Brendan Myers, Dept. Philosophy, NUI Galway: On Tara
Presentation at the Environ 2004 conference University of Limerick 1st February 2004. Brendan Myers Department of Philosophy, NUI Galway. Today I shall describe the case for environmental conservation from an Aristotelian perspective and using the Hill of Tara as a particular case example with which to apply the perspective. Virtue theory is the oldest moral theory in the Western philosophical tradition, originating with Aristotle although something very like it had previously been expressed in heroic literature. It places the location of moral concern not on the results of the agent¹s actions, nor on the agent¹s actions themselves, but on the agent¹s character. A preliminary statement of its basic principle might be that the right thing to do is the action which manifests excellent character, or which helps to develop and sustain the habit of excellent character. This of course demands an explanation of what excellent character is. The principle, developed philosophically in the 5th century BC by Aristotle and revived in the 20th century by Elisabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre and others, usually begins with an analogy, as follows. Each of the professions, like medicine, law, architecture, music, and so on, has its own special aim and all of its practices and skills are directed at this aim. Every profession has a certain body of skills the possession of which enables one to succeed at achieving the particular good for that profession. If I am a medical doctor, I aim to heal the diseases and injuries of patients in my care, for health is the aim of the profession of medicine. That aim is bound into what it means to be a doctor. If my skills as a doctor are developed to the level of excellence, then it can be said that I am a good doctor. The analogy is applied to morality in this way: living a complete life as a moral human being is a kind of practice as well. As a human being, I aim to flourish and be happy; this Aristotle takes to be an unquestionable given, although he admits that there is much dispute about exactly what flourishing and happiness is. To aim at happiness is for Aristotle bound together with what it means to be human. What skills do I need to succeed at being a human being? I need the virtues. If I can exercise the virtues with excellence, then it can be said that I have good character, and that I am living well, as a human being ought to live. Aristotle claims that happiness itself is activity performed in accordance with virtue. A short summary of the logical sequence by means of which a person becomes virtuous can be expressed in the following three stages. (1) At the first stage, we are born with several capacities and endowments of nature, such as the ability to move, grow, think, and speak. These Aristotle called the faculties, although among them Aristotle privileged the social and intellectual faculties as being higher and more noble than others. Reason, in his system, is the highest faculty we have, the "spark of the divine within us". I prefer to include our artistic and aesthetic faculties among the highest and divine faculties, but I¹ll leave that aside for now. (2) At the second stage, the person is thrust into social situations which require him to respond with the right faculty, and with just the right amount of that faculty. This is Aristotle¹s well known doctrine of Œthe mean¹. (3) The third and final stage obtains in the way in which we regularly and repeatedly respond to and interact with other people. That is the practice, so to speak, that will produce virtue or vice. If we respond to a situation by acting upon that faculty within us which is highest and most noble, or in Aristotle¹s words Œclosest to the divine¹, and with just the right amount of it, neither too much nor too less, then we act rightly. To continue to respond the same way is habit forming. If we make a habit of responding to other people in this way, we will have installed within our character a virtue. A person whose actions are habitually virtuous flourishes. A morally right action is one which springs from a virtuous habit of character. Moving now from 5th century BC Athens to any century BC Ireland, we arrive at the Hill of Tara, which I shall discuss today as an exemplary case for the application of Virtue ethics to the issue of environmental conservation. Tara provides an outstanding example of an ecologically sensitive area, being close to the sea and sky, centrally located in Ireland, and having the biodiversity of the whole of Ireland represented within it like a scale model. Tara is also a national monument, and its importance is cultural as much or more than it is ecological. This creates an added dimension of philosophical interest and complexity. It is both a heritage monument and also a landscape monument‹indeed it is a heritage monument in part precisely because it is a landscape monument. For one of the translations of its name is Œspectacle¹ or Œwide view¹, since it affords an excellent view over the landscape of Ireland, and as suggested by Dáithí Ó h-Ógáin, professor of folklore at UCD, that may very well have been the reason the hill was selected as the seat of Ireland¹s high kings. Tara was the centre of religious and political power in Ireland for approximately four thousand years. It is, in the worlds of Canterbury historian Alfred Smyth, the "place that reminds of their past achievements and their ancestral
pride." This obtains even in the modern period: for instance,
thousands
of people attended a meeting called by Daniel O¹Connell on 15th August
1843 to support his demand that the Act of Union with Great Britain
should be repealed. And in 1916, the Declaration of the Republic was
read out on Tara before it was read out at the GPO on O¹Connell
Street,
in Dublin. Some of Ireland¹s most noteworthy public figures in the
late
19th to early 20th century, including Arthur Griffith, Maude Gonne,
W.B.
Yeats, George Moore, and Douglass Hyde, all protected Tara from being
excavated by the British Isrealite Association by physically
interposing
themselves between the monuments of the hill and the bulldozers sent
there to demolish them. The British Isrealites were looking for the
Arc
of the Covenant, which they thought was buried under the earthworks
now
known as the Rath of the Synods.
One particular feature of Tara stands out among others for its
importance in Ireland¹s mythology. It is the Lia Fail, the stone said
to
have been brought to Ireland by the gods and used in the inauguration
ceremony of Ireland¹s kings. Its name, like the name of Tara itself,
indicates the enormous heritage importance of Tara. In Dáithí Ó
h-Ógáin¹s words:
The word Fál seems to derive from an Indo-European root *ual- meaning
Œto be strong¹, and accordingly would be related to the other Irish
word
Flaith, meaning Œsovereignty¹. The original meaning of Lia Fáil would
thus have been something akin to Œthe stone of prosperity¹, and since
Fál was also used as a rhetorical term for Ireland, this indicates
that
it was regarded as the most important ritual stone in the whole
countryŠ
That is a brief illustration of the cultural importance of Tara for
the
whole of Ireland. The philosophical argument here is twofold. As Tara
is
such an important monument, therefore: (1) whatever maintenance,
management, or development plan is decided upon, it will in some sense
inevitably reflect the character and identity of the Irish people, and
(2) if Tara and its immediate environs should ever be degraded,
damaged,
or diminished in quality, that would be representative of the worst,
and
not the best, qualities in the character of not only the planners
responsible for the plan, but also of the Irish people as a whole.
This
is the position I would like to here explicate.
Aristotle and almost all contemporary Virtue theorists veritably
presuppose that a human being is a social animal inhabiting a
culturally
and politically organised community, and they explore what virtues are
necessary for a person to succeed at being a human being with that
contextual reference in mind. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle
famously claimed "man is by nature a social being," The phrase can
also
be translated as Œa political being¹. In the Politics, <1253a2>
Aristotle similarly claimed that a human being is "a political
animal".
This means that it is natural for people to be social beings, and
that a
capacity for sociability is among the potentialities and endowments of
nature with which a person is born. If people are by nature social
animals, then it will be natural for them to possess and develop the
characteristics which enable them to live socially. This was also
upheld
by Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1981 work After Virtue, in what has been
called Œthe consistency requirement¹ of Virtue theory, as follows:
The catalogue of the virtues will therefore include the virtues
required
to sustain the kind of households and the kind of political
communities
in which men and women can seek for the good together, and the virtues necessary for philosophical enquiry about the
character of the good.
MacIntyre¹s point is entirely concerned with social environments, not
ecological environments, although something similar applies in that
field as well. In order to be able to aim to flourish and be happy,
and
regardless of one¹s conception of what it means to flourish and be
happy, one must sustain the surroundings and conditions in which the
aim
is possible. We do not flourish, or we do not flourish as well as we
could, if the social environment in which we live is not supportive of
that aspiration.
An extension of this principle seen by Alasdair MacIntyre is that
wherever the virtues appear, they always do so within the context of a
historical and cultural tradition sustained by a community. On this
view, the community and not the individual is the basic unit of human
life and survival. But this is not the claim that a person has no
identity aside from the community identity. This is the claim that the
individual has an identity as an individual precisely because he is a
member of a community‹he is identified by others as who he is, by the
social roles and occupations which are characteristic of his own
personal way of participating in the community. One or more of the
aforementioned professions can be among them. To use my own life as an
example: to some people I am an uncle, to others an older brother, to
others a teacher of undergraduate philosophy courses, and so on. I am
the son of Irish immigrants to Canada and so I have a social identity
as
a member of the Irish Diaspora. Each of these roles taken together
forms
a large part of my social identity. Each of these roles also has a
history, which is theoretically distinct from my own biography, and
insofar as I take on these roles I take on their history as well. A
person¹s happiness as a social being is intertwined with the human
community of which he is a member, and its history. For Virtue theory,
it is this intertwining with one¹s community which forms the moral
human
being¹s original position. This is importantly unlike other moral
theories in the Western tradition, for it does not begin by first
postulating the agent as a tabula rasa, a Œblank slate¹. Rather, a
person comes into the world already possessing a package of
inheritances
from the culture and surroundings she is born into, and the various
roles, occupations, and professions she occupies. As MacIntyre says,
I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in
an individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The
possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social
identity coincideŠWhat I am, therefore, is in key part what I
inherit, a
specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find
myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like
it
or not, whether I recognise it or not, one of the bearers of a
tradition.
This position on history and continuity forming the basis of one¹s
identity is also drawn from the initial analogy with professions and
practices. MacIntyre illustrates this as follows:
It was important when I characterised that at any given moment what a
practice is depends on a mode of understanding it which has been
transmitted often through many generations. And thus insofar as the
virtues sustain the relationships required for practices, they have to
sustain relationships to the past‹and to the future‹as well as in the
present.
The heritage monument stands at the intersection of a person¹s social
and historical identity. It is both an expression and an indicator of
social and historical identity. It embodies the very past which
informs
my present social identity and relations, being either a commemoration
of certain people or events, or in the case of a landscape monument
like
Tara, embodying the physical remnants of the commemorated people or
events. Tara is the site of many of Ireland¹s important historical
occasions. The most well known of these, of course, is St. Patrick¹s
bonfire, by which he inaugurated the arrival of Christianity. A
commemorative Mass is held on Tara every year on St. Patrick¹s day to
celebrate the event, and this is a continuation of the ancient
tradition
of using Tara as a ritual centre. The Catholic Mass is of course not a
Pagan tradition. But as it happens, there is a modern revival of Irish
Paganism for whom the Hill of Tara is similarly important, and many of
them perform their own ceremonies on regular solar and lunar
occasions,
both day and night. The Hill of Tara is for Ireland what the Acropolis
of Athens is for the Greeks, what the Coliseum of Rome is for the
Italians, and the Great Pyramid is for the Egyptians. It might not
appear as physically impressive as these monuments, but it
nevertheless
affords connection and continuity between the present time and the
ancient historical or semi-mythological events that decisively shaped
the culture we today have inherited. A national monument embodies in
art, architecture, landscape, and historical commemoration the values
and shared cultural commitments that in large measure makes a
community
what it is. To recognise something as a monument means to recognise
the
values and cultural commitments which one both calls one¹s own and
also
shares with a community, in the art, architecture, landscape, or
inaugural event embodied and commemorated by the monument. One
recognises in these things the values that one claims as one¹s own,
and
in which one may find commonality with the other members of the same
community, including those with whom you have no direct personal
relation.
On this basis, I claim that it would be un-virtuous to damage,
destroy,
or undermine the dignity of heritage monuments like Tara, for the
reason
that it would represent a failure of the consistency requirement of
Virtue theory, the requirement that whatever one¹s conception of the
good, one must possess the virtues required for the maintenance of
one¹s
social and community context in which one¹s quest for the good is
possible. To damage Tara would also be a failure of virtue for the
reason that the link with the past that Tara makes possible, which is
also a necessary part of the well-lived life, would be severed. On
this
argument, the destruction of one slope of the Hill of Allen in co.
KIldare, the ancient home of the legendary hero Fionn MacCumhall,
represents an extraordinary failure of civic virtue. The same might be
said of the decision by Limerick City Council, and the county councils
of Limerick and Leitrim, to discontinue the position of heritage
officer. Dublin City¹s officer went on sabbatical for six months and
was
not replaced while he was away. At the time of presenting this paper,
it
is not yet known what decisions have been made by the landscape
engineering consultants hired to create a development plan for Tara.
They probably don¹t plan to make it into a quarry, like the Hill of
Allen. But residents local to Tara are concerned that the Hill will be
commercialised, rather like Newgrange. In a statement issued by the
action group, The Friends of Tara, local residents expressed their
desire as follows:
1.8. The Friends of Tara recognise the Hill of Tara as being a very
special place and do not welcome anything that would change their
interaction with the Hill. This manifests itself in many ways.
Important
to the Friends of Tara are the cultural, spiritual and historical
past,
present and future of the Hill.
1.10. It important for The Friends of Tara that the nature and
character
of the Hill is not changed.
There is also a plan to build a new dual-carriageway toll route from
north Dublin to Navan, which would pass within 1.5 kilometres of Tara,
between Tara Hill itself and the adjacent hill of Skryne. This
motorway
development has already become the concern of the activist movement
which also protested against motorway development in Carrickmines,
south
co. Dublin, and the Glen of the Downs in co. Wicklow. In a letter of
protest against this motorway signed by numerous academics from
Ireland
and abroad, it was claimed that:
The Hill of Tara constitutes the heart and soul of Ireland. Its very
name invokes the spirit and mystique of our people and is instantly
recognisable worldwide. The plan approved recently by An Bord Pleanála
for the M3 motorway to dissect the Tara-Skryne valley, Ireland's
premier
national monument, spells out a massive national and international
tragedy that must be averted.
The historian Alfred Smyth said what others have been too polite to
say:
Much of Wicklow is already becoming an up-market leafy suburb of south
Dublin. Meath is already well on target for becoming one vast, dreary
estate and car park for north Dublin. And an M3 scab on the landscape
planned to run between Tara and Skryne will be the service road for
this
waste land of commuter housing that will follow it.
My argument here is that since Tara is Ireland¹s premiere national
heritage monument, a commercial development of its slopes and a nearby
dual-carriageway toll road would be enormously tragic for the national
character of Ireland, and indeed for Irish people around the world.
But
there is an interesting positive opportunity here. Because the Hill of
Tara and environs is not an ancient engineered structure, like the
Pyramids, the Parthenon, or the Coliseum, other internationally known
monuments to which Tara was often compared, but rather is a 500 foot
grassy knoll overlooking the Boyne river valley, it can and should be
taken as a showcase for the display of good ecological practice.
So, what is good ecological practice? The aforementioned consistency
requirement can also support the claim that it is virtuous to
contribute
to general conservation projects. For although Aristotle placed the
highest value on self-sufficient and noble actions, he also claims
that
to fully flourish one must still have certain external goods which
serve
as instrumental aids. <ýslide 16> These can include the social and
material results or rewards that such action produces for the agent
and
his associates, the props and instruments that help the virtuous
person
to perform noble actions, the agent¹s social relations, as well as
material possessions and circumstances. It seems clear that a healthy
and stable environment is one of these external goods. Someone who
lives
in a polluted atmosphere, or close to polluted lakes and rivers, would
suffer the bad health-effects of the toxic air and water supply,
making
it hard or impossible to flourish. Aristotle would surely agree. He
says, "the philosopher being a man will also need external well-being,
since man¹s nature is not self-sufficient for the activity of
contemplation, but he must also have bodily health and a supply of
food
and other requirements. " It is thus not a great leap to claim that the
consistency requirement, which demands that social virtues be included
in one¹s catalogue, also demands that environmental virtues be
included
as well. If your environment is unsuited or even entirely unfit for
human habitation, it would be hard to flourish in it, or perhaps even
impossible.
What might the environmental virtues be? Recall that to explore the
human virtues, Aristotle and MacIntyre considered analogies with
professional occupations. In this case there is at least one
professional occupation which can help to explore the virtues of the
conservationist. Consider gardens and gardening. There are many
virtues
which would enable one to become a excellent gardener aside from
possession of the relevant botanical knowledge. They might include
patience, aesthetic sensibility, foresight, and imagination‹virtues we
find admirable in many other contexts as well. A gardener is a
professional on par with builders, musicians, animal-handlers, and the
others which Aristotle cited as examples when constructing his theory
of
the virtues. Someone who loves his garden and who manifests that love
by
treating it well, tending it, caring for its plants and features, and
so
on, is in some sense rewarded by the garden. The flowers bloom and the
birds sing. It isn¹t necessary to claim that the response from the
garden to being tended and cared is the conscious response of a
sentient
being. But the garden has needs and demands which a good gardener must
understand if he wishes to tend it well and get it to be all that it
can
be, in much the same way that a musician must care for and understand
the needs of her instrument, to produce excellent music with it.
I take the case of the gardener as the model for human stewardship of
the Earth in general. It is the often un-stated wish of
environmentalists that the whole surface of the Earth should be left
untouched as much as possible. I do not completely agree‹good
conservation practice must, in my view, be a matter of getting
involved
in the environment, working in it and with it to create a living space
for humanity that is supportive of our physical, intellectual, social,
and aesthetic needs, and the aspiration to flourish and be happy. This
is why I chose the gardener as the model. The gardener's labour input
makes it impossible that he is a passive witness to the garden,
keeping
his hands off it, although there may well be some parts of the world
which are so ecological sensitive that they should be left entirely
alone. For my part, I claim that the profession of the gardener is the
model for how the development of the Hill of Tara itself and the
surrounding region should proceed. The virtues of a land planner,
conservation authority manager, park ranger, environmentalist,
agriculture policy maker, or official in a public works office are in
some sense the virtues of a gardener "writ large" upon much bigger
territories. The profession of a gardener has a history, in landscape
architecture traditions or in flower hybrid breeding for instance, and
thus it is able to sustain the relevant webs of connection with the
past
and the future: the past we inherit from tradition, the future to
which
we aim in our present actions. More generally, the case of the
gardener
is the paradigm for a being or species, like humanity, which is able
to
alter and re-create its own environment. For the work of a gardener is
in some sense an intervention into nature and an imposition of human
values and labour power on to nature. No one would find in nature rows
of manicured flowers, perfectly trimmed trees, symmetrically arranged
hedges, and so on. These features are the product of the gardener¹s
labour. A good gardener forms a relationship with his garden, and a
kind
of interaction develops between them. The gardener is rewarded for his
work by the blossoming of the trees, flowers, and other plants. Indeed
the garden becomes loveable precisely because the gardener loves it,
understands its needs, works with it, and respects it. If the gardener
slackens his effort, the garden¹s loveable qualities diminish: weeds
overrun the flowerbeds, litter spoils the view, and so on. The
qualities
that make a garden loveable are nurtured, developed, fortified and
improved by the tending care of the gardener.
In conclusion, may I say that I do not claim to have found the
complete
formulae to solve the ethical question of conservation and the
environment, but I believe I have obtained a working hypothesis. Why
might it be virtuous for our species to take upon itself the role of
the
gardener of the Earth? It cannot be because the Earth somehow needs
us.
Life on Earth flourished for millions of years without us, and would
continue to flourish if our species disappeared. The environment
doesn¹t
need sustainable development. People do. My working hypothesis is that
human flourishing is bound to the flourishing of the world for the
reason that through the ecological responses to human activities that
affect the environment, the flourishing or non-flourishing of the
environment becomes the indicator of the moral condition of human
community, and the conditions of special landscapes like Tara are the
most important of these indicators. Although the environment does not
require human intervention to sustain itself, the non-flourishing of
an
ecosystem tends to be a direct or indirect result of human activities
carried out within them or with resources extracted from them. Actions
which contribute to the degradation or destruction of the environment
represent a failure of the qualities and attributes of character
Aristotle claims we need to succeed as human beings. A destroyed
landscape, a poisoned marine, an unbreathable atmosphere, or a
territory
rendered unfit for human habitation (or for habitation by anything) is
surely a product of qualities like short-sightedness or even
ignorance,
and not nobility or excellence. A stable and clean environment, by
contrast, furnishes us with the material resources we require to eat
and
be healthy, and is the pre-condition required to cultivate
our "higher"
virtues connected to our faculties of intellect, aesthetics, and
sociability. The Hill of Tara, as it is a landscape monument as well
as
a heritage monument, should be taken as the paradigm case for the
display of Ireland¹s ecological and cultural values.
Presentation at the Environ 2004 conference University of Limerick 1st February 2004. Brendan Myers Department of Philosophy, NUI Galway. Today I shall describe the case for environmental conservation from an Aristotelian perspective and using the Hill of Tara as a particular case example with which to apply the perspective. Virtue theory is the oldest moral theory in the Western philosophical tradition, originating with Aristotle although something very like it had previously been expressed in heroic literature. It places the location of moral concern not on the results of the agent¹s actions, nor on the agent¹s actions themselves, but on the agent¹s character. A preliminary statement of its basic principle might be that the right thing to do is the action which manifests excellent character, or which helps to develop and sustain the habit of excellent character. This of course demands an explanation of what excellent character is. The principle, developed philosophically in the 5th century BC by Aristotle and revived in the 20th century by Elisabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre and others, usually begins with an analogy, as follows. Each of the professions, like medicine, law, architecture, music, and so on, has its own special aim and all of its practices and skills are directed at this aim. Every profession has a certain body of skills the possession of which enables one to succeed at achieving the particular good for that profession. If I am a medical doctor, I aim to heal the diseases and injuries of patients in my care, for health is the aim of the profession of medicine. That aim is bound into what it means to be a doctor. If my skills as a doctor are developed to the level of excellence, then it can be said that I am a good doctor. The analogy is applied to morality in this way: living a complete life as a moral human being is a kind of practice as well. As a human being, I aim to flourish and be happy; this Aristotle takes to be an unquestionable given, although he admits that there is much dispute about exactly what flourishing and happiness is. To aim at happiness is for Aristotle bound together with what it means to be human. What skills do I need to succeed at being a human being? I need the virtues. If I can exercise the virtues with excellence, then it can be said that I have good character, and that I am living well, as a human being ought to live. Aristotle claims that happiness itself is activity performed in accordance with virtue. A short summary of the logical sequence by means of which a person becomes virtuous can be expressed in the following three stages. (1) At the first stage, we are born with several capacities and endowments of nature, such as the ability to move, grow, think, and speak. These Aristotle called the faculties, although among them Aristotle privileged the social and intellectual faculties as being higher and more noble than others. Reason, in his system, is the highest faculty we have, the "spark of the divine within us". I prefer to include our artistic and aesthetic faculties among the highest and divine faculties, but I¹ll leave that aside for now. (2) At the second stage, the person is thrust into social situations which require him to respond with the right faculty, and with just the right amount of that faculty. This is Aristotle¹s well known doctrine of Œthe mean¹. (3) The third and final stage obtains in the way in which we regularly and repeatedly respond to and interact with other people. That is the practice, so to speak, that will produce virtue or vice. If we respond to a situation by acting upon that faculty within us which is highest and most noble, or in Aristotle¹s words Œclosest to the divine¹, and with just the right amount of it, neither too much nor too less, then we act rightly. To continue to respond the same way is habit forming. If we make a habit of responding to other people in this way, we will have installed within our character a virtue. A person whose actions are habitually virtuous flourishes. A morally right action is one which springs from a virtuous habit of character. Moving now from 5th century BC Athens to any century BC Ireland, we arrive at the Hill of Tara, which I shall discuss today as an exemplary case for the application of Virtue ethics to the issue of environmental conservation. Tara provides an outstanding example of an ecologically sensitive area, being close to the sea and sky, centrally located in Ireland, and having the biodiversity of the whole of Ireland represented within it like a scale model. Tara is also a national monument, and its importance is cultural as much or more than it is ecological. This creates an added dimension of philosophical interest and complexity. It is both a heritage monument and also a landscape monument‹indeed it is a heritage monument in part precisely because it is a landscape monument. For one of the translations of its name is Œspectacle¹ or Œwide view¹, since it affords an excellent view over the landscape of Ireland, and as suggested by Dáithí Ó h-Ógáin, professor of folklore at UCD, that may very well have been the reason the hill was selected as the seat of Ireland¹s high kings. Tara was the centre of religious and political power in Ireland for approximately four thousand years. It is, in the worlds of Canterbury historian Alfred Smyth, the "place that reminds