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In recent years, many scholars working in the field of environmental ethics have turned to the virtues and explored their relevance for environmentally responsible behavior. Many virtues are relevant to environmental ethics, such as humility, wisdom, and compassion. In this post, I'd like to consider the relevance of the virtue of temperance (otherwise known as moderation or self-control), drawing from Richard White's book Radical Virtues.
White claims that we need to return to the way temperance was originally understood and then apply it to our lives. Temperance does not require something extreme like being married without having sex, nor does it require a Spartan existence with respect to food, shelter, and drink. Rather, temperance can be thought of as the care of oneself and the world through the rational mastery of desire. It is not that desires for things like food, sex, or wealth are necessarily bad. Rather, for the temperate person, these and our other desires are in their proper place. There is an inner harmony as well as harmony with others and the world.
The problem is that temperance is not highly prized in our society, generally speaking. We don't like temperance, because even though it does not require us to live like monks, it does require that we control our desires and their subsequent actions. But we prefer self-indulgence in food, drink, sex, and many other activities, rather than enjoying these good things in an appropriate manner. This applies to economic consumption as well, which has a variety of effects on the environment.
Consider the environmental impact of meat production, as well as its relationship to human hunger. Given that more than 800 million people on our planet are suffering from some form of malnutrition or hunger, it is startling that a majority of the world's soy and corn is used to feed livestock and poultry. I'm not a vegetarian, though these and other factors push me in that direction. Temperance need not require that we forego eating beef, but it would almost certainly require us to limit our consumption and reducing its current level. Americans today consume 50 more pounds of meat, poultry, and fish per capita per year than we did 50 years ago. Cutting back on these products is one small way to cultivate temperance, and of course it carries other health benefits as well.
If temperance were a virtue prized in our society and expressed not just in our individual lives but also our collective life, one result is that we would take better care of the natural world. We would be less prone to inflict damage upon it for self-indulgent reasons. We would be closer to experiencing the inner harmony of temperance and the resulting outer harmony with others and our natural environment fostered by this important virtue.
