12 Min Read
June 6, 2025
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David Pereplyotchik is an associate professor of philosophy at Kent State University. His primary areas of research are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and environmental ethics. He is the author of Psychosyntax: The Nature of Grammar and Its Place in the Mind (Springer 2017), as well as numerous articles for journals such as Philosophical Psychology, Mind & Language, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
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“A structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of dynamite.” – Pëtr Kropotkin
A recent spate of climate protests and mass-movement civil disobedience events around the world has reinvigorated mainstream discussion of the ethics of civil disobedience, direct action, and the sabotage of energy infrastructure. Moral, political, and strategic issues that faced the twentieth-century coalminers’ movements are resurfacing quickly in today's popular press.1 To take just one example, Andreas Malm's recent book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Verso, 2020), has received a great deal of attention, inspiring a 2022 film with the same title. Several other recent films address the topic explicitly, including the Oscar-nominated First Reformed (2017). Finally, the genre of climate fiction (“cli-fi”) is replete with depictions of organized ecosabotage and ecoterrorism. In this paper, I examine how the framework of virtue ethics can be applied to the “direct actions” that have been either performed or contemplated in response to the global climate emergency.
Moral Frameworks
Traditional moral philosophy divides into three competing camps: (i) deontologists, who stress rights and freedoms, inspired by the works of Kant and Locke; (ii) consequentialists, who calculate the costs and benefits of an action, following the principles of Bentham and Mill; and (iii) virtue ethicists, whose main concern is the cluster of character traits that contribute to human flourishing, as characterized by Aristotle, Confucius, Aquinas, and their intellectual descendants.
More recently, philosophical discussion of environmental issues has yielded the “biocentrist” philosophies of deep ecology, social ecology, eco-feminism, and anarcho-primitivism.2 These begin with an explicit commitment to the intrinsic value of living beings, species, and ecosystems, putting them at odds with today’s carbon-based industrial systems of production. The practical proposals that emerge from such philosophies are often quite radical—e.g., the wholesale dismantling of petrocapitalism—and their prescriptions for private/local action sometimes include the sabotaging of the soft and hard energy infrastructure that feeds the climate crisis.
Advocates of the traditional moral theories have broached these topics. Predictably, many deontologists oppose ecosabotage on principle. The violation of laws and rights—especially property rights, for libertarians—is always intolerable, irrespective of the potential benefits. This is especially true of actions that disable key chokepoints in the supply of energy, thus affecting a great many freely made contractual agreements. In-house debates ensue about whether the right to self-defense, or the defense of other rights-holders, can serve as a trump card here. On the other side of the fence, consequentialists, who have no in-principle objection to any specific type of action, nevertheless condemn ecosabotage on the grounds that it is often ineffective, counterproductive, dangerous, and destructive of social harmony.3 This is, again, especially true of actions that affect the lives and livelihoods of those who participate in the carbon economy—which is to say, virtually everyone. But what of the third traditional account? What say the virtue theorists? This is the question I seek to address here. Virtue ethics seems ideally suited to an examination of extra-legal acts. On this approach, the focus is not on domestic legislation, global policy, or universal principles. Nor does it offer a decision procedure that yields concrete verdicts on individual actions. Rather, the questions at issue for the virtue ethicist are about the character traits that an agent expresses in choosing to perform or forgo a course of action, and the bearing of those traits on a flourishing human life.
There is a way in which each of the three traditional moral theories can attempt, however implausibly, to usurp their rivals. The consequentialist (e.g., the rule-utilitarian) might claim that following the deontologist’s rules about rights and duties would, on the whole, lead to better outcomes. Likewise, they might claim that any plausible list of moral virtues would include all and only those character traits whose exhibition tends, on the whole, to bring about positive consequences. In a similar fashion, the deontologist can assert that maximizing personal liberty will coincide with maximizing utility and treat the virtues as those character traits that an agent must have in order to properly interpret and apply the moral law.
Here, we pursue a different line. The proposal is to conceive of the virtues in such a way as to incorporate both the consequentialist’s calculations of benefit/harm and the deontologist’s considerations of rights/duties. We accomplish this by highlighting the intellectual virtues of prudence and skilled instrumental reasoning, as well as the moral virtues of wisdom and justice. The maximally virtuous agent is one who calculates optimally—which includes having meta-cognitive policies about when to stop calculating—and has the requisite compassion, impartial character, sense of justice, commitment to duty, love of freedom, and perception of fairness to implement whatever policy the consequentialist or deontologist would deem best. When those two approaches conflict—as they notoriously do (e.g., in cases of liberty vs. security)—the virtuous agent has the prudence and wisdom to perceive which must give way, and to what degree.
More ambitiously, we can attempt to incorporate the insights of the aforementioned biocentrist philosophies by conceiving of virtuous agents as those who have—in addition to the usual virtues—traits that pertain specifically to their relationship with nature, the environment, non-human life-forms, and the biosphere as a whole. Many proposals along these lines have been explored.4 The present discussion is intended to be a contribution to this broader current.
A Typology of Direct Actions
Before applying the framework of virtue ethics to the specific case of environmental direct action, we must delineate the types of acts that comprise this category and then proceed to examine what they have in common and where they diverge in respect of goals, tactics, and results. Often, the most widely-reported actions are harmless pranks, such as the throwing of soup at famous museum paintings, the spraying of Stonehenge with a rapidly-disappearing orange substance, and the dousing of the UK finance ministry with fake blood. The goal of such actions is to draw public attention to the role of fossil-fuel companies, financiers, and government officials in the ever-deepening climate crisis. Notably, there have recently been several cases of public self-immolation and self-mutilation in the service of this goal.
More generally, acts of “civil disobedience” are typically non-violent in their tactics and intended primarily to raise awareness in commonplace contexts—shopping malls, public buildings, banks, corporate offices, political fundraisers, academic lectures, airports, and museums. The goal is to interfere with “business as usual” by disrupting the complacency of the target institution and its participants. Actions in this category include blocking street traffic, disrupting public events with nudity or slogans, doing "sit-ins" in banks and shopping malls, blocking government buildings, interrupting political meetings, invading corporate offices, and "occupying" public spaces. Such tactics are familiar in a variety of historical struggles and are exemplified today in climate protests across the world.5 Indeed, in 2019, a group of London scientists made explicit the case for civil disobedience in the modern era, and, in 2022, the heirs to fossil-fuel fortunes even bankrolled such actions.
Some environmentalists advocate transitioning from social disruption as an awareness-raising tactic to a more direct engagement with industry practices. While remaining non-violent activists have targeted the logging, shipping, and animal agriculture industries—e.g., by putting unauthorized warning labels on meat and dairy products in supermarkets, breaking into factory farms to videotape the conditions or remove the animals, blockading whaling vessels, immobilizing or damaging logging and shipping equipment, and climbing trees to prevent them from being felled.
The types of ecosabotage most relevant to the production and transport of carbon-based energy aim to disrupt extractive activities, including logging, drilling, fracking, and mining. Sabotage of this kind can be carried out in an incontestably nonviolent fashion, using blockades and sit-ins, but it can also involve various kinds of property destruction. Actions in the latter category range from small-scale pranks that target individual vehicles and private planes, to more serious acts such as the burning of car dealerships and blocking of the construction of oil pipelines by trespassing on corporate or federal land. Some have gone so far as to sabotage critical energy infrastructure—including, of course, blowing up those pipelines.6
For completeness, we can include the sorts of extremely violent actions that are exemplified by the infamous “Unabomber”, Ted Kaczynski—e.g., the mailing of homemade bombs to individuals who are perceived to play a large role in climate destruction—or, in the most extreme case, the targeted assassination of policymakers, lobbyists, or industry leaders, which constitute the central subject matter of many novels and films. Plainly, there are gradations of such direct action, which range from harmless pranks all the way up to federal crimes. The philosophical work of analyzing the conceptual differences between civil disobedience, ecosabotage, and ecoterrorism is ongoing, and I will not rehearse those debates here.7 Having surveyed the range of actions that constitute our subject matter, let us now apply the framework of virtue ethics to them.
Virtue Ethics and Ecosabotage
We can begin by asking what character traits are expressed in an act of ecosabotage. In what follows, I will first list what I take to be the virtues and then examine the vices. Judging by both the fictional depictions of ecosabotage, as well as by the factual historical record, eco-saboteurs rank high on compassion, love, generosity, courage, bravery, self-sacrifice, persistence, dedication, focus, burning passion, and zeal. Their devotion to a cause beyond themselves expresses a deep emotional—perhaps even spiritual—solidarity with a social and ecological systems much larger than themselves. They seek justice in defending the rights of the voiceless—impoverished communities contaminated by industrial toxins, factory-farmed animals, wildlife, ecosystems, and the weightiest of silent majorities: the future generations of both humans and other species. It is primarily for the sake of the latter that saboteurs target the energy and financial systems that undergird the carbon-dominant order.
As moral virtues shade off into intellectual ones, we can add to our list the eco-saboteurs’ independence of mind and reasoned non-conformism, as well as their big-picture conception of the biosphere—its inhabitants and political systems—their willingness to face up to difficult realities, their progressive mindset that seeks to move humanity in a better direction, and their desire to share an important truth with the world. Finally, successfully implementing their plans and remaining undetected for substantial periods of time plainly involves knowledge, skill, cunning, ingenuity, and technical prowess. This is, by any measure, an impressive list of virtues. It is not hard to see why their exaggerated manifestation in the eco-saboteur can sometimes give an air of saintliness—an inspiring image of the lone righteous and selfless devotee of truth, beauty, and justice. But we must now balance our perspective with a consideration of the vices that are found in both the fictional and real-life eco-saboteurs.
Extreme actions can be fueled by an inflated ego, which, when combined with feelings of powerlessness in the face of a genuine crisis, continuously feeds the vices to which the agent is already prone. One example of this situation is the intellectual dogmatism that both makes it difficult to take seriously alternative perspectives and, moreover, exaggerates the likelihood that eco-saboteurs’ actions will have a net-positive effect at all on industrial practices, faraway people, wild animals, or future generations. Other vices include an obsessive sense of doom, a lack of composure, and a blind retributivist rage. Let us dwell on the latter for a moment.
Vengeful rage can be caused by a personal infringement—a loss of land or livelihood—and might therefore take a narrow target, such as the business entity that caused the trouble. This is no different from any other type of vengeful hatred, even if the resulting act carries political significance to other interested parties. By contrast, when righteous anger is directed at large-scale social systems and industries—“technological society,” “modern capitalism,” or “big oil”—the character traits on display are often not love and compassion but a deep misanthropy that finds its ultimate expression in ecofascism.
Virtue ethics is deeply informed by the works of Aristotle, Confucius, and the Islamic and Christian traditions, all of which stress the paramount importance of family and friendship—the foundations of our social being. It is thus a fact of singular importance that a committed eco-saboteur will be practically incapable of having close family bonds, trusting friendships, and other long-term personal projects/goals—the core elements of a good human life. The illegality of their actions requires living an isolated life, often in hiding, fearful, distrustful, and closed off to others. Any attempt to retain social bonds will require engaging in an inordinate amount of deceit and dishonesty with anyone who gets close. And with regard to collaborators, there will always be the reasonable worry that they are either already working for law enforcement, or will buckle under threats from the authorities. As the members of the ELF/ALF learned in the early 2000s, even the strong bonds between collaborators can wither and fray, leading to confessions and arrests years later. That being so, a sustained commitment to ecosabotage is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to square with individual-level flourishing, when the latter is properly conceived of as a life-long developmental process that requires intimate relations with family and friends. Importantly, this is so regardless of whether the actions taken are successful and remains true even in those (rare) cases when the saboteur escapes detection.
A Virtuous Saboteur?
A useful way to conceptualize the matter is to return to our fictional idealized construction of the maximally virtuous agent. In this context, our goal is to see whether a prolonged engagement in ecosabotage can plausibly be undertaken by such an agent. What we find, I claim, is that the conditions under which this is possible are very tightly circumscribed. It is, in other words, unlikely in the extreme, though perhaps not impossible, that any actual eco-saboteur can live up to the ideal. To play this game, we set the hypothetical agent’s virtue parameters maximally high and reduce or eliminate factors that contribute to the acquisition/possession of vices. For instance, the ideally virtuous agent will feel disgust in performing (or even considering) actions that disturb the social order, even if she is simultaneously aware that those actions must be performed in pursuit of a more worthy cause, or that the social order in question is itself morally indefensible. Such an agent would take no pleasure in committing inherently destructive or anti-social acts, nor be motivated to perform them by spite, wrath, vengeance, jealousy, ambition, hatred, arrogance, fear, misanthropy, or petty personal grievance. In the course of conceiving, planning, and carrying out those acts, she must at no point be drunk with power, delusional, or intemperate—in short, she must have excellent impulse control. Perhaps most importantly, our maximally virtuous agent must have a keen sense of justice.
Our hypothetical agent must also have the intellectual virtues—including the foresight to anticipate the nth-order consequences of her actions, the intelligence to carry out the action successfully, the prudence to justifiably believe that the action will do more good than harm, the wisdom to comprehend what moral and political risks she is undertaking and what responsibilities she is either shirking or fulfilling in the process. The reasoning she employs must not be dogmatic, confabulatory, or otherwise epistemically suspect. She must be open to conflicting perspectives, mindful of her own epistemic limitations, and able to “feel the force of the better reason”. This involves, at a minimum, actively seeking and duly considering counterevidence to her viewpoint, appreciating its import, and adjusting accordingly.
I submit that none of the examples we find in fictional or historical accounts of eco-saboteurs come close to satisfying this description. Many are fueled directly, perhaps entirely, by wrath and vengeance—a burning hatred for climate criminals, past, present, and future. Some are woefully ill-informed and emotionally unprepared—almost delusional about the task they have set for themselves. Others are ego-maniacal, power-hungry, and sadistic. And still others act out of personal grievance such as the loss of a home or an occupation. None, as far as I can tell, are capable of balancing their commitment to direct action with their personal responsibilities to friends and family.
If there is a distinctive intellectual error in the eco-saboteur’s motives, it is the one embodied in the words of Kropotkin, with which I began. There is, unfortunately, a fundamental mismatch between the global, systemic nature of the problems that we face and the isolated actions of private individuals. The course of life on Earth cannot be affected by even a major successful act of sabotage. The future of species, or the environment, increasingly threatened by the carbon consumption that fuels our energy-hungry lifestyles, is simply too big for that. But neither is there a call to acquiesce in what Barney calls “the cynical position that, under conditions of petrocapitalist totality, meaningful action is impossible prior to a fundamental transformation that is beyond our capacity to effect.”8 Organized broad-based social and political movements have produced meaningful results in the past, and they can do so again in the present context. The fact is that nonviolent tactics work, and there is evidence that they are more effective than the alternatives.9
When digesting the climate science and the truly dire forecasts for the future of our planet, one naturally takes a god’s-eye perspective on the matter. But things go awry when this viewpoint carries over into one’s planning of practical projects, leading one to assign historical significance to actions that are, in fact, of little or no consequence with regard to the crisis at hand. A virtuous agent, I conclude, recognizes the limits of her private sphere of action.
The author is grateful to Kim Garchar, Daniel Palmer, Michael Brownstein, Daniel W. Harris, and the members of the Summer Philosophy Workshop for their helpful comments on this work.
Articles in this series
Introduction: Energy Humanities in Practice: Teaching, Technology, Transition
EH in Practice 1: Libraries and Laboratories: Teaching Energy Humanities in Literary Studies
EH in Practice 2: The World of Energy and The Myth of Containerization
EH in Practice 3: Museums and the Challenge of Cultural Decarbonization
EH in Practice 4: Preserving Oil: In Conversation with Educators at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum and Oil Museum of Canada
EH in Practice 5: Virtue Ethics and Ecosabotage
EH in Practice 6: The Rise and Fall of Energiewende: A Case Study in Horse Racing Syndrome
Notes
1. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso Books, 2013).
2. Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement," Inquiry 16, no. 1 (1973): 95–100; Paul Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1986); Joseph R. DesJardins, Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy, 5th ed. (Cengage, 2013).
3. Thomas Young, "The Morality of Ecosabotage," Environmental Values 10, no. 3 (2001): 385–93; Bron Taylor, "Resistance: Do the Ends Justify the Means?" in State of the World 2013, ed. Linda Stark (Island Press, 2013), 304–316.
4. Geoffrey Frasz, "Environmental Virtue Ethics: A New Direction for Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 15, no. 3 (1993): 259–74; Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Open Court, 1999); Louke van Wensveen, Dirty Virtues: The Emergence of Ecological Virtue Ethics (Humanity, 2000); Ronald Sandler and Philip Cafaro, eds., Environmental Virtue Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Ronald Sandler, Character and Environment (Columbia University Press, 2007); Brian Treanor, "Environmentalism and Public Virtue," Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 23, nos. 1–2 (2010): 9–28; Dominika Dzwonkowska, Virtue Ethics and the Environment, 1st ed., Routledge Environmental Ethics Series (Routledge, 2024).
5. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy.
6. Christopher Ketcham, "The Machine Breaker: Inside the Mind of an 'Ecoterrorist'," Harper's Magazine, 2023; Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (Verso, 2021).
7. Michael Martin, "Ecosabotage and Civil Disobedience," Environmental Ethics 12, no. 4 (1990): 291–310; Jennifer Welchman, "Is Ecosabotage Civil Disobedience?" Philosophy and Geography 4, no. 1 (2001): 97–107.
8. David Barney, "Beyond Carbon Democracy: Energy, Infrastructure, and Sabotage," in Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond, ed. Imre Szeman and Jeff Diamanti (West Virginia University Press, 2019), 214–228.
9. Johannes Brehm and Henri Gruhl, “Increase in Concerns About Climate Change Following Climate Strikes and Civil Disobedience in Germany,” Nature Communications 15, no. 2916 (2024); Kevin A. Young and Laura Thomas-Walters, “What the Climate Movement’s Debate About Disruption Gets Wrong,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11, no. 25 (2024); Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011).
