virtue to ground the moral and political dimensions of ES: directional, relational, situational, and learnable.
4.3.1 Virtues Are Directional
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.
4.3.2 Virtues Are Relational
Virtues and the virtuous person are not self‐generated, but are developed in relationship with the agent's communities (see Sanderse 2012). More specifically, virtues are relational because they are created by the community, from a specific cultural value and set of frames of reference virtues are learned and displayed in the community, through the interactions with our environments; and virtues are intended for the community, insomuch as personal flourishing is regarded as a collective task. Aristotle considered that a flourishing life is understood only as a shared life in the polis and can be realized only in a well‐governed community (NE 1094b). Thus, a good life would be part of the general discipline of politics (Kristjánsson 2013, 2016).
As noted, ill‐defined socioecological problems require collective work to map, identify, and reconcile values and goals behind action (Blok et al. 2016). Virtues, as the expression of collective flourishing, can provide a general compass for that collective work. The relational nature of virtues would emphasize agents' commitment to and responsibility toward the flourishing of the community rather than their rights in the community (Dobson 2003). Therefore, virtues would provide an effective moral and political grounding to ES and its focus on cultivating citizenship for sustainability.
4.3.3 Virtues Are Situational
A virtuous character includes values (with social flourishing as a compass) and the disposition to act on them in a stable way. Thus, even though virtue ethics emphasizes the agent's whole moral inner life rather than the rightness of their isolated actions, virtues can also be interpreted as inspiring principles or creating general prescriptions to act, i.e. doing what is honest, generous, just; or not doing what is dishonest, mean, unjust (Hursthouse 1999; Hartman 2006). However, the application of those general prescriptions is dependent on time, place, and culture (Sanderse 2012; Russell 2015), i.e. the agent requires the ability to perceive, sense, and deliberate how to act from virtue in each particular situation (Hartman 2006), as clearly illustrated by Yearley (1990, p. 14): “I do not act benevolently in order to be benevolent (…). I act benevolently because the situation I face fits a description of a situation that elicits my benevolence.” Therefore, virtues provide the appropriate reasons and emotions to decide what to do in each situation we face (and why). This is especially convenient for contexts marked by complexity, novelty, rapid change, and uncertainty, as socioecological challenges are. In these situations, a predefined set of rules or a focus on the (unforeseeable) consequences of behaviors may be a doubtful foundation for knowing how to act.
The variety of skills needed to act virtuously across very different situations involves all kinds of virtues at play. However, Aristotle conceives virtues as interrelated and interdependent (Jacobs 2017) through one virtue: the virtue of practical wisdom or phronesis. Understood as a meta‐virtue, since no other virtue can be exercised without it (Hursthouse 1999), phronesis can be defined as “the knowledge of which acts are virtuous in which situations” (Curzer 2012, p. 12). Aristotle highlights that, unlike scientific or theoretical knowledge, practical wisdom “is concerned with human affairs and what can be deliberated about (…). Nor is practical wisdom knowledge of universals only. On the contrary, it must also know particulars. For it is practical, and action is concerned with particulars” (NE 1141b).
Since phronesis is so central to virtuous choice, it deserves special attention when it comes to the ES of virtue, as we will develop in Section 4.4.
4.3.4 Virtues Are Learnable (and Teachable)
Aristotle distinguishes natural virtue from full virtue (NE 1144b). While we may have an innate disposition for justice, courage, compassion, or generosity, for instance, we need to develop understanding for those dispositions to be fully just, courageous, compassionate, or generous. In other words, it is because we learn to become fully virtuous that makes the virtuous acts actually virtuous (Curzer 2012, p. 12). For Aristotle, full virtue and practical wisdom are strongly intertwined, since “it is neither possible to be fully good without practical wisdom nor practically wise without virtue of character” (NE 1145a).
This means that we have to learn how to turn our natural receptivity to virtues into full virtues. We grow into virtues through habituation, and virtues require practice, in a similar way to acquiring skills, e.g. we evolve as a generous person by performing generous actions, as we become pianists by playing the piano (NE 1103a). But acquiring both virtues and skills is not a passive process; both need effort, focus, and the right kind of practice (Russell 2015). Nevertheless, there is a difference between acquiring