Mutual Flourishing: A Dialogical Approach to Environmental Virtue Ethics

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a well-structured and well-researched atricle, written in very good English. It offers an original approach, trying to connect the writings of Descombe with the approach of Val Plumwood. The only reservation that I have - but that is, I think, a serious one - is that moral 'subjectivity' is defined not only by intentionality and agency, but also a missing third here: responsibility, created through connecting intentionality with agency; and reciprocity, which is mentioned at the beginning, but basically dropped thereafter. That is, while we may experience and express 'love' for nature, the picture might change once the 'beautiful' fox might have the rabids and bite the observer, or a deathly snake biting, or a simple rock hitting me on the head. And as regards responsibility, an 'as-if', I'm afraid, won't work; though I completely agree that storytelling DOES play an important role in changing our attitude towards nature.

These, however, are more personal observations. Overall, as mentioned, it is certainly worth publishing.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

I thank you for your remarks. It is a very interesting question. I have used your examples and formulation of the problem and provided some answers in note 8. 

Reviewer 2 Report

In general this was a sound and coherent text. It clear argumentation and interesting references were easy to follow. There were few places of improvement also. These should require only modest amount of extra work.

1)Environmental virtue ethics should be explained more as it is in the main title. What is it and for what? No need to go all the way back to Aristotle, but a brief explanation will suffice. Additional references to sources other than Treanor might be helpful to show what environmental virtue ethics is.

2)Using headings and subtitles throughout the text would increase the readability of this paper. This paper was not exceedingly hard to follow, but why not make it easier to follow by using headings?

3)"Substantial account of nature" comes up repeatedly. It would be helpful for a reader to explain what this is, and why it is relevant, and why this is some how objectionable? Please, explain this early on.

4)The idea of envinronmental identity is related to deep ecology and the idea of ecological self by Arne Naess. The author's line of argumentation in reference to self-realisation comes up in the thinking of Naess. Referring to Naess or at least showing familiriality with his similar way of thinkin would make the article more credible. This is not an article on deep ecology, but acknowledgement would be helpful as there have been a lot of discussion on this kind of topics of ecological self and identity already.

See Naess: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-4519-6_128

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. I have added a couple of phrases addressing 1. I have also taken into account the recommendation on point 2. I added a note (1) regarding point 3 and a note (10) addressing briefly point 4.