This paper comes out of a panel honoring the work of Anne Donchin (1940-2014), which took place at the 2016 Congress of the International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB) in Edinburgh. My general aim is to highlight the contributions Anne made to feminist bioethics, and to feminist reproductive ethics in particular. My more specific aim, however, is to have a kind of conversation with Anne, through her work, about whether reproductive justice could demand insurance coverage for in vitro (...) fertilization. I quote liberally from Anne’s work for this purpose, but also to shower the reader with her words, reminding those of us who knew her well what a wonderful colleague she was. (shrink)

In recent decades, feminists have pointed out how prominent ethical theories are primarily concerned with establishing rules of conduct between strangers who share the same social status. As Claudia Card points out, such theories outline explicit expectations and rewards of formal relationships; these relationships characterize formal institutions, such as law and business, and the considerations of upper-class men who predominate in such institutions. An ethics which focuses on the impersonal application of rules risks overlooking attentiveness to personal needs, a crucial (...) quality in caring relationships which women and poorer classes have had primary responsibility for sustaining. For example, women have had greater pressure than men to be attentive to the particular needs of their children and households, while poorer workers have had to attend to the idiosyncrasies of their customers and employers. Moreover, contractarian theories of ethics idealize an equality of status which is not always possible or desirable: Ethical theories should be able to inform us in how we ought to treat our children, or how people should take care of others with disabilities. I will argue that virtue theories can be particularly responsive to these feminist criticisms. Since a feminist ethical theory must be able to evaluate and critique both feminine and masculine practical considerations, I will examine how virtue theories emphasize caring qualities alongside some endorsed by contractarian theories. I will then discuss how understanding gendered notions of care can highlight unjust social practices, by reference to Card’s distinction of formal institutions and Annette Baier’s notion of caring professions. Furthermore, I will point out how emphasizing moral agents’ personal qualities and circumstances can inform conditions for just laws, as exemplified by Rosalind Hursthouse’s ethical examination of abortion. In these ways, virtue theory can provide a moral context within which values of justice and care are jointly cultivated. (shrink)

The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. They examine moral exemplars and the "moral saints" debate, the morality of rescue during the Holocaust, role morality as lying between "personal" and "impersonal" perspectives, Carol Gilligan's theory of women and morality, Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, and moral responsiveness in young children.

When women become perpetrators of suicide bombing, their agency – their ability to act upon and affect the world – is often denied. There are a number of reasons for this and one this thesis considers is that – as females – they are not expected to be violent. Accordingly, such women are judged to be coerced or incompetent, and so unable to rule themselves sufficiently as agents. Models of autonomy propose various frameworks for assessing whether acts or persons are (...) self-governing, and the relational approach in particular has garnered much support recently. However, some aspects of the relational account remain under-theorised, including how autonomy might be measured. In this thesis, I aim to bring these two elements together by examining whether an extension of the relational model may offer a way in which to estimate the autonomy of the bombers in a more nuanced fashion. I make two claims. First, that the relational conception of the agent and autonomy ‘fits’ the bombers. Second, that my spectrum view, which is rooted in the relational approach, maps the bomber’s autonomy approximately but in detail. As such, my spectrum view is a befitting notion of autonomy and allows a graded and comparative representation of the bomber’s autonomy. (shrink)

Addressing central questions in the debate about Foucault's usefulness for politics, including his rejection of universal norms, his conception of power and power-knowledge, his seemingly contradictory position on subjectivity and his ...

In this paper, I critically examine the two dominant views of the concept of luck in the current literature: lack of control accounts and modal accounts. In particular, I argue that the conditions proposed by such views—that is, a lack of control and the absence of counterfactual robustness—are neither necessary nor sufficient for an event's being lucky. Hence, I conclude that the two main accounts in the current literature both fail to capture what is distinctive of, and central to, the (...) concept of luck. (shrink)

All humans experience needs. At times needs cut deep, inhibiting persons’ abilities to act as agents in the world, to live in distinctly human ways, or to achieve life goals of significance to them. In considering such potentialities, several questions arise: Are any needs morally important, meaning that they operate as morally relevant details of a situation? What is the correct moral stance to take with regard to situations of need? Are moral agents ever required to tend to others’ well-being (...) by meeting their needs? What justification or foundation, if any, can be given for requiring moral agents to respond to others’ needs? (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Iris Marion Young's conception of power, arguing that it is incomplete in at least two ways. First, Young tends to equate the term power with the narrower notions of ‘oppression’ and ‘domination.’ Thus, Young lacks a satisfactory analysis of individual and collective empowerment. Second, as Young herself admits, it is not obvious that her analysis of power can be useful in the context of thinking about transnational justice. I conclude by considering one way in which (...) Young's analysis of power needs to be extended or perhaps modified in order to do justice to questions of transnational justice. (shrink)

: This comparative study of the ethics of care and the Confucian concept of jen argue against two assumptions made by Chenyang Li in his own study of these two traditions. Against him, I argue that a "feminine" morality is not adequate to address human equality, and that care-orientated theories like jen and care seem incompatible with the feminist commitment to oppose the subjection of women.

Violence is gendered, so let's call it like it is.

How has engineering ethics addressed gender concerns to date? How have the ideas of feminist philosophers and feminist ethicists made their way into engineering ethics? What might an explicitly feminist engineering ethics look like? This paper reviews some major themes in feminist ethics and then considers three areas in which these themes have been taken up in engineering ethics to date. First, Caroline Whitbeck’s work in engineering ethics integrates considerations from her own earlier writings and those of other feminist philosophers, (...) but does not use the feminist label. Second, efforts to incorporate the Ethic of Care and principles of Social Justice into engineering have drawn on feminist scholarship and principles, but these commitments can be lost in translation to the broader engineering community. Third, the film Henry’s Daughters brings gender considerations into the mainstream of engineering ethics, but does not draw on feminist ethics per se; despite the best intentions in broaching a difficult subject, the film unfortunately does more harm than good when it comes to sexual harassment education. I seek not only to make the case that engineers should pay attention to feminist ethics and engineering ethicists make more use of feminist ethics traditions in the field, but also to provide some avenues for how to approach integrating feminist ethics in engineering. The literature review and analysis of the three examples point to future work for further developing what might be called feminist engineering ethics. (shrink)

What do we as a society, and as parents in particular, owe to our children? Each chapter in Taking Responsibility for Children offers part of an answer to that question. Although they vary in the approaches they take and the conclusions they draw, each contributor explores some aspect of the moral obligations owed to children by their caregivers. Some focus primarily on the responsibilities of parents, while others focus on the responsibilities of society and government. The essays reflect a mix (...) of concern with the practical and the philosophical aspects of taking responsibility for children, addressing such topics as parental obligations, the rights and entitlements of children, the responsibility of the state, the role and nature of public education in a liberal society, the best ways to ensure adequate child protection, the licensing of parents, children’s religious education, and children’s health. Taking Responsibility for Children will be of interest to philosophers, advocates for children’s interests, and those interested in public policy, especially as it relates to children and families. (shrink)

When read as a theory that is supposed to mirror, represent or fit some collection of historical data, critics argue that Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift in Structure of Scientific Revolutions fails by cherry-picking and underdetermination. When read as the ground for a socio-epistemological conception of rationality, critics argue that Kuhn’s theory fails by either the naturalistic fallacy or underarticulation. This paper suggests that we need not view Structure as a historian’s attempt to accurately depict scientific theory change or a (...) philosopher’s attempt to suggest, more normatively, the factors we ought to consider in theory choice. Instead, we might use Kuhn’s theory as a metaphilosophical frame through which to better understand the limits of otherwise intractable philosophical debates. We can focus on Kuhn’s theory not as a proposition or model to confirm, but as something we might use as a tool for understanding. Philosophers have discussed the justice and care orientations in ethics as two theories for which there will be some common, constraining set of intuitions to confirm one theory over the other, to demonstrate that protecting rights is fundamentally more valuable that fulfilling needs or that fulfilling needs is fundamentally more valuable that protecting rights. Instead of conceptualizing this conversation as a choice between two theories, this paper looks to Ian Hacking’s interpretation of Kuhn’s paradigm concept to suggest that working in the world of justice is very different than working in the world of care, as each orientation is a paradigm with its own cognitive and contextual standards of theory assessment. To start, after Larry Laudan, each has its own ontology, methodology, aims and values. But moreover, after Ian Hacking, each has an even larger, entrenched collection of projectible predicates. Though Carol Gilligan herself uses the metaphor of gestalt shift in a few places to characterize the move from the justice to the care perspective, the insight—that what many assume to be a standard exercise in theory choice is really more of a paradigm shift—has been under theorized by ethicists and ignored by philosophers of science. This paper brings the full resources of Structure and its secondary literature to this metaethical issue, while making the larger point that Structure has an important pragmatic role to play, when it comes to the understanding philosophical debates, even if we cannot secure the truth of Kuhn’s theory. (shrink)

A philosophical investigation of new year's celebrations.

Although there are important aspects of ecofeminist valuations of women's caring, a greater degree of skepticism than is now found in ecofeminist scholarship is in order. In this article I argue that there are political risks in celebrating women's association with caring, as both an ethic and a practice, and in reducing women's ethico-political life to care. I support this position by drawing on the work of feminist theorists who argue that the positive identification of women with caring ought to (...) be treated cautiously for it obscures some of the negative implications of feminized care and narrows our understanding of women as political actors. I explain why I think ecofeminists would be better served by using feminist theories of citizenship to understand and interpret women's engagement in politics. (shrink)

O artigo tem como objetivo inicial apresentar, a partir de um panorama geral, alguns elementos centrais da concepção de moral no pensamento de Simone de Beauvoir, bem como suas articulações com outros conceitos pertinentes. A partir disso, pretende-se considerar determinadas apropriações e críticas de teóricas feministas recentes, buscando avaliar as possíveis contribuições do pensamento de Beauvoir à filosofia moral de viés feminista.

Just how care moves us is the subject of Katherine Gardiner’s thesis. Gardiner wants to know how care moves us – or in philosophical terms, how it motivates us. She describes caring as a morally ‘necessary’ activity, which means that we cannot escape responding to the care appeal. However, Gardiner uses the example of ‘Pim’, who cannot care and feels really bad about it - not because he is incapable of caring, but who just can’t. She reviews several versions of (...) care ethics that might persuade him to care, containing concepts like ‘engrossment’, ‘responsibility’, ‘solidarity’, ‘virtue’ and ‘reason’. According to Gardiner, none will do, because they are not compelling enough. She concludes that we need to understand how morality has effect, how it works. Christine Korsgaard’s concept of ‘normativity’ does just this. Korsgaard makes necessary links between making moral decisions and having an identity and being human and argues that acting contrary to any of these will make one “feel worse than death”. Caring for and about others is an important human activity and for some people is a crucial part of their practical identity. Without Korsgaard, we would have to reject Pim as a moral deviant (someone insensible to moral reason); with Korsgaard we can understand Pim’s pain, according to Gardiner. (shrink)

The film Gandhi expands our understanding of how the virtue of care can function in the public sphere by portraying Gandhi dealing with Indian independence from Britain, the subjugation of women and Untouchables, and strife between Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi illustrates in his social and political activism how the virtue of care is animated by benevolence and structured by the building blocks of the care perspective: responsibility and need, relationship and mutual dependency, context and narrative.