without any thematic consciousness.

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The inhabitants right to an “environment that is not harmful to their health and well-being” and the right to “ecologically sustainable development” is violated. Environmental ethics, on the other hand, is the area of applied ethics that discusses, reflects and reasons on normative measures (values, rules, norms, criteria) for dealing with non-human natural entities in a responsible way (Karafyllis 2013, p.292). In particular, it refers to the value that mankind places on protecting, conserving, and efficiently using resources that the earth provides. Simply put, environmental ethics poses the question - what, if any, moral obligation does man have to the preservation and care of the non-human

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Life is subject to a conflict of impulses, the selfish and the unselfish. Morality exists in a proper balance between these two. This harmony is felt by a moral sense analogous to the sense of beauty. Man is distinguished from the lower animals

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(Ethics 938). It is not enough to state that one is virtuous, nor is it enough for someone to be born virtuous and end there. Rather, it is the continuous pursuit, the juxtaposition of virtuous activity and of that which isn’t, that allows an individual to flourish in an Aristotelian society. We can deduce, then, that “…human

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Therefore, we need to think about tomorrow with respect to every action that we take in the environment and in this case we can say that sustainable development requires slower population growth. With this in mind, we need to be educated through our cultures about the impact we caused to the environment as we continue to reproduce.   The challenge of environmental ethics has led to the attempt to apply traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns; the preservation of biodiversity as an ethical goal; the broader concerns of some thinkers with wilderness, the built environment and the politics of poverty; the ethics of sustainability and climate change, and some directions for possible future developments of the discipline [ CITATION And15 \l 1033 ]. With this multi-dimensional approach one can see that it is more of a cultural issue to think of it from its origin.

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