Forgiveness is typically regarded as a good thing - even a virtue - but acts of forgiveness can vary widely in value, depending on their context and motivation. Faced with this variation, philosophers have tended to reinforce everyday concepts of forgiveness with strict sets of conditions, creating ideals or paradigms of forgiveness. These are meant to distinguish good or praiseworthy instances of forgiveness from problematic instances and, in particular, to protect the self-respect of would-be forgivers. But paradigmatic forgiveness is problematic (...) for a number of reasons, including its inattention to forgiveness as a gendered trait. We can account for the values and the risks associated with forgiving far better if we treat it as a moral practice and not an ideal. (shrink)

This paper rethinks the fostering task of the teacher in a time when it, paradoxically, has tended to become marginalized and privatized despite its public urgency. Following post-holocaust thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, the position explored here is radical in the sense that it takes ‘the crisis of traditions’ and the erosion of a common moral ground or value basis seriously, and it is conservative in the sense that it insists on responding educationally to the call from (...) the past by returning to the moral character of our existence and our own embeddedness in the incompleteness of living traditions. The argument is that there is a difference between educating for common values—which entails a belief in pre-existing commonalities—and making values common in and through education. The latter, we argue, entails an aspiration for continuously creating new commonalities and for cultivating the ability to act and judge as a thinking moral agent in specific, lived and worldly cases. In this sense, the fostering task of the teacher is to create commonality of what is not common, turning the liberal democratic values of the past into contested objects of study. (shrink)

This paper considers whether eudaimonism is necessarily an idealizing approach to ethics. I argue, contrary to what is implied by Christine Swanton, that it is not, and I suggest that a non-ideal eudaimonistic virtue ethics can be useful for feminist and critical race theorists. For eudaimonist theorists in the Aristotelian tradition, the claim that one should aim to live virtuously assumes that there will typically be good enough background conditions so that an exercise of the virtues, in conjunction with these (...) favorable external conditions, will suffice for someone to flourish both in the sense of living virtuously and in the sense of living well or living the good life. However, under some forms of oppression the background conditions will not be good enough, and thus an exercise of the virtues will often be insufficient to constitute a flourishing life. It may seem that eudaimonism, with its foregrounding of the concept of flourishing and its assumption of a tight connection between living virtuously and living well, may function as a form of ideology that elides the ways in which non-ideal and oppressive conditions can separate virtue from well-being and can make the state of flourishing (in its dual senses) unattainable. I point out that eudaimonism can be revised to incorporate the claim that virtue and flourishing may typically be unlinked, and I advocate retaining flourishing as an unattainable end, exercising the virtues even with a sense of their absurdity, and confronting the existential states of frustration and disappointment that may result. (shrink)

Normative ethical theory should provide us with guidance for how to live moral lives in a world filled with inequity and abuse of power. In this essay, I address ways that features of resisting organizational power do and do not overlap with features of resisting oppression more generally. I examine the potential for moral damage to individuals who resist organizational power, and argue that the traits necessary for successful whistleblowing are similar to what Lisa Tessman refers to as ‘burdened virtues’—they (...) are necessary to successfully resisting organizational power, but ‘costly to the selves who bear them.’ I conclude by offering a preliminary sketch of the traits of a virtuous resister. (shrink)

This chapter compares the philosophical methods used respectively by John Rawls and Iris Marion Young. Rawls’s theory is ideal in several interrelated methodological respects: he emphasizes principle over practice; he relies on a fictional reasoning process; and his theory is designed for an imagined world that lacks many problematic aspects of the real world. Young’s method, which she characterizes as critical theory, is non-ideal in all the respects that Rawls’s method is ideal. Young emphasizes practice; she respects the reasoning of (...) actual people; and she directly addresses existing injustices. If Young has been able to develop philosophical ideals of justice that are more comprehensive, relevant, and substantively acceptable than Rawls’s, I suggest that one reason may be the non-ideal aspects of her methodology. In the end, however, Young’s philosophical contributions cannot be attributed only to her method; they are also the product of her unique political passion and creative imagination. (shrink)

The ideal of distributive justice as a means of ensuring fair distribution of social opportunities is a cornerstone of contemporary feminist theory. Feminists from various disciplines have developed arguments to support the redistribution of the work of care through institutional mechanisms. I discuss the limits of such distribution under the conditions of theories that do not idealize human agents as independent beings. People’s reliance on care, understood as a response to needs, is pervasive and infuses almost all human interaction. I (...) argue that the effect of care on shaping the social opportunities of all individuals is huge, although often invisible. Much of the optimism of theories of distributive justice comes from ignoring or downplaying the way in which care influences most factors of social success. Jonathan Wolff distinguished between three types of resources whose fair distribution is important: internal, external and structural. Care, I argue, does not fit well in any of these types. Inseparably interwoven with relational realities, care cuts across these categories and thus poses a challenge to the feasibility of equal chances. I focus on the under-analyzed issue of bad care and show how difficult it is to dismantle legacies of bad care. Their effect on even close-to-ideal social arrangements is too significant to be disregarded, yet very difficult to tackle through institutional mechanisms. A commitment to certain elements of individual ethics – as opposed to merely political institutions – is required in order to bridge the gap between ideal theories of justice and feasible practical aims. (shrink)

Political action is unpredictable because it unfolds among a plurality of independent actors. This unpredictability generates a fundamental puzzle: If an actor cannot know where her initiative will lead, what motivates and guides her in her doings? The aim of this paper is to develop and defend the solution to the puzzle that we can find in the thought of Hannah Arendt, namely the idea that political action is – or should be – motivated and guided by principles, principles like (...) justice, equality, or honour. Such principles must be distinguished from goals because they do not designate a specific state of affairs, but are general ideas that allow for diverse implementations. I show that this distinction is of great practical importance for the actors involved, since their outlook and their attitude towards others will differ depending on whether they see their activity as aimed at a goal or as guided by a principle. (shrink)

This article examines some of the conceptual history of collective political action within feminist movements beginning with sisterhood and moving to feminist political solidarity. I argue that feminist political solidarity is built on a commitment by individuals to form a unity in opposition to injustice or oppression. Three moral relations emerge from this understanding of feminist political solidarity: the relation to the cause, the relation among members of the solidary group, and the relation between the solidary group and the larger (...) society. These relations evoke certain obligations and responsibilities which I present and defend. Feminist political solidarity is informed by the particularities of the cause and thus any theoretical account of the moral obligations is necessarily limited, but by looking at these three relations together with a sociological account of transnational feminist political solidarity drawn from Clare Weber’s sociological description of the Women’s Empowerment Project, a clearer picture of some of the moral requirements of a commitment to feminist political solidarity emerges. -/- . (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s account of the relationship between politics and morality. Many critics have argued that Arendt’s conception of political action lacks any moral foundations, while others have tried to focus on her understanding of thinking as a normative source of her ethics. In contrast to these views, I present an alternative explanation and argue that the sources of Arendt’s political ethics are located neither in the faculty of thinking nor in extrapolitical moral norms or rules, but in (...) the ontological conditions of action, specifically worldliness, natality and plurality. This interpretation allows us to make sense of Arendt’s fragmented, unsystematic accounts of the various virtues and moral dispositions required for authentic politics: courage, responsibility, care, respect, moderation, solidarity and gratitude. In particular, an inquiry into the ontological sources of political ethics provides a solid normative grounding for the two moral dispositions—promise and forgiveness—that form an explicit “moral code” of political action for Arendt. (shrink)

According to recent scholarship within queer theory, heterosexuality maintains itself as a class by employing its epistemological authority for identifying and defining homosexuals. Heterosexuality is thus an ideological abstraction that privileges those with social and material advantages, rather than an accurate description of the actual, and thus heteronormative descriptions of sexuality correspond to Charles W. Mills’ description of ideal-as-idealized theory. Since ideological arguments cannot be overturned simply by appeals to rational debate, to what can we turn to subvert the sense (...) of entitlement and rightness that heteronormativity provides? Recent feminist philosophers have stressed the distinction between guilt as emotional self-assessment and existential guilt. Taking up Kierkegaard’s existential account of guilt, I claim that in order to advance a non-ideal theory of desire, which grounds critique in actual conditions, it is important to consider the nature of subjective attachments to exclusive, idealized conceptions of the ‘normal.’. (shrink)