A climate-change denier could find no encouragement in Aristotle. As a natural scientist who believed in meticulous research based on repeated acts of empirical observation and rigorous examination of hypotheses, he would be alarmed at the current evidence of human-caused environmental damage. The first reference to the extinction of a species by human activity (over-fishing) occurs in Aristotle’s The History of Animals. By seeing humans as animals, he effected a transformation in the ethical relationship between us and our material environment that has unlimited significance. His commitment to living planned lives in a deliberated way, taking long-term and total responsibility for our physical survival as well as our mental happiness, would, scientists and classicists agree, make him an environmental campaigner today. Only humans have moral agency, and therefore, as co-inhabitants of planet Earth with an astounding number of plants and animals, have the unique responsibility for conservation. But humans also have the capacity, because of their unique mental endowment, to cause terrible damage: as Aristotle said, drawing a chilling distinction, a bad man can do 10,000 times more harm than an animal.
- Why read Aristotle today?
- Why read Aristotle today?
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