Abstract: In early 2003 the government announced that one of Ireland¹s major national monuments, the Hill of Tara, would be subject to a development plan. At the time of writing, no details have yet been finalised concerning what changes will be made to the site, or to the management of the site, but many locals are afraid that it will be made into a heavily commercialised tourist destination, rather like Newgrange. Simultaneously, the National Roads Authority released plans to redraw the N3 motorway and to build a dual-carraigeway from north Dublin to Navan, co. Meath. This motorway would come close to the Hill of Tara, severing the historic Tara-Skryne Valley and upsetting several historic and archaeologically-important areas. This paper will describe the situation in more detail, and apply some of the recent philosophical thinking on the topic of environmental conservation to the situation. Since Tara features so prominently in the history and the national mythology of the Irish people, its development and/or management cannot be approached the same way one approaches any other ecologically sensitive or archaeologically important area. I shall take the perspective of Virtue Theory, advanced in the ancient world by Aristotle and in the modern world by Alasdair MacIntyre. My conclusions shall combine a purely environmental-conservationist view, with a cultural point of view, while taking into account the economic issues that apparently necessitated the construction of the motorway.
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 [the Irish people] 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 [will include] 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.
