Simplicity as a New Environmental Virtue

This paper argues for the addition of a new environmentally focused virtue, simplicity, to the virtue ethical framework developed by Aristotle. First, relevant background from Aristotle’s virtue ethics are developed including the crucial, “doctrine of the mean”, a balance between excess and deficiency of a specified character trait. The tenets of the new virtue simplicity are developed with practical examples based on Aristotle’s method of developing a virtue of character. Simplicity is proposed as a desire to take the appropriate amount from the natural world and an acceptance of one’s circumstances. Those possessing simplicity will not fall victim to the pervasive “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality. Examples are given of historical figures the author believes to have possessed simplicity. People like Philip Cafaro, Henry David Thoreau, and even Warren Buffett are discussed as potential “mentors” for our own journeys into simplicity. Finally, an expansion on the intertwined nature of simplicity with the cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, piety, temperance, and courage is given satisfying Aristotle’s “unity of the virtues” requirement

Can simplicity help?

International audienceAnalysts are today given (or develop) a wide range of powerful visual reasoning tools, of leading-edge platforms where services like high interactivity, high computing capacity, structured knowledge, processing of complex reasoning tasks on massive data, are duly implemented. Classic XVIIIth or XIXth century dataviz solutions may then appear as respectable, but deprecated - far too simple to match today's challenges. In this paper we try to show that the very simplicity of these solutions can still be of help in problem-solving situations. We first revisit some great classics in order to uncover patterns and exceptions inside a data set consisting of incomplete historical evidence on groups of stalls that used to be located on the market square in Cracow. We show that, once reinterpreted and re-implemented, classic visualisations like Charles De Fourcroy's tableau poléométrique or Munehisa Homma's candlestick chart do help the analyst to re-read the data, and to augment his level of knowledge. We then introduce an online, free to use implementation of these classics that we expect to weigh through a sort-of crowdsourcing approach to which extent they can act as relevant and generic visual formalisms. Finally, we underline the potential contribution of this research in terms of methodology, and discuss in what simplicity proves here helpful