Review of Byron Williston, The Anthropocene Project: Virtue in the Age of Climate Change . Oxford University Press, 2015. 209 pages

Byron Williston has titled his thoughtful and engaging book on virtue ethics and climate change The Anthropocene Project.Here Williston is grappling with an issue that vexes most of us.The science of anthropogenic climate change has been increasingly clear, at least since the IPCC First Assessment Report in 1990.But, in the intervening twenty-five or so years we've done damn little about it.We have responded to climate change with dithering and doubt, not concrete action.Why is this?Williston suggests that it is because we are bad people-well, perhaps not exactly bad but just not very good.Grappling with climate change, he argues, will require us to become better, more virtuous people.As he tells us: "If we are going to find a morally defensible path through the climate crisis we need to become better people, and that means cultivating the virtues" (7).To glean the wisdom needed to cope with climate change, the specific virtues of hope, truthfulness and justice will need cultivation.By its very title, The Anthropocene Project positions itself in juxtaposition with the so-called "Enlightenment Project."The phrase "the Enlightenment Project" seems to have entered the philosophical lexicon some thirty years after the Manhattan Project via Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981).That book argued that whatever the successes of science and materialism, the moral project of Enlightenment was always doomed to failure.Enlightenment philosophes maintained that morality could be given an individual and rational basis, independent of history and tradition, by arguing from principles of human nature to conclusions about moral rules and precepts.MacIntyre infamously argued that this line of argument could only sustain moral imperatives and moral emotions, never claims to undebatable moral truths and falsehoods.A little like MacIntyre, Williston takes calculative approaches to moral problems to be a dead end, at least as far as environmental action is concerned.The rational calculation of individual interests enjoined by orthodox utilitarianism, contractarianism and game theory lead inexorably to collective action problems at the individual and international levels.Williston specifically claims that they all lead to a "tragedy of the commons" (13) pace

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