It’s an undeniable fact about our moral lives that we are partial towards certain people and projects. Despite this, it has traditionally been very hard to justify partiality. In this paper I defend a novel partialist theory. The context of the paper is the debate between three different views of how partiality is justified. According to the first view, partiality is justified by facts about our ground projects. According to the second view, partiality is justified by facts about our relationships (...) with the things that we are partial towards. And according to the third view, partiality is justified by facts about the things that we are partial towards. I argue that all three views contain part of the truth. We can see this by adopting a more sophisticated view of the weight of reasons. Once we do this, it will be clear that both facts about individuals and facts about relationships play a role in explaining why we often have stronger reason to act well towards those things we are partial towards. Further, I argue, facts about projects help explain why facts about relationships play the role that they do in determining the strength of our reasons. (shrink)

This essay argues that current advocacy of lesbian and gay rights to legal marriage and parenthood insufficiently criticizes both marriage and motherhood as they are currently practiced and structured by Northern legal institutions. Instead we would do better not to let the State define our intimate unions and parenting would be improved if the power presently concentrated in the hands of one or two guardians were diluted and distributed through an appropriately concerned community.

Contemporary critical approaches to bioethics increasingly present themselves as “relational,” though the meaning of relationality and its implications for bioethics seem to be many and varying. I argue that this confusion is due to a multiplicity of relational approaches originating from distinct theoretical lineages. In this article, I identify four key differences among commonly referenced relational approaches: the scope and nature of relationships considered, the extent of the determining influence on individual selfhood, and the integrity of individual selfhood. Importantly, these (...) four differences carry consequences for the usage of relational approaches within academic and clinical bioethics. I show that these differences attach to multiple objects of critique within mainstream bioethics and imply distinct metaethical commitments. Although I issue a cautionary note about combining relational approaches from distinct lineages, I close by suggesting that many such approaches may have their use, drawing on Susan Sherwin's sense of bioethical theories as lenses. (shrink)

On the shared-­ends account of close friendship, proper care for a friend as an agent requires seeing yourself as having important reasons to accommodate and promote the friend’s valuable ends for her own sake. However, that friends share ends doesn't inoculate them against disagreements about how to pursue those ends. This paper defends the claim that, in certain circumstances of reasonable disagreement, proper care for a friend as a practical and moral agent sometimes requires allowing her judgment to decide what (...) you are to do, even when you disagree with her judgment (and even when her judgment is in fact mistaken). In these instances, your friendship can make it the case that you may not act on your own practical and even moral judgments because, at those times, you have a duty as her close friend to defer to her judgments. As a result, treating your friend properly as a responsible agent can require that you assist her in committing what may in fact be serious moral wrongs. (shrink)

Care theorists have made significant gains over the past twenty-five years in establishing caring as a viable moral and political concept. Nonetheless, the concept of caring remains underdeveloped as a basis for a moral and political philosophy, and there is no fully developed account of our moral obligation to care. This article advances thinking about caring by developing a definition of caring and a theory of obligation to care sufficient to ground a general moral and political philosophy.

The phenomenon of technological hazards, whose existence is only revealed many years after they were initially produced, shows that the question of our responsibilities toward future generations is of urgent importance. However, the nature of technological societies means that they are caught in a condition of structural irresponsibility: the tools they use to know the future cannot encompass the temporal reach of their actions. This article explores how dominant legal and moral concepts are equally deficient for helping us understand what (...) future-oriented responsibility requires. An alternative understanding of responsibility is needed, one which can be developed from phenomenological and feminist concepts of care. Care, by opening up for us an understanding of the diversity of values that are constitutive of a worthwhile life, also connects us to the future as the future of care. As such, it provides us with ethical resources that can guide us in the face of uncertainty. (shrink)

Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who (...) we are as persons. Given this centrality, important questions arise concerning the justification of friendship and, in this context, whether it is permissible to “trade up” when someone new comes along, as well as concerning the possibility of reconciling the demands of friendship with the demands of morality in cases in which the two seem to conflict. (shrink)

Research studying the effects of non-financial goals on stakeholder relationships remains inconclusive, with scholars disagreeing on which goals increase or decrease a firm’s proactive stakeholder engagement (PSE). Instead of examining which goals act as forces for good or evil, we shift the focus of recent discussions by emphasizing the mechanisms that can explain the positive and negative stakeholder outcomes of non-financial goals under the umbrella of one theoretical lens. We do so by introducing an ethics of care perspective. Specifically, we (...) first show that four of the five most distinctive non-financial goals of family owners jointly stipulate care-based morality, which likely enhances PSE. However, we subsequently argue that one goal, namely, the wish to exert power and influence, interacts with other goals and related care-based morality to lower PSE. Finally, we show how female family directors temper these interactions. Our insights into the additive and interactive effects of non-financial goals on PSE contribute to corporate social responsibility research, to the organizational goal literature, to family business studies and to work drawing on care ethics in management studies. (shrink)

I contend that there are important moral reasons for individuals, organisations and states to aid others that have gone largely unrecognised in the literature. Most of the acknowledged reasons for acting beneficently in the absence of a promise to do so are either impartial and intrinsic, on the one hand, being grounded in properties internal to and universal among individuals, such as their pleasure or autonomy, or partial and extrinsic, on the other, being grounded in non-universal properties regarding an actual (...) relation to the agent, such as common membership in a family or culture. In contrast, I articulate and defend the existence of two unrecognised reasons for beneficence that can take the form of being impartial and extrinsic. One is that a being’s capacity to be part of a sharing relationship with us can provide some reason to help it, and another is that a sharing relationship qua relationship is an end-in-itself that can provide some reason to help another. I differentiate these considerations from one another and from the more standard reasons for beneficence, provide arguments for thinking that they are central to beneficence, and rebut objections that are likely to be offered by friends of the more standard reasons. (shrink)

While care ethics has frequently been criticized for lacking an account of autonomy, this paper argues that care ethics' relational model of moral agency provides the basis for criticizing the philosophical tradition's model of autonomy and for rethinking autonomy in relational terms. Using Diana Meyers's account of autonomy competency as a basis, a dialogical model of autonomy is developed that can respond to internal and external critiques of care ethics.

I argue that partialist critics of deontological theories make a mistake similar to one made by critics of utilitarianism: they fail to distinguish between a theory’s decision procedure and its standard of rightness. That is, they take these deontological theories to be offering a method for moral deliberation when they are in fact offering justificatory arguments for moral principles. And while deontologists, like utilitarians do incorporate impartiality into their justifications for basic principles, many do not require that agents utilize impartial (...) methods of moral deliberation. It follows that insofar as partialists reject impartiality in deliberation, their criticisms may miss their mark. If however, partialists are opposed to justifications for basic principles that rely upon impartiality, they are committed, I argue, to drastic revisions in moral theory that have worrisome implications. (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.

: In this paper I attempt to defuse a set of epistemic worries commonly raised against ideal observer theories. The worries arise because of the omniscience often attributed to ideal observers – how can we, as finite humans, ever have access to the moral judgements or reactions of omniscient beings? I argue that many of the same concerns arise with respect to other moral theories (and that these concerns do not in fact reveal genuine flaws in any of these theories), (...) and further, that we can and often do have knowledge of the reactions of ideal observers (according to standard, prominent theories in the domain of epistemology). (shrink)

Trust has generally been understood as an intentional mental phenomenon that one party has towards another party with respect to some object of value for the truster. In the landmark work of Annette Baier, this trust is described as a three-place predicate: A entrusts B with the care of C, such that B has discretionary powers in caring for C. In this paper we propose that, within the context of thick interpersonal relationships, trust manifests in a different way: as a (...) property of the relationship itself. We argue that this conceptualization has important implications for the debate over the ethics of interpersonal interventions. In particular, when trust is understood in this way, actions that would otherwise be deemed morally troubling may be permissible, or even morally desirable, on account of their role in strengthening trusting relationships. (shrink)

This article explores a particular connection between friendship and social solidarity and seeks to contribute to understanding the societal significance of non-institutionalised relationships. Commonly the benefits of friendship are assumed to accrue to friends only. But this is only part of the story. Friendship, as instantiation of intimacy and site of moral learning, is conducive to solidarity understood as felt concern for unknown others. That potentiality rests on a specific characteristic: friendship’s loose institutional anchorage. Beginning with an explanation of friendship’s (...) institutional deficit, the article elaborates Durkheim’s ‘positive solidarity’ juxtaposed with Honneth’s recent take on solidarity. It then discusses the contribution personal relationships make to morality, before turning to the specifics of moral learning in friendship. Finally, the article argues that although undesirable as social organising principle, friendship’s institutional deficit renders it conducive to the relational acquisition of a comprehensive understanding of solidarity. (shrink)

As the number of intrinsically unknowable technologically produced risks global society faces continues to grow, it is evident that the question of our responsibilities towards future people is of urgent importance. However, the concepts with which this question is generally approached are, it is argued, deficient in comprehending the nature of these risks. In particular, the individualistic language of rights presents severe difficulties. An alternative understanding of responsibility is required, which, it is argued, can be developed from phenomenological and feminist (...) concepts of care. Such concepts privilege an understanding of human beings that is primarily relational rather than individualistic, and show that responsibility is, in the first place, about connection rather than respecting separation. Care, by opening up for us an understanding of the diversity of values that are constitutive of a worthwhile life, also connects us to the future as the future of care. As such, it provides us with ethical resources that can guide us in the face of uncertainty, including general principles of action and the desire for institutions that can articulate them. (shrink)

Social and structural inequities shape health and illness; they are an everyday presence within the doctor-patient encounter yet, there is limited ethical guidance on what individual physicians should do. This paper draws on a study that explored how doctors and their professional associations ought to respond to the issue of social health inequities.

In this article I criticize some traditional impartiality practices in Western philosophical ethics and argue in favor of Marilyn Friedman’s dialogical practice of eliminating bias. But, I argue, the dialogical approach depends on a more fundamental practice of equanimity. Drawing on the works of Tibetan Buddhist thinkers Patrul Rinpoche and Khenpo Ngawang Pelzang, I develop a Buddhist-feminist concept of equanimity and argue that, despite some differences with the Western impartiality practices, equanimity is an impartiality practice that is not only psychologically (...) feasible but also central to loving relationships. I conclude by suggesting ways that feminist dialogical practices for eliminating bias and meditative practices are mutually supportive. (shrink)

This paper argues that a comparative study of the idea of a sense of justice in the work of John Rawls and the early Chinese philosopher Kongzi is mutually beneficial to our understanding of the thought of both figures. It also aims to provide an example of the relevance of moral psychology for basic questions in political philosophy. The paper offers an analysis of Rawls’s account of a sense of justice and its place within his theory of justice, focusing on (...) the features of this capacity and how it develops. It then provides an account of the sense of justice in Kongzi’s thought as it is seen in the Analects. Finally, it shows how examining the similarities and differences between the two accounts can deepen our understanding of both views, as well as our appreciation for the importance of understanding how a sense of justice develops. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBringing philosophical work on friendship to bear on the growing body of critique about the state of the neoliberal academy, this paper defends academic friendship. Initially a vignette illustrates the key features of academic friendship and the multiple demands on academics to account for themselves in the neoliberal university. We locate academic friendship in the context of that neoliberal university before discussing managerialist threats to this relationship. We indicate how the performativity-driven working environment contrasts radically and unfavourably with some defining (...) features of friendship. Academic friendship, we argue, can entail generative intellectual and moral activity and growth though trusting and honest reflection on research and scholarship, and teaching and learning. Contending that it may offer an antidote to aspects of the neoliberal academy, in our concluding section academic friendship is highlighted as both a defence and a means of resistance against the worst excesses of the university in dark times. (shrink)

The dynamic differentiation of various social spheres in modernity has not been matched by any similarly dynamic development of new forms of trust which would help to maintain the connection between the impersonal/ systemic forms and the personal ones. Instead, we face today an increasing gap between the forms of trust related to the proliferating ‘abstract systems’ and the personal forms of trust. It is, above all, in this context that the topic of friendship became reintroduced into theoretical debates in (...) search for a model of human relationships which might bridge this gap. It is argued that such transformation of friendship into a ‘radical utopia’ is only the latest phase in the long series of historical transformations it has undergone in the context of changing social articulation of the relation between privacy and publicness. (shrink)

Approaches to global ethics have drawn on a number of diverse theoretical traditions, such as Kantianism and utilitarianism. While emerging frameworks contribute to a growing awareness of and interest in ethics within a global society, the values that they prioritize are not adequate for realizing a just, equitable and fair system of global governance. This article considers the possibilities of an alternative ethic - a feminist ethic of care - and explores how it can bear on present circumstances, including global (...) inequity and injustice. This care ethic has been put forward as a viable normative approach to politics and policy. Little attention, however, has been paid to the potential of a care ethic within the globalization and ethics debate. This article illustrates how the values and corresponding principles of care, grounded in relationships and responsibilities, are essential to responding adequately to the current challenges of globalization. By examining the relevance of care in this context, the article seeks to broaden dominant ethical worldviews and contribute to the articulation of normative tools for examining globalization while at the same time avoiding the trappings of conventional universality - the abstract and a priori thinking typically associated with conceptions of global ethics. (shrink)

The paper draws upon new conceptions of place, space, interaction and community in Geography and Media Studies to explore the possibilities of extending existing conceptions of care and caring from the context with which they are traditionally associated—face-to-face encounters within a shared physical locale. It proposes three structures of ‘caring at a distance’, all of which have a core element of mediated or distanciated interaction, and concludes that mass media and electronic networks play a significant role in extending the scope (...) of beneficence beyond our ‘nearest and dearest’ to embrace distant others. (shrink)

The paper draws upon new conceptions of place, space, interaction and community in Geography and Media Studies to explore the possibilities of extending existing conceptions of care and caring from the context with which they are traditionally associated—face-to-face encounters within a shared physical locale. It proposes three structures of 'caring at a distance', all of which have a core element of mediated or distanciated interaction, and concludes that mass media and electronic networks play a significant role in extending the scope (...) of beneficence beyond our 'nearest and dearest' to embrace distant others. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young argues we cannot understand others' experiences by imagining ourselves in their place or in terms of symmetrical reciprocity (1997a). For Young, reciprocity expresses moral respect and asymmetry arises from people's greatly varying life histories and social positions. La Caze argues there are problems with Young's articulation of asymmetrical reciprocity in terms of wonder and the gift. By discussing friendship and political representation, she shows how taking self-respect into account complicates asymmetrical reciprocity.

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)

The topic of the self has long been salient in feminist philosophy, for it is pivotal to questions about personhood, identity, the body, and agency that feminism must address. In some respects, Simone de Beauvoir's trenchant observation, "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other," sums up why the self is such an important issue for feminism. To be the Other is to be the non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent — in short, the mere body. (...) In law, in customary practice, and in cultural stereotypes, women's selfhood has been systematically subordinated, diminished, and belittled, when it has not been outright denied. Since women have been cast as lesser forms of the masculine individual, the paradigm of the self that has gained ascendancy in U.S. popular culture and in Western philosophy is derived from the experience of the predominantly white and heterosexual, mostly economically advantaged men who have wielded social, economic, and political power and who have dominated the arts, literature, the media, and scholarship. Responding to this state of affairs, feminist philosophical work on the self has taken three main tacks: (1) critique of established views of the self, (2) reclamation of women's selfhood, and (3) reconceptualization of the self to incorporate women's experience. This entry will survey feminist perspectives on the self from all three of these angles. (shrink)

I develop a model of love or care between children and their parents guided by experiences of parents, especially mothers, with disabilities. On this model, a caring relationship requires both parties to be aware of each other as a particular person and it requires reciprocity. This does not mean that children need to be able to articulate their interests, or that they need to be self-reflectively aware of their parents’ interests or personhood. Instead, parents and children manifest their understanding of (...) one another as unique, irreplaceable individuals, with identifiable needs and interests through their interactions with one another. (shrink)

A central focus of care ethics is on the compelling moral salience of attending to the needs of our particular others. However, there is no consensus within the care literature for how and when such partiality is morally justified. This article outlines and defends a novel justificatory argument that grounds partiality in the facts and values of the relation itself. Specifically, this article argues that partiality is justified when grounded in caring values exemplified in good caring relations. Hence, this justification (...) is termed the argument from good caring relations. This justification is promising for two reasons. First, the argument from good caring relations has the potential to spur engagement between care ethics and the broader partiality literature. In particular, the argument from good caring relations could enhance what Simon Keller has termed ‘the relationships view’. Second, the argument from good caring relations is more persuasive than the other major justificatory argument for partiality presently in the care literature: a distributive argument, which takes the form of a modified version of Robert Goodin’s assigned responsibility model of moral obligation. Indeed, where this distributive argument fails, the argument from good caring relation succeeds. This article thus concludes that the argument from good caring relations is preferable for justifying partiality in care ethics. (shrink)

Despite clear parallels between Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics and recent scholarship in feminist ethics, feminists are often suspicious of discourse ethics and have kept themselves mostly separate from the field. By developing a sustained application of Habermas's discourse ethics to friendship, Keller demonstrates that feminist misgivings of discourse ethics are largely misplaced and that Habermas's theory can be used to develop a compelling moral phenomenology of interpersonal relations.

It is commonly thought that there is a connection between love and death. But what can be said philosophically about the nature of that connection (if indeed it exists)? Plato's Symposium suggests at least three possible ways in which love and death might be connected: first, that love entails (or ought to entail) a willingness to die for one’s beloved; second, that love is a desire for (or perhaps itself is) a kind of death; and third, that love is linked (...) to human mortality and the desire for immortality. I argue that each of these three suggestions is problematic, and should not be accepted at face value. I am ultimately skeptical as to whether any one, overriding connection—be it moral or causal or metaphysical—between love and death exists. At the very least, the matter deserves more nuanced and multi-faceted reflection than what we find in the Symposium. (shrink)

Den feministiske etikken har de siste 25 årene levert moralfilosofiske bidrag som åpner for etiske analyser av nye temaer og kjønnede maktstrukturer. I den norske etikkdiskursen er det likevel sjelden at kjønn eller feministisk etikk tematiseres – til tross for flere tiår med betydelig etikksatsing. Uttrykker tausheten en usynliggjøring som opprettholder et faglig makthierarki? Eller skyldes det at feministisk etikk ikke er «ekte» filosofi, men politikk forkledd som vitenskap? I denne artikkelen diskuteres den feministiske etikkens faglige bidrag og eksistensberettigelse.

In this paper I introduce the theory of gift giving as a possible means to reconcile the contradictions inherent in accountability measures of ‘faculty productivity’ in the American university. In this paper I sketch the theory of gift economies to show how, given the historical ideals that characterize the faculty‐student relationship, a theory of gift giving could help us better judge the labor of the faculty. I suggest that it is the relational character of teaching that frustrates accountability measures and (...) that perhaps if viewed as a gift economy—and in particular an economy with ‘reproductive’ ends—we could better grasp the effectiveness of these relationships. (shrink)

While communities engaged in liberatory struggles have valued group loyalty and condemned betrayal, loyalty itself may be problematic, because remaining loyal to a community may require that one refrain from deconstructing the group identity on which the community is based. This essay investigates what loyalty is and whether loyalty is a virtue, and considers why, if loyalty is indeed a virtue, it may be one that is difficult to maintain in a context of oppression.

Illustrating the tensions and possibilities that the notion of the ethic of care as a democratic and citizenship issue may have in discourses of citizenship education in western states is the focus of this article. I first consider some theoretical debates on the definition of an ethic of care, especially in relation to issues of justice and (im)partiality. Then, I discuss the reconceptualization of care on the basis of two related but distinct themes: the reconciliation of justice and care, and (...) the rethinking of citizenship. Following this, I lay out some implications for citizenship education and answer the question of what learning and teaching for/about a reconceptualized ethic of care can contribute to changing current perceptions of and actions towards immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. (shrink)

The metaphor of “care drain” has been created as a womanly parallel to the “brain drain” idea. Just as “brain drain” suggests that the skilled migrants are an economic loss for the sending country, “care drain” describes the migrant women hired as care workers as a loss of care for their children left behind. This paper criticizes the construction of migrant women as “care drain” for three reasons: 1) it is built on sexist stereotypes, 2) it misrepresents and devalues care (...) work, and 3) it misses the opportunity for a theoretical change about how skills in migration contexts can be understood. (shrink)

Ethicists of care have objected to traditional moral philosophy's reliance upon abstract universal principles. They claim that the use of abstraction renders traditional theories incapable of capturing morally relevant, particular features of situations. I argue that this objection sometimes conflates two different levels of moral thinking: the level of justification and the level of deliberation. Specifically, I claim that abstraction or attention to context at the level of justification does not entail, as some critics seem to think, a commitment to (...) abstraction or attention to context at the level of deliberation. It follows that critics who reject a theory's use of abstraction at the level of justification have not shown that the theory recommends abstraction at the level of deliberation and that it, therefore, compels the deliberating agent to overlook morally salient details. (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.

Cosmopolitanism, as a moral idea, holds that individuals are the ultimate units of moral worth and are entitled to equal consideration, regardless of contingencies such as citizenship or nationality. In one common interpretation, cosmopolitan justice not only regards individuals as the basic subjects of moral concern, but it also requires distributive principles to transcend national affiliations and to apply equally to all persons of the world. As Simon Caney puts it, “persons’ entitlements should not be determined by factors such as (...) their nationality or citizenship.“. (shrink)

‘Universalist’ moral principles have fallen into disfavour because too often they have been pretexts for unilateral impositions upon others, whether domestically or internationally. Too widely neglected has been Kant’s specifically Critical re-analysis of the scope and character of rational justification in all non-formal domains, including the entirety of epistemology and moral philosophy, including both justice and ethics. Rational judgment is inherently normative because it is in part constituted by our self-assessment of whether the considerations we now integrate into a candidate (...) judgment have been integrated as they ought, so as to form a cogent, justifiable judgment. Constitutive of this self-assessment is that rational judgments must be based upon considerations which can be communicated to all others, such that they too can assess them as sufficiently cogent justification; also constitutive of this rational self-assessment is that we actually engage with others who do assess our judgments. Kant’s Critical principles rule out in principle any unilateral imposition upon others, whether in cognition or morals. Using Kant’s Critical principles and methods in connection with ‘practical anthropology’ and the enormously important domain of acquired rights and obligations shows how Kant had already justified fundamentally universal principles of justice which can be institutionalised in variously distinctive cultures, and which form the proper bases for our acquired, specifically social rights and obligations, including those of friendship and community. (shrink)

In this paper, we contextualize Claudia Card's work on forgiveness within wider literatures on forgiveness. With Card, we emphasize the costs of forgiveness and the sufferings of victims, and suggest alternatives to forgiving evils. Women who live in particularly unsafe contexts require recognition more than reconciliation. We conclude that those who forgive evil also require recognition that respects the choices of forgiving agents, seeing their decisions as relevant to conceptual analysis about forgiveness.

RESUMEN La filósofa irlandesa Iris Murdoch propone una teoría moral basada en el amor. Esta "ética del amor" se constituye a partir de la atención amorosa y la imaginación. De acuerdo con Murdoch, teorías morales como la kantiana presentan importantes problemas al considerar la moralidad como un asunto de "algoritmos morales". Las éticas dominantes desde la modernidad hasta nuestros días se han centrado en la universalidad, la imparcialidad, los principios morales, etcétera. Murdoch apunta a que la moralidad tiene que ver, (...) más bien, con nuestra capacidad de responder a otros individuos particulares, particularidad que no es reducible a ninguna forma de universalidad o imparcialidad compleja. ABSTRACT The Irish philosopher Iris Murdoch proposes a moral theory based on love. This "ethics of love" is constituted by loving attention and imagination. According to Murdoch, moral theories such as the Kantian one present important problems as they consider morality a matter of "moral algorithms". Dominant ethics from modernity until today have focused on universality, impartiality, moral principles, and so on. Murdoch points out that morality has to do, rather, with our ability to respond to other particular individuals, a particularity that is not reducible to any form of universality or complex impartiality. (shrink)

Using friendship studies from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, history, classics, political science, sociology, ethology, neuroscience, semiotics and other disciplines, the volume uses the encyclopedic format to construct both a positive ontology (based on empirical evidence) of friendship, as well as discussing friendship's "negative ontology" (i.e., its uncertainties, ambivalences, unknowns, and ineffable aspects), to outline a multidisciplinary comparative approach to different philosophical models of friendship (e.g., ancient Greek, Indian, Roman, modern), and to explore the inner connection between friendship and philosophy (...) (as a way of life and a friendship with wisdom). Among the emergent categories are 1. Issues (e.g., money, mutuality, satisfaction). 2. Models (e.g., the ancient Greek, the Indian, the modern model of friendship). 3. Kinds or types of friendship (e.g., bad friends, noblest friendship, typologies). 4. Incoherence of theoretical typologies (e.g., complexity, ineffability, thisness). 5. Technical terms (e.g., bestowal, friend-shield effect, homophily). 6. Theories, accounts (e.g. Silver’s thesis, Dunbar’s number, mirror account of friendship). 7. Cases of friendships (e.g., Achilles and Patroclus, Murdoch’s friends, famous friends). 8. Philosophers on friendship (e.g., Aristotle, Kant, Weil). 9. Motifs and themes (e.g., gift, pleasure, social media). 10. Concepts (e.g., eros, presentism, tacit knowledge). 11. Proverbs (e.g., Faroese, Jamaican, Swahili proverbs). 12. Friendship studies (e.g., anthropology, history, semiotics of friendship). (shrink)