We argue for asymmetries between positive and negative partiality. Specifically, we defend four claims: i) there are forms of negative partiality that do not have positive counterparts; ii) the directionality of personal relationships has distinct effects on positive and negative partiality; iii) the extent of the interactions within a relationship affects positive and negative partiality differently; and iv) positive and negative partiality have different scope restrictions. We argue that these asymmetries point to a more fundamental moral principle, which we call (...) Morality’s Harmonious Propensity. According to this principle, morality has a propensity toward preserving positive relationships and dissolving negative ones. (shrink)

Contrary to the widespread view that Reid and Hume agree that reason, alone, is inert, I argue that they disagree on this point. Both accept that reason plays a role in forming moral sentiments, and that affections are components of moral evaluations. However, I show that for Reid moral evaluations (comprised of moral judgments and moral affections) are different from moral motives (which are not comprised of affections). Moral motives for Reid are mind‐independent states of affairs that are grasped by (...) reason and do not require affections to influence human beings. Reid hence holds a non‐Humean theory in which reason, alone, is not inert. (shrink)

‘This class is so [insert expletive] depressing.’ I overheard a student communicating this to a friend upon exiting one of my ethics courses and I wondered how my classes could generate a sense of empowerment rather than depression, a sense of hope rather than despair. Drawing from David Hume's and Martin Hoffman's work on the psychology of empathy and sympathy, I contend that dominant Western philosophical pedagogy is inadequate for facilitating morally empowered students. Moreover, I stipulate that an adequate analysis (...) of the role emotion should play in pedagogy requires tending to the politics of emotional expression and how oppression functions. I argue that ethical educators have a moral responsibility to facilitate not only critical moral thinking but critical moral agency. Part of ethical education should involve the provision of tools for effective citizen engagement, and reasoning alone is insufficient for this goal. The role of emotion in ethical decision-making and action remains devalued and u.. (shrink)

Rudyard Kipling famously penned, “East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” His poetic line suggests that Eastern and Western cultures are irreconcilably different and that their members engage in fundamentally incommensurable ethical practices. This paper argues that differing cultures do not necessarily operate by incommensurable moral principles. On the contrary, if we adopt a virtue ethics perspective, we discover that East and West are always meeting because their virtues share a natural basis and structure. This (...) article sketches the rudiments of what a universal virtue ethic might look like. Such an ethic is especially relevant and valuable in this era of global business. (shrink)

Public utility regulation is one example of how stakeholder theory has actually evolved in practice. Through trial and error, court cases, statutory law and economic realities, stakeholder theory has its origins almost a century before R Edward Freeman published his seminal work Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. This wealth of historical data is largely overlooked by the stakeholder literature. We will show in this article how the specific history of public utility regulation provides at least one answer to how stakeholder (...) theory can be formulated, used, and applied. This process of determining and protecting stakeholder interests is significantly different from rationalist trends in stakeholder theory.1 Rather than first trying to determine the requirements of stakeholder theory in conjunction with an ideal ethical theory, the account given here is of an evolutionary stakeholder theory where rules arise out of the ongoing search for cooperative solutions among all stakeholders. (shrink)

This paper argues that the rules that constitute a market protect autonomy and increase welfare in healthcare. Markets do the former through protecting rights to self-ownership and a cluster of rights that protect its exercise. Markets protect welfare by organizing and protecting trades. In contrast, prohibition destroys legitimate markets, giving rise to so-called black markets that harm both the autonomy and well-being of agents. For example, a fee-for-service medical system is a highly developed and specialized market. It is individuals working (...) together, through the division of labor, to provide mutual insurance. This coordination, and the benefits it makes possible, is not possible without injunctions against harm. Prohibitions on harm are not mere ethical niceties, they are practice rules for both healthcare and markets. Placing the doctor within a healthcare market actually reinforces the doctor’s moral obligation, and the legal enforcement of that obligation, not to harm. Similarly, markets reinforce patient rights to self-determination through legal and institutional enforcement of the harm principle in the form of the protection of certain basic welfare rights to life, bodily integrity, property, trade, and contract. Since the establishment of markets protects agent autonomy and welfare, and prohibition directly harms the same, there are strong reasons for establishing markets to protect trade in precisely those areas where autonomy and well-being are most vulnerable to exploitation, for example, the trade in human kidneys. (shrink)

Twice in the _Journal of Business Ethics_, Walter Block provides a libertarian argument that The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is unjust because it is a violation of a business’s property rights and therefore ought to be repealed. No libertarian reply to Block has ever been given, creating the mistaken impression that his argument is the true representation of libertarian theory with regards to civil rights. This paper focuses on Title II and argues that both Block, and this prevailing opinion (...) of libertarian theory, are wrong. There are different types of libertarian theory. Block’s theory of natural rights is one of them, but there is another strain of libertarian thought that embraces the common law, at least as it existed up until the late 1800’s. This paper explicates a libertarian argument, based on the common law, which supports and defends Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Specifically, the evolution of contracts via assumpsit arguments, found in Blackstone’s _Commentaries,_ endogenously and consistently gives rise to the obligation to serve all. Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is consistent with this common law tradition on public accommodations. Libertarian arguments that accept the common law on contracts ought also to accept common law doctrine on public accommodations and, _perforce_, the justness of Title II. (shrink)

This paper has three aims. First, I defend, in its most radical form, Hume's scepticism about practical reason, as it applies to purely self-regarding matters. It's not always irrational to discount the future, to be inconstant in one's preferences, to have incompatible desires, to not pursue the means to one's ends, or to fail to maximize one's own good. Second, I explain how our response to the “irrational” agent should be understood as an expression of frustrated sympathy, in Adam Smith's (...) sense of sympathy, rather than a genuine judgement about Reason. We judge these people because we cannot imaginatively identify with their desires and attitudes, and this is frustrating. Third, compared to the standard cognitive view, my account better explains the nature of our criticism of the “irrational,” and, by portraying “irrationality” as a cause of upset to other people, provides a better normative basis for being “rational.”. (shrink)

Welfarism is the view that morality is centrally concerned with the welfare or well-being of individuals. The division between welfarist and non-welfarist approaches underlies many important disagreements in ethics, but welfarism is neither consistently defined nor well understood. I survey the philosophical work on welfarism, and I offer a suggestion about how the view can be characterized and how it can be embedded in various kinds of moral theory. I also identify welfarism's major rivals, and its major attractions and weaknesses.

According to the quasi-perceptualist account of philosophical intuitions, they are intellectual appearances that are psychologically and epistemically analogous to perceptual appearances. Moral intuitions share the key characteristics of other intuitions, but can also have a distinctive phenomenology and motivational role. This paper develops the Humean claim that the shared and distinctive features of substantive moral intuitions are best explained by their being constituted by moral emotions. This is supported by an independently plausible non-Humean, quasi-perceptualist theory of emotion, according to which (...) the phenomenal feel of emotions is crucial for their intentional content. (shrink)

The real-life complexity of moral motivation can be examined and explained by reintegrating time and development into moral inquiry. This article is one of the possible integrative steps in this direction. A dynamic developmental conception of moral motivation can be a useful bridge toward such integration. A comprehensive view of moral motivation is presented. Moral motivation is reconceptualized as a developmental process of self-organization and self-regulation out of which moral judgment and action emerge through the interplay of dynamically intertwined cognitive (...) and emotional components. Moral identity is proposed to emerge from long-term self-organization of moral motivation. In turn, as a higher-order construct, moral identity has a top-down influence on real-time self-organization. The article includes an account of short-term changes in moral motivation, and an account that connects real-time moral functioning with long-term changes. Moral motivation is qualified as a dynamic developmental process on the basis of self-organization, multicausality, nonlinearity, interconnectedness of time scales and substantial intrapersonal variability through motivational pluralism. (shrink)

David Hume's most brilliant and ambitious work is entitled A Treatise of Human Nature, and it, together with his other writings, has left an indelible mark on philosophical conceptions of human nature. So it is not merely the title of Hume's work that makes discussion of it an appropriate inclusion to this volume, but the fact of its sheer influence. However, its pattern of influence – including, of course, the formulations of ideas consciously antithetical Hume's own – is an immensely (...) complex one, subtle and incredibly difficult to decode. In all probability ‘Hume's’ presence in contemporary thinking of human nature is to likened to the end product of a historiographical game of Chinese whispers, whereby ‘Hume's’ view on x and y is now inflected with interpretations his work – or, more accurately, selected parts of it – that are in turn filtered by thinkers and traditions with different focuses and interest from Hume's own. I am not equipped even to begin to trace this line of influence, a lack compounded by my relative ignorance of the present state of the debate on human nature. Nevetheless various ‘humean’ doctrines still orient debate and I guess these claims include the idea that causation is a matter of instantiating a universal regularity, that normativity can understood causally, that motivation is a matter of belief plus some independently intelligibly ‘attitude’, that a self is best conceived as a collection of independent states that combine to yield a self and so on. (shrink)

Accounts of virtue suffer a conflation problem when they appear unable to preserve intuitive distinctions between types of virtue. In this essay I argue that a number of influential attempts to preserve the distinction between moral and epistemic virtues fail, on the grounds that they characterize virtuous traits in terms of ‘characteristic motivation’. I claim that this does not distinguish virtuous traits at the level of value‐conferring quality, and I propose that the best alternative is to distinguish them at the (...) level of good produced. It follows from this that a consequentialist account is best placed to avoid a conflation of moral and epistemic virtue. (shrink)

Suppose that the human tendency to think of certain actions andomissions as morally required – a notion that surely lies at the heart of moral discourse – is a trait that has been naturallyselected for. Many have thought that from this premise we canjustify or vindicate moral concepts. I argue that this is mistaken, and defend Michael Ruse's view that the moreplausible implication is an error theory – the idea thatmorality is an illusion foisted upon us by evolution. Thenaturalistic fallacy (...) is a red herring in this debate,since there is really nothing that counts as a ‘fallacy’ at all. If morality is an illusion, it appears to followthat we should, upon discovering this, abolish moraldiscourse on pain of irrationality. I argue that thisconclusion is too hasty, and that we may be able usefullyto employ a moral discourse, warts and all, withoutbelieving in it. (shrink)

On one side of his sign board, a nineteenth century surgeon depicted a physician operating on a patient's leg; the other side showed the Good Samaritan taking care of the victim's wounds. Christ's parable has often been quoted and depicted as a primary example of human compassion, to be followed by all persons and, a fortiori, by so-called professionals such as physicians and nurses. If we grant that the parable has not lost its narrative power for 20th century “postmodern” readers (...) living in a “pluralistic” society, it merits a closer analysis. (shrink)

At the end of Matters of Exchange , Harold Cook's major revisionist account of the early modern scientific revolution, he locates the political and economic writings of Bernard Mandeville within the practices and values of contemporaneous Dutch observational medicine. Like Mandeville, Cook describes the potency of early modern capitalism and its attendant value system in generating industry and knowledge; like Mandeville, Cook finds coercive systems of moral regulation to be mistaken in their estimation of human capacities; and like Mandeville, Cook (...) does not shy away from the violence that often made the worldwide commerce in matters of fact possible. “Every Part was full of Vice,” famously rhymed Mandeville, “Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.” The practices and values of science, this book suggests, stemmed from the vices of the merchant and the consumer, not the sprezzatura of the baroque courtier, the asceticism of the Christian gentleman, the speculation of the university philosopher, or the dour appraisal of the theologian. Interest, not claims to disinterest, made modern science and its attendant values possible. Scrupulous attention to goods from around the world and right at home created the conditions for natural knowledge. (shrink)

This paper presents and criticizes. Alexander's evolutionary theory of morality (1987). Earlier research, on which Alexander's theory is based, is also reviewed. The propensity to create moral systems evolved because it allowed ancestral humans to limit conflict within cooperating groups and thus form larger groups, which were advantageous because of intense between-group competition. Alexander sees moral codes as contractual, and the primary criticism of his theory is that moral codes are not completely contractual but also coercive. Ways of evaluating Alexander's (...) theory as well as modified versions of it are discussed. (shrink)

David Hume’s and later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on concepts are generally presented as standing in stark opposition to each other. In a nutshell, Hume’s theory of concepts is taken to be subjectivistic and atomistic, while Wittgenstein is metonymic with a broadly pragmatistic and holistic doctrine that gained much attention during the second half of the 20th century. In this essay, I shall argue, however, that Hume’s theory of concepts is indeed much more akin to the views of Wittgenstein and his (...) epigones than many, including Wittgenstein himself, probably might have suspected. As I try to show, Hume anticipates many themes central to Wittgenstein’s writings on language and meaning, and actually takes initial steps towards both an anti-subjectivistic and anti-atomistic psychology and epistemology. (shrink)

Critical reflection on the available neuropsychological evidence suggests that the roles of emotion and reason in moral judgment may not be distinct. This casts significant doubt on our current understanding of moral judgment, and therefore also on all philosophical theories based on that understanding. Most notably, it raises doubts about both sentimentalism and rationalism, which historically have often been treated as exclusive and exhaustive theories regarding the nature of moral concepts. As an alternative, I endorse pluralism with regard to the (...) emotional and rational nature of moral concepts. (shrink)

In response to critical discussions of my book, Moral Literacy, by Stephen Engstrom, Sally Sedgwick and Andrews Reath, I offer a defence of Kant's formalism that is not only friendly to my claims for the moral theory's sensitivity to a wide range of moral phenomena and practices at the ground level, but also consistent with Kant's high rationalist ambitions.

Both Simone Weil and John McDowell analogize value or meaning to sensations such as colour or heat, and this analogy is a strategy for resisting anti‐realism. However, McDowell's analogy tacitly accepts the very dualism which he is criticizing, while Weil's analogy is both more naïve and more radical than his. Like McDowell, Weil argues that virtuous character is the actualization of a second nature, but she emphasizes the role of the body in this process. Fully trained, the agent's body is (...) a transparent medium through which she reads circumstances – and through which the circumstances, clearly perceived, express themselves in action. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Humean theories of moral motivation appear preferable to Kantian approaches only if one assumes a broadly foundationalist conception of rational justification. Like foundationalist approaches to justification generally, Humean psychology aims to counter the regress-of-justification argument by positing a set of ultimate regress-stoppers-in this case, unmotivated desires. If the need for regress-stoppers of this type in the realm of practical deliberation is accepted, desires do indeed appear to be the most likely candidate. But if this (...) foundationalist strategy is rejected, there is no longer any reason to suppose that all motivation must be traceable to some extra-rational incentive. This clears the way for a rehabilitation of the Kantian claim that reasons for action can take the form of categorical imperatives. To illustrate this thesis, I show how a conception of practical rationality that incorporates a contextualist model of justification can be developed that treats social norms as reasons for action, without assigning any mediating role to agent desires. a theory of action of this type eliminates the gap between moral obligation and action, and so articulates the fundamental Kantian intuition that acting on the basis of moral principle-and with disregard for self-interest-is just one way of acting rationally. (shrink)

Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done (...) by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology. (shrink)

In the work of Charles H. Cooley, sympathy is a central subject matter of sociology and social psychology, a descriptive and explanatory method similar to “interpretive understanding,” and an evaluative method used for social critique and arguments for social reforms. The latter feature of the value-orienting qualitative method of sympathetic introspection is pertinent in light of discussions regarding the development of a critical qualitative methodology. The uniqueness of Cooley's method, when compared to value-neutral approaches in the interpretive tradition, is its (...) theoretically- and methodologically-grounded license for social scientific thinking to cultivate concern for the people it studies, with the following practical implication: arguments for social reforms rooted in a form of knowledge that embeds individuals in the social whole. Further, Cooley's notion of sympathy contributes to the theory of mind debate by theorizing both a philosophical-anthropological and sociological foundation for attributing mental states to others in order to participate in social action. (shrink)

The planet seems to be heading into an ecological catastrophe, in which the earth will become uninhabitable for many species, including human beings. At the same time we humans are beset by appalling injustices. The Rio Declaration which addressed both these sets of problems contains conceptual contradictions about ‘development and ‘nature’. This paper addresses the issue of whether it is logically possible to work for both global justice and ecological sustainability. The article proposes a way of responding to the spirit (...) of the Rio Declaration without reinstating its contradictions; considers a posthuman perspective on the issue; and proposes a phenomenological approach to ethics and justice which would include both the human and more-than-human parts of the world. In section the implications for education are drawn out, in terms of ‘learning to mind’. Finally, links are drawn to the Journal theme of translation. (shrink)

David Hume's celebrated essay ‘‘Of the Standard of Taste’’ is the central text for understanding Hume's aesthetic theory, yet an important claim in that essay has received inadequate attention in the literature. Although it is understood that Hume stresses the importance of delicacy of taste, it is less well understood that this delicacy is a delicacy of imagination, which is distinct from a delicacy of perception. Using both the essay and other texts to elucidate this thesis, it appears that Hume's (...) account of taste faces unresolved difficulties in defending a standard of taste. (shrink)

The Stoic, David Hume’s “man of action and virtue,” is often considered the forerunner and foundation of Adam Smith’s market man of morals (Hume 1985, 146–54). Ian Simpson Ross notes Smith’s enthusiasm for Stoic philosophers such as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius and the way Stoic philosophy informs Smith’s arguments on various topics such as self-command, self-love, and suicide (Ross 1995, 172, 384). Pierre Force confirms the influence of Stoicism in tracing Smith’s moral system as a contrast with the Epicurean/Augustinian tradition, (...) showing that for Smith and Stoics self-love merely points the way for an agent to choose rationally a course of action (Force 2003, 103–5). However, Deirdre McCloskey and others .. (shrink)

The contemporary sociology of morality is a form of descriptive ethics that shrinks away from any sort of prescriptive ethics. Building on the moral philosophies of John Dewey, and also of Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, and in dialogue with recent work by Stefan Bargheer, this article proposes a more ambitious program of critical social ethics that connects concerns with character and the common good but tempers them with attention to alienation and oppression.

Hume describes skeptical philosophy as having a variety of desirable effects. It can counteract dogmatism, produce just reasoning, and promote social cohesion. When discussing how skepticism may achieve these effects, Hume typically appeals to its effects on pride. I explain how, for Hume, skeptical philosophy acts on pride and how acting on pride produces the desirable effects. Understanding these mechanisms, I argue, sheds light on how, why, when, and for whom skeptical philosophy can be useful. It also illuminates the value (...) of skeptical philosophy for a humanistic education, giving us a reason to include Hume in curricula. (shrink)

Hume describes his own “open, social, and cheerful humour” as “a turn of mind which it is more happy to possess, than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year.” Why does he value a cheerful character so highly? I argue that, for Hume, cheerfulness has two aspects—one manifests as mirth in social situations, and the other as steadfastness against life’s misfortunes. This second aspect is of special interest to Hume in that it safeguards the other virtues. (...) And its connection with the first aspect helps explain how it differs from Stoic tranquility. For Hume, I argue, philosophy has a modest role in promoting human happiness by preserving cheerfulness. (shrink)

This study looks at the emerging branch of everyday aesthetics from the perspective of the fracture which exists in its core, as a result of the double reading of the everyday: the first, which elevates it to the realm of the extraordinary and the second, in which it remains strictly ordinary. Our purpose here is to repair this fracture by turning to David Hume’s functionalist aesthetics, where disinterest and utility are reconciled through sympathy and the affective experience of otherness that (...) it provides. Once transferred to the everyday sphere, sympathy facilitates understanding between these two versions, since the aesthetic appreciation of everyday objects or common activities requires, like the second version, that they remain in the practical environment and, like the first, to see something special in them, which is the possibility of one’s own or another’s well-being. (shrink)

When I first began to study philosophy I was introduced to the discipline in that magically traditional way by being assured that what lay before me was the love of wisdom. Why this had any adolescent appeal still puzzles me, but, like many others, I joined in as spectator to and occasionally as a removed participant in all the rough and tumble of a Socratic sparring match in the Athenian marketplace. There was some talk of wisdom, to be sure, which (...) seemed to link it with a humble admission of ignorance or a pitch against yielding to temptation, but neither was ever deeply revealing. I waited for more. My next encounter a few years later turned up little more than the surname of an English disciple of Wittgenstein. Somehow the trail had gone to brush, despite the apparent health and energy of philosophy. (shrink)

How should we understand the categorical distinction Aristotle draws between praxis and poesis? If this distinction gains its meaning only in a specific social and cultural context, what does this tell us about another famous Aristotelian distinction, namely, the distinction he draws between two types of justice: corrective and distributive? In particular, what is the orienting role of this distinction (and what should we make of this) in accounts of justice based on Kantian right and accounts based on Rawls’ principles (...) of justice? (shrink)

Neuroscience, together with a broadened concept of “mind” has instigated pragmatic and ethical concerns about the experience and treatment of pain. If pain medicine is to be authentic, it requires knowledge of the brain-mind, pain, and the relative and appropriate “goodness” of potential interventions that can and/or should be provided. This speaks to the need for an ethics that reflects and is relevant to the contemporary neuroscience of pain, acknowledgment and appreciation of the sentient being in pain, effects of environment (...) and value(s), and the nature of healing. It may be that neuroethics provides this viable meta-ethic for pain care. This essay describes how an integrative neuroethics of pain care allows, if not obligates, alignment of facts, values, and moral attitudes as a continuing process of re-investigation, analysis, and revision of what we know (and don’t know) about brains, minds, selves, and how we regard and treat the painient. (shrink)

This is a critical review essay of Christine Korsgaard's Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (OUP 2009).

Hume is a naturalist in many different respects and about many different topics; this paper argues that he is also a naturalist about intentionality and representation. It does so in the course of answering four questions about his theory of mental representation: (1) Which perceptions represent? (2) What can perceptions represent? (3) Why do perceptions represent at all? (4) Howdo perceptions represent what they do? It appears that, for Hume, all perceptions except passions can represent; and they can represent bodies, (...) minds, and persons, with their various qualities. In addition, ideas can represent impressions and other ideas. However, he explicitly rejects the view that ideas are inherently representational, and he implicitly adopts a view according to which things (whether mental or non-mental) represent in virtue of playing, through the production of mental effects and dispositions, a significant part of the causal and/or functional role of what they represent. It is in virtue of their particular functional roles that qualitatively identical ideas are capable of representing particulars or general kinds; substances or modes; relations; past, present, or future; and individuals or compounds. (shrink)

Based on social-cognitive theory, this article proposes a model that seeks to explain why high status organizational members engage in unethical behavior. We argue that status differentiation in organizations creates social isolation which initiates activation of high status group identity and a deactivation of moral identity. We further argue that high status group identity results in insensitivity to the needs of out-group members which, in turn, results in lessened motivation to selfregulate ethical decision making. As a result of this identity (...) activation, we demonstrate how high status individuals will be more vulnerable to engaging in unethical activities. Individual-level moderators of the relationships are also discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I lay out, argue for, and defend ethical Mooreanism. In essence, the view says that some moral propositions are Moorean propositions and thus are epistemically superior to the conjunctions of the premises of skeptical arguments to the contrary. In Sect. 1 I explain Mooreanism and then ethical Mooreanism. In Sect. 2 I argue for ethical Mooreanism by noting a number of important epistemic parities that hold between certain moral truths and standard Moorean facts. In Sect. 3 I (...) defend ethical Mooreanism against the objection that moral propositions are too epistemically dissimilar to standard Moorean facts to count as Moorean truths. (shrink)

The development of nursing ethics as a field of inquiry has largely relied on theories of medical ethics that use autonomy, beneficence, and/or justice as foundational ethical principles. Such theories espouse a masculine approach to moral decision-making and ethical analysis. This paper challenges the presumption of medical ethics and its associated system of moral justification as an appropriate model for nursing ethics. It argues that the value foundations of nursing ethics are located within the existential phenomenon of human caring within (...) the nurse/patient relationship instead of in models of patient good or rights-based notions of autonomy as articulated in prominent theories of medical ethics. Models of caring are analyzed and a moral-point-of-view (MPV) theory with caring as a fundamental value is proposed for the development of a theory of nursing ethics. This type of theory is supportive to feminist medical ethics because it focuses on the subscription to, and not merely the acceptance of, a particular view of morality. (shrink)