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With the permission of Swedish Allemansrätten, the Right of Public Access, allows people to interact with the natural environment... . Environmental ethics, discuss about the relationship between man and nature, and is hence clearly connected to the questions of wildlife tourism. Great part of the previous literature has focused on the environmental ethics in tourism from the perspective of utilitarianism or deontology, with special concern in animal rights, animal ethics and animal welfare. However, questions like ‘what kind of people will do good to the environment?’, ‘What are the characteristics of these people?’ are among those that still need to be discussed in the field of wildlife tourism research. According to the theory of environmental virtue ethics, man's attitude towards nature originates from the internal quality and character of human beings. Whether it is the western scholars Thomas Hill and Geoffrey Frasz, or the ancient Chinese School of Confucianism and Taoism, they all put forward their own opinions on the characters required by the virtue ethics of the environment. In this thesis, documentary writing and network media records of wildlife tourists in Sweden are used as empirical materials to demonstrate the behavioral and psychological manifestations of the three characters of environmental virtues ethics. These three characters reflect the harmonious interaction between man and nature, and contribute in the theoretical discussions of of ethics in Tourism Studies.

This dissertation comprises a series of five separate papers, arranged as chapters, linked thematically and also in their conclusions. The thematic connection between the chapters is that, in each, I investigate some aspect, either historical or contemporary, of how moral limits have been, or might be, applied to the human manipulation of nature through technology. More specifically, I explore how the concept of naturalness has been, and still is, employed in ethical arguments that seek to place limits upon or defend the use of various technologies. In each chapter, I argue that arguments which appeal to nature or naturalness as a normative concept make proper sense only when understood from the perspective of virtue ethics. The conclusions of each chapter are connected, and connected to the conclusions of the dissertation as a whole: firstly, that what I call 'arguments from nature', as they are used in debates about the moral limitations on the use of technology, are defensible only from within a virtue ethics framework; secondly, that such arguments have an important, although limited, role in such debates; and, finally, that virtue ethics more broadly can inform debates about the ethics of technology and the environment. In the first two chapters, by comparing contemporary debates over the ethics of technological manipulation of nature with historical debates over the proper relationship between art and nature, I demonstrate that virtue ethics have played, and still do play, a significant role in our ethical understanding of our relationship with the non-human world. I argue that the ethical issues that arise from our relationship with the non-human world, in response to advances in technology and to problems with the environment, indicate the need for an understanding of ethics that goes further than the mere consideration of rights and utility. In chapters three and four, I argue that virtue ethical theory provides the most promising understanding of the argument from nature as it is applied in attempts to place limits on the human manipulation of nature. In the final chapter, I explore what a modern environmental or technological virtue or vice might be. I explain and defend the environmental and technological virtue of 'living in place' and, in doing so, bring together and validate the claims made in previous chapters that the appeal to human nature does have a role as a normative guide for our ethical evaluations of how we should live and, more generally, that virtue ethical theory can be of guiding and foundational significance in an overarching ethics of the environment and technology.

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