A Case for Personal Virtue: 3. Which Virtues?

Virtues are good or desirable traits or habits of character, cultivated tendencies to act one way or another in response to particular circumstances. The standard by which a character trait may be judged a virtue or a vice is human thriving in the context of the broader moral and political community.

Obviously, there is considerable room for disagreement about such judgments. Even so, I would like now to propose a partial list of virtues that seem to me conducive to the development of a sound energy policy and a sustainable civilization.

Confession of a Former Objectivist, part two

In the wake of my experience with Objectivism, I came to mistrust all claims to certainty. This was reinforced by my continuing study of philosophy, through which I gained a growing understanding of the richness and ambiguity of human experience and the elusiveness of knowledge.

Through many years of disorientation and bafflement, I gradually came to be comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. By recasting myself as an environmental philosopher, using the intellectual resources of the philosophical tradition to grapple with complex issues of knowledge and value in environmental ethics and policy, I was slowly able to open up a practical domain in which I could make some (tentative) assertions and hold some (tentative) convictions.