Love and the Politics of Place

The first major claim of this dissertation is that love of home is the preeminent environmental virtue. For the most part, environmental virtue ethicists have not talked much about love. In the first chapter, this oversight is addressed by way of an argument that love of home can be understood, at least from within the Aristotelian philosophical tradition, as the environmental virtue par excellence. The second main contention of the dissertation is that there is an internal connection between the virtue of love and a particular sort of knowledge of the object of that love. For that reason, when it comes to homes, those people who make their dwelling in such places are best situated to take responsibility for them. The third and final major thesis of the dissertation is that political authority over any home—understood as a place of a certain kind—should be vested in the sustainably-settled inhabitants of that place. Support for this claim derives from a discussion of Aristotle’s Politics that takes into account Aristotle’s discussions of the self-sufficiency of the polity and of the vice of acquisitiveness. The conclusion of the dissertation gestures toward a political form of localism grounded in the activity of sustainably-settled inhabitants of locales.