Toward an environmental relational virtue ethics and a relational biodiversity economics

Ecological crises are increasingly understood as symptoms of a ‘values gap’ — the failure of political and economic systems to register the diverse ways nature matters. While relational values aim to address this gap, it faces persistent conceptual and practical critiques. We propose shifting the focus to relational virtues. Closing the values gap requires cultivating moral and social dispositions that regulate feedback between human conduct and ecological systems. Drawing on niche construction theory, we reconceptualize virtue cultivation as moral niche construction, where virtues function as feedback mechanisms that stabilize and transmit moral–ecological relations across generations. This framework bridges normative ethics with cultural evolution and advances relational biodiversity economics by explaining how relational orientations become embodied in practices and institutions. Engaging recent debates on moral and virtue nudging, we outline policy tools that support character formation while respecting autonomy. Sustainability transformation, we argue, depends on closing this virtues gap.