An overview of relational approaches to ethics, which contrast with individualist and holist ones, particularly as they feature in the Confucian, African, and feminist/care traditions.

People who are involuntarily childless need to use assisted reproductive technologies if they want to have a genetically related child. Yet, from an ethical point of view it is unclear to what extent assistance to satisfy this specific desire should be warranted. We first show that the subjectively felt harm due to the inability to satisfy this reproductive desire does not in itself entail the normative conclusion that it has to be met. In response, we evaluate the alternative view according (...) to which the satisfaction of this desire is regarded as a way to meet one’s presumed intermediate need for parenthood. This view presupposes that parenthood is one of those general categories of experiences and activities that contribute an irreplaceable value to people’s lives, but the central difficulty is to find those characteristics that mark out parenthood as an irreplaceable constituent of a valuable life. We go on to argue, however, that even if one assumes that parenthood is such an irreplaceable constituent that makes life more valuable, this does not necessarily entail a moral duty to satisfy the desire for genetic parenthood. We conclude that there is a pro tanto obligation to help people conceive a genetically related child (if this is what they prefer), but that this can be outweighed by other moral considerations, such as safety and justice concerns. (shrink)

With regard to any natural resource, we can ask whether we should obtain (more of) it. For instance, we may ask whether we, as a society, should seek to obtain more minerals, or more oil. Furthermo...

Kant on sex gives most philosophers the following associations: a lifelong celibate philosopher; a natural teleological view of sexuality; a strange incorporation of this natural teleological account within his freedom-based moral theory; and a stark ethical condemnation of most sexual activity. Although this paper provides an interpretation of Kant’s view on sexuality, it neither defends nor offers an apology for everything Kant says about sexuality. Rather, it aims to show that a reconsidered Kant-based account can utilize his many worthwhile insights (...) and that making Kant’s account of sexuality more consistent with his own basic philosophical commitments results in a compelling approach to the complex and complicated phenomena of sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation. (shrink)

The ethics of care addresses aspects of the human condition that other moral theories overlook—our vulnerability to injury, inevitable dependencies, and ubiquitous needs. In the grip of these experiences, we require care from others to survive and flourish. The precarious nature of human existence represents a related experience, one less thoroughly explored within care ethics. Through examination of these occasions for care, this article offers two contributions: First, a map of the conceptual relations between care ethics’ four key concepts: need, (...) vulnerability, dependency, and precariousness. As a subset of these efforts, I investigate the relevance of precariousness and precarity for care ethics by asking what they require of caring relations that vulnerability does not. Second, a more precise articulation of care ethics’ normative foundations and accompanying elucidation of the alternative vision of moral responsibility care ethics advances. Examining need, vulnerability, dependency, and precariousness through the lenses of finitude and embodiment exposes two common forms of conflation: between precarity and vulnerability and between dependency and vulnerability. Analysis of the moral significance of the body as a site for care reveals a novel portrayal of the normative foundations of care ethics and the reasons why we care for one another ethically. (shrink)

While some trust theorists have adverted to the vulnerabilities involved in trust, especially vulnerability to betrayal, the literature on trust has not engaged with recent work on the ethics of vulnerability. This paper initiates a dialogue between these literatures, and in doing so begins to explore the complex interrelations between vulnerability and trust. More specifically, it aims to show how trust can both mitigate and compound vulnerability. Through a discussion of two examples drawn from literary sources, the paper also investigates (...) the effects of pathogenic vulnerability on the psychic economies of trust and distrust. (shrink)

Political theorists generally defend the moral importance of health care by appealing to its purported importance in promoting good health and saving lives. Recent research on the social determinants of health demonstrates, however, that health care actually does relatively little to promote good health or save lives in comparison with other social and environmental factors. This article assesses the implications of the social determinants of health literature for existing theories of health care justice, and outlines a new approach that can (...) justify publicly subsidized comprehensive health care despite its limited contribution to good health. Even if health care plays a relatively limited role in promoting good health, it remains morally important because of the care it provides to individuals. As such, it can be justified in terms of care ethics. When health care is justified primarily in terms of care rather than health, however, the goals of a just health-care system shift. The measure of a just health-care system is no longer strictly its ability to generate good health outcomes but also its ability to provide individuals with accessible, good quality daily care. This different focus has important consequences for the way we think about the institutions of a just health-care system as well as for the delivery and allocation of medical goods and services. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to move toward a relational moral theory of harm through examination of a common yet underexplored form of child maltreatment: childhood psychological abuse. I draw on relational theory to consider agential, intrapersonal, and interpersonal ways in which relational harms develop and evolve both in intimate relationships and in conditions of oppression. I set forth three distinctive yet interconnected forms of relational harm that childhood psychological abuse causes: harm to the relational agency of individuals, harm (...) to the relationships individuals hold with themselves, especially with regard to how they respect, know, and trust themselves, and harm to interpersonal relationships of both a direct and indirect nature in present and future timeframes. I close by noting that while relationships can be the site of human brutality that destroys the relational self, paradoxically and promisingly, they also can be a primary means of the relational reconstitution of the self. Ultimately, relational analyses of the harms of childhood psychological abuse reveal several key elements of a relational theory of harm and demonstrate the significance of relational harms for moral philosophy. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of friendship is crucial in defending his ethics against the longstanding charge of emotional detachment. But his theory of friendship is vulnerable to this charge too: the Kantian sage can appear to reject sympathetic suffering when she cannot help a suffering friend. I argue that Kant is committed to the view that both sages and ordinary people must suffer in sympathy with friends even when they cannot help, because sympathy is necessary to fulfill the imperfect duty to adopt (...) others’ merely permissible ends, and we ought to take friends’ MPEs as our own. MPEs are individuated in terms of concepts which include marks of the first person, and no marks of law other than permissibility. To adopt ends of others individuated in terms of such concepts rather than merely promote them as means to different ends, those concepts must engage with one’s feelings in a way that requires sympathy. (shrink)

Psychologists often characterize the infant’s attachment to her primary caregiver as love. Philosophical accounts of love, however, tend to speak against this possibility. Love is typically thought to require sophisticated cognitive capacities that infants do not possess. Nevertheless, there are important similarities between the infant-primary caregiver bond and mature love, and the former is commonly thought to play an important role in one’s capacity for the latter. In this work, I examine the relationship between the infant-primary caregiver bond and love. (...) I argue that while these very early attachments do not represent genuine love, a fuller understanding of them can inform extant philosophical views of love. (shrink)

Social work has long been concerned with the respective roles of the social work profession and the social welfare system in addressing human needs. Social workers engage in needs assessment together with client systems. They provide and advocate for the needs of clients, as well enabling and empowering clients and communities to address their needs. They also advocate for social welfare benefits and services and overall social policies that take human needs into account. However, explicit ethical content was not present (...) in earlier Codes of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers. Furthermore, until very recently, little published literature in peer-reviewed journals has human needs theories to guide models of social work practice or inform social work research. Universalistic assumptions about human needs have long been found within social work’s literature on human development (see Jani and Reisch 2011, under General Overviews). However, these assumptions were often inexplicit. They did not fully utilize theories of human need, which have long recognized that although human needs may be universal, they are addressed in culturally and environmentally specific manners. Also, in practice, social workers have often conflated human needs with the need for the services or benefits available at any one time. This bibliography will explore the history and evolution of the interdisciplinary body of human needs theory and research on which social work has drawn historically, with special attention to the recent surge in interest in human needs theories. In doing so, the entry will discuss a number of key debates that have arisen regarding needs, including whether they are universal or specific to particular cultures; what the relationship is between human needs, human rights, and social justice; and how to reconcile theories of human needs and of human capabilities. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 35-37.

Moral distress has been the subject of extensive research and debate in the nursing ethics literature since the mid-1980s, but the concept has received comparatively little attention from those working outside of applied ethics. In this article, I defend a care ethical account of moral distress, according to which the phenomenon is the product of an agent’s inability to live up to one of her caring commitments. This account has a number of attractions. First, it places a greater emphasis on (...) the importance of the relationship between the caregiver and her cared-for than that found in previous accounts. Second, it does not make problematic assumptions about the correctness of a caregiver’s moral judgments, as has been claimed in relation to previous accounts of moral distress. Finally, my account allows for a clear conceptual distinction to be drawn between moral distress and other forms of negative moral emotion such as guilt and regret. Earlier accounts draw this distinction by appealing to the causal aetiology of moral distress, but as I show here, such appeals are ultimately unsuccessful unless they are made from an explicitly care ethical starting point. One of the implications of my account is that moral distress has the potential to occur in the context of any caregiving relationship. This claim is explored in the final section of the paper, in relation to student-teacher and parent-child caregiving. (shrink)

I begin by discussing forms of cosmopolitanism that motivate challenges to distributive accounts of global justice. I then use Sen's version of the capabilities approach to show how distributive accounts fall short, why an overarching theory of justice is not needed, and that democracy understood as the exercise of public reasoning can do the work of identifying and addressing injustices. That said in favor of Sen, I argue that his account fails to attend to the kinds of injustices emerging from (...) relationships of power and the institutions and structures in which these relationships are embedded. To show this, I outline features of a feminist relational approach, which I then apply to Canada's attempt to address historic harms through the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. While I agree with Sen that we do not need a theory of global justice that is universal, ideal, impartial, or abstracted from context, I aim to broaden the scope of justice beyond both distributive accounts and Sen's version of the capabilities approach. (shrink)

In this article I seek a more complete understanding of evil action. To this end, in the first half of the article I assess the conceptual strengths and weaknesses of the most compelling theories of evil action found in the contemporary philosophical literature. I conclude that the theories that fall under the category I call ‘‘Nuanced Harm Accounts’’ successfully identify the necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept. However, necessary and sufficient conditions are not coextensive with significant features, and Nuanced (...) Harm Accounts are incomplete even if they are correct. In order to supplement them, in the second half of the article I examine the normative relation that obtains between perpetrators and victims of evil and find them to be parties to a relation of asymmetrical power in which the vulnerability of the weaker party is exploited by the stronger party for its advantage, pleasure, or otherwise to achieve its aims. Moreover, the parties in the relation reciprocally enable each other’s role relative to one another. The strength of the more powerful party emerges out of the states of vulnerability of the victims, and the victims are vulnerable relative to the power(s) of the perpetrator. (shrink)

The idea that we need our beloveds has a rich and longstanding history in classic literature, pop culture, social sciences, and of course, philosophical treatments of love. Yet on little reflection, the idea that one needs one’s beloved is as puzzling as it is familiar. In what, if any sense, do we really need our beloveds? And insofar as we do need them, is this feature of love something to be celebrated or lamented? In the relevant philosophical literature, there are (...) various ways of understanding the type(s) of psychological need internal to love and whether and how the necessity in question contributes to love’s value. In this chapter, I survey and critically analyze several accounts of felt necessity in love and advocate for a philosophically neglected perspective on the nature and value of needing our beloveds. (shrink)

The article presents an original needs-based partial theory of human injustice and shows its relationship to existing theories of human need and human liberation. The theory is based on an original typology of three social structural sources of human injustice, a partial theorization of the mechanisms of human injustice, and a needs-based theorization of the nature of human injustice, as experienced by individuals. The article makes a sociological contribution to normative social theory by clarifying the relationship of human injustice to (...) human needs, human rights, and human liberation. The theory contends that human injustice is produced when oppression, mechanistic dehumanization, and exploitation create systematic inequality in opportunities to address human needs, leading to wrongful need deprivation and the resulting serious harm. In one longer sentence, this needs-based partial theory of the sources, mechanisms, and nature of human injustice contends that three distinct social systemic sources—oppression, mechanistic dehumanization, and exploitation—produce unique and/or overlapping social mechanisms, which create systematic inequality in opportunities to address universal human needs in culturally specific ways, thus producing the nature of the human injustice theorized here: wrongfully unmet needs and serious harm. (shrink)

(Conference proceedings 2014) This presentation (International Development Ethics Association, July 2014) considers economic vulnerability, exploring the risk of deprivation of necessary resources due to a complex and rarely discussed vulnerability that arises from hope. Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological account of French petit-bourgeois aspiration in The Social Structures of the Economy has recently inspired Wendy Olsen to introduce the term “aspiration paradox” to characterize cases wherein “a borrower's status aspirations may contribute to a situation in which their borrowings exceed their capacity to (...) repay,” leaving the individual much the worse, due to an aspiration to betterment. If such financial opportunities were not made available to these people – if some were denied loans due to a careful assessment of their vulnerability – would they be better off? We should seriously consider that they might be. I will hazard the straightforwardly paternalistic suggestion that limiting access to lending to those who are vulnerable to their aspirations can be a just policy. Because aspiration paradox is a cross-cultural phenomenon, and because lending frequently involves asymmetries in mathematical education between borrowers and lenders, I hope to elude at least some of the charges of colonialism that have gained a stronger purchase on adaptive preference arguments. (shrink)

Patient-centered care is now recognized as a clinical method and ideal model for patient – health professional relationships, and many definitions have influenced its evolution. Overall the patient-centered care literature has provided relatively little to define patient-centered care at the level of the patient-professional relationship. Additionally, patient-centered care lacks grounding in ethical theory. This thesis asserts that theoretical concepts from the ethics of care can provide a stronger conceptual basis for patient-centered care.This thesis begins with a critical interpretive review of (...) the patient-centered care literature, yielding 12 articles that previously introduced new theoretical and definitional work on patient-centered care and patient-centered communication. Six common themes and ideas were discovered, and include Engaging the Patient as a Whole Person, Recognizing and Responding to Emotions, Fostering a Therapeutic Alliance, Promoting an Exchange of Information, Sharing Decision Making, and Enabling Self-Management and Patient Navigation. These elements were then compared to key elements of the ethics of care. This thesis argues that feminists have good reason to consider care as a type of moral duty, and it describes how this duty functions. This thesis also argues that a duty to care is triggered when caregivers are presented with particular substantive forms of vulnerability. Specifically, this thesis argues that vulnerable subjects whose constitutive needs are at risk require particular moral obligations. The links between the ethics of care and patient-centered care are discussed, including how an ethics of care response ought to function in the health care context. Finally, the cases of J.J. and Makayla Sault, two aboriginal girls who refused chemotherapy in favour of traditional aboriginal healing practices, are analyzed. This thesis offers a short scoping review of the bioethics discourse surrounding these cases. A review of this discourse revealed several common themes, which included the peripheral importance of culture and history, the equating of best interests with survival, the supremacy of science-based medicine, and the impartial application of ethical principles. This thesis recommends that health care professionals apply an ethics of care approach to similar ethical dilemmas in the future, which involves shifting one's ethical focus to the central relationships of the case, understanding the unique perspective of the patient's narrative, and promoting a care-based rather than a justice-based approach to problem-solving. (shrink)