• BEING AT ONE: MAKING A HOME IN EARTH’S COMMONWEALTH OF VIRTUE

    Author(s):
    Peter Critchley (see profile)
    Date:
    2016
    Subject(s):
    Aristotle, Ecology, Ethics, Marx, Karl, 1818-1883, Philosophy, Socialism, Sociology
    Item Type:
    Book
    Tag(s):
    Green politics, Karl Marx, Social theory
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6DJ58G2T
    Abstract:
    In this book I argue for a concept of ecological virtue as a condition for constituting a flourishing earthly commonwealth. I establish the virtues as qualities for successful living within specific social relations, putting character formation and social formation together to deliver a common control of collective forces that is based upon personal (co)responsibility. In conceiving these qualities along ecological lines, then ‘successful living’ takes shape as sustainable living in the ecological society. At this point it becomes possible to call back the old eudaimonistic notion of flourishing well. The book therefore needs to be set against the background of Owen Flanagan’s book The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007), where Flanagan writes of ‘eudaimonistic scientia’, or ‘eudaimonics’ for short, which he defines as the ‘empirical-normative inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human flourishing.’ Establishing these conditions in terms of the institutions, structures, practices and relations in which human and planetary flourishing go hand in hand, I seek to recover the ancient unity of ethics and politics in an ecological context, thereby outlining the contours of the Ecopolis of the future. Plenty of the arguments in Being at One comes from MacIntyre and Nussbaum in philosophy, Flannery in ecology, Wilson in biology, Robert Wright on the non-zero sum society, (The nonzero-sum moment - our welfare is crucially correlated with the welfare of the other etc.), Stuart Kauffman on the self-organising creative universe, and many more. The originality of this thesis lies in the way these sources are brought together in an integral framework concerning the dialectic of natural dependency, moral independence and social and ecological interdependence.
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    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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