Despite its prominence in traditional societies and its apparent commonsense appeal, the moral tradition of Role Ethics has been largely neglected in mainstream normative theory. Role Ethics is the view that the duties and/or virtues of social life are determined largely by the social roles we incur in the communities we inhabit. This essay aims to address two of the main challenges that hinder Role Ethics from garnering more serious consideration as a legitimate normative theory, namely that it is ill-suited (...) to support a theory of right action that can enhance moral reasoning, and that it countenances certain unjust roles such as that of slave or slave-owner. Taking inspiration from contemporary social science, we argue that proponents of Role Ethics can adopt a view that reduces the apparent diversity of role obligations to four prototypical types of role duties. We propose a contemporary version of Role Ethics that coheres with human moral psychology, and which lends itself to a relatively pragmatic theory of right action that precludes the possibility of unjust roles. (shrink)

The goal of this project was to motivate pre-service elementary teachers to commit to spending significant instructional time on science in their future classrooms despite their self-assessed lack of confidence about teaching science and other impediments. Pre-service teachers in science methods courses explored connections between science and ethics, specifically around issues of ecological sustainability, and grappled with their ethical responsibilities as teachers to provide science instruction. Survey responses, student “quick-writes,” interview transcripts, and field notes were analyzed. Findings suggest that helping (...) pre-service teachers see these connections may shape their beliefs and dispositions in ways that may motivate them to embark on the long road toward improving their science pedagogical content knowledge and ultimately to teach science to their students more often and better than they otherwise might. The approach may also offer a way for teachers to attend to the moral work of teaching. (shrink)

Šiame straipsnyje analizuojama ryškėjanti tendencija sutapatinanti rūpesčio etiką su sentimentalizmu. Lyginant šios tendencijos atstovo Michaelo Slote’o ir vienos iš rūpesčio etikos kūrėjų Nel Noddings filosofiją, analizuojamas rūpesčio etikos ir sentimentalizmo santykis, pastarojo galimybės adekvačiai konceptualizuoti rūpesčio / rūpinimosi specifiką. Teigiama, kad sentimentalizmo konceptualinis žodynas, grindžiamas empatijos sąvoka, užgožia reliacinį rūpesčio etikos pobūdį. Straipsnyje empatijos sąvokai priešpriešinama dėmesio sąvoka, kurią nemaža dalis rūpesčio etikos atstovų pasitelkia apibrėžti moralinį rūpestį / rūpinimąsi. Analizuojant Simone Weil ir Iris Murdoch filosofiją, atskleidžiama dėmesio sąvokos reikšmė (...) rūpesčio etikai. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to critically investigate and problematize how museum exhibitions on Difficult Matters, like war and sexual violence, can be designed in order to contribute to teaching-learning relations between museum and visitor, which may transform existing perceptions of self, others, and the world and evoke a deepened sense of responsibility in the viewers, i.e. an ethical transformation.Based on a hermeneutic phenomenological approach the study takes three paths to shed light on the above. 1) Investigating literature on (...) museum studies on New Museology and Difficult Matters on the basis of which the research maps out current problems of understanding the pedagogical and ethical potentials. 2) From conducting case studies of two specific exhibitions to make an in-depth examination of designing exhibitions on Difficult Matters and how these are related to contextual conditions. 3) Investigating pedagogical theoretical literature inspired by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and literature in feminist philosophy on ethics of vulnerability all closely linked to the case studies, the study develops a conceptual basis for understanding the practice of designing exhibitions on Difficult Matters. A main finding is that designing exhibitions on Difficult Matters is related to the condition of vulnerability and this demands a pedagogical perspective sensitive to the ethical implications of exhibition making. This is because evoking ethical transformation is conditioned by a teaching-learning relation, which inspires openness on the part of the visitor to an encounter with the other and her/his life-story as being different from existing perceptions - an openness which is defined by vulnerability. As a result, vulnerability is at the heart of exhibitions on Difficult Matters.The overall conclusion to be drawn from the study is that vulnerability is a key concept in museum pedagogy and that vulnerability is an ambivalent potentiality which must be addressed from a double perspective on vulnerability as being inherent to the human condition and dependent on the particular situation. Consequently, vulnerability calls for pedagogical considerations and ethical attention from museum professionals, when designing exhibitions on Difficult Matters. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the problems of cultivating a critical attitude in pedagogy given problems with accounts grounded in critical social theory, rational liberalism and pragmatic esthetic theory. I offer instead an alternative account of criticism for education in open, pluralistic, liberal, democratic societies called 'pedagogy of difference' that is grounded in the diversity liberalism of Isaiah Berlin and the dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber. In our current condition in which there is no agreement as to the proper criteria (...) for assessing attitudes and actions, for a critical attitude to gain a foothold one must learn to evaluate proposed beliefs and behaviour-based standards within a particular tradition as well as those drawn from another viewpoint. To know oneself, one must engage others who are different. But to engage others in a meaningful way one must be immersed in a tradition to which one is heir or with which one chooses to affiliate. (shrink)

The relationship between love/care and justice was one of the key tensions from which care ethics originated; to this very day it is subject of debate between various streams of thought within care ethics. With some exceptions most approaches have in common the belief that care and justice are mutually exclusive concepts, or at least as so different that their application is situated on different levels. Hence, both are complementary, but distinct, so that there is no real interaction. This paper (...) aims to investigate whether, and if so, how, a deeper understanding of Ricoeur’s thoughts on this matter enriches the relationship between care and justice with respect to care ethics. This connection suggests itself from Ricoeur’s interpretation of the relationship as a dialectical one in which the logic of superabundance and the logic of equivalence meet. Care enables people to see the face and individuality of the one, ‘le chacun,’ within the anonymous structures of justice that tend to reduce all human beings to the anonymous each, ‘le on’; justice in its turn is the precondition for love to become incarnated and made real. What may this view—of care and justice standing in close connection, in which they correct and strengthen each other—add to the understanding of concrete practices of care? (shrink)

This article situates Darwin’s views on evolution and ethics into contemporary normative categories of moral theory by looking at Darwin’s treatment of ethics in The Descent of Man and discussing how Darwin’s approach to evolution and ethics fits with several representative normative ethical theories (virtue ethics, natural law ethics, social contract ethics, utilitarian ethics, deontological ethics, and care ethics). A close study of Darwin’s treatment of ethics that situates it among the ethical concepts and principles of the above normative theories (...) is interesting, and helpful and necessary as today we seek to understand ethics against the backdrop of an evolutionary perspective on human beings. Ethics and human nature are distinct, yet theories of ethics always come with an attendant view of human nature. The moral philosophers Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Kant, and Mill—who provide important forerunners of normative theories on offer today—view human beings differently: their ethical theories have distinctive contours because of the particular aspects of human beings they regard as most significant. The same is true of Darwin; yet Darwin’s evolutionary view of human beings, though admittedly quite unique among traditional moral theorists, does not lead him to an unfamiliar and eccentric view about the nature and content of ethics. (shrink)

Conventional management strategies for anti-corporate anger involve its negative construal as an inappropriate irrationality in need of containment. An alternative account is offered in which such anger comprises a healthy and health-sustaining component of care-based moral agency directed not only toward the affiliative advancement of connection among community members, but also toward the (political) resistance to violation, injustice, and carelessness through which disconnection from responsive community relationships occurs. The role of anger in care-based moral agency is demonstrated through discussion of (...) the classic case of environmental and human health crisis at Love Canal, New York. (shrink)

The rapid development of assisted reproduction technologies for the treatment of infertility appears to empower women through expanding their individual choice, but it is also creating new forms of suffering for them and their collaborators, especially in the context of transnational third-party reproduction. This paper explores the possibility of framing the ethical discourse around third-party reproduction by bringing attention to concerns of altruistic empathy for women who collaborate in the reproductive process, in addition to those of individualistic choice. This would (...) entail moving beyond an ethic of liberty that is based on self-interest and the language of rights, to an alternative ethic of care that is based on self-restraint and the language of responsibilities. An ethic of care and responsibility would cultivate the empathetic self-reflection of the autonomous actor in relation to those others who are part of the enterprise of bringing a child into the world. (shrink)

Recent work on empathy has focused on the phenomenon of feeling on behalf of, or for, others, and on determining the role it ought to play in our moral lives. Much less attention, however, has been paid to ‘feeling-with.’ In this paper, I distinguish ‘feeling-with’ from ‘feeling-for.’ I identify three distinguishing features of ‘feeling-with,’ all of which serve to make it distinct from empathy. Then, drawing on work in feminist moral psychology and feminist ethics, I argue that ‘feeling-with’ has unique (...) moral value over and above ‘feeling-for.’ I end by rebutting some likely objections to the claim that ‘feeling-with’ is morally valuable. (shrink)

This essay responds to Donna J. Haraway's (2016) provocation to ‘stay with the trouble’ of learning to live well with nonhumans as kin, through practice-based approaches to learning to care for nonhuman others. The cases examine the promotion of care for trees through mobile game apps for forest conservation, and kinship relations with city farm animals in Kentish Town, London. The cases are analysed with a view to how they articulate care practices as a means of making kin. Two concepts (...) are proposed, ‘learning from’ and ‘facing’ the Other, which are thickened through discussions of how caring takes place in each case in relation to a particular category of nonhuman other: animated tree and urban farm animal. Thus while attendant to situations of care involving a specific nonhuman subject, the cases also broker thinking on learning from and facing (the) other kinds of trees and animals, and the interspecies dynamics of which they are a part. The intersectional implications of the practice sites and participants are elaborated, to complexify and affirm situated but also reflexive approaches to caring. In doing this, the authors attend to their own positionalities, seeking to diversify Western-based ecofeminist engagements with caring, while asking what their research can do for the nonhuman other. They formulate and apply a collaborative methodological approach to the case studies, developed through cultivating attentiveness to the nonhuman subject of research. The authors consider in particular how attentiveness to the nonhuman other can facilitate practices of knowing that further a non-anthropocentric and non-innocent ethic of caring. By further interconnecting situations of caring for nonhuman animals and plants, the authors advocate for practices of care that antagonise how species boundaries are drawn and explore the implications for learning to care for nonhumans as kin. (shrink)

The article discusses a sustainable educational approach for developing a moral value of peace by using a historical event, the bombing of Hiroshima. To make the case, the article uses the care theory of Nel Noddings to discuss the interpersonal aspects of peace education. The article asks how care theory handles tragedies like Hiroshima and it can contribute to a moral value of peace. The idea of caring is also examined, through Hiroshima, from a different angle, of the relationship between (...) nature and human beings. The political position of this article is to expand the idea of sustainability by creating values for peace using material related to the bombing. (shrink)

There is a view that what we owe to other people is explained by the fact that they are human beings who share in a common human life. There are many ways of construing this explanatory idea, and I explore a few of these here; the aim is to look for constructions that contribute to an understanding of what we owe to people with profound and multiple learning difficulties and disabilities. In exploring the idea of sharing in a common life (...) I construe ‘sharing’ as ‘participating in’, and ‘common life’ as the social life characteristic of the environment that someone lives in. My principal purpose is to render the idea of sharing in a common life in terms that help explain its eligibility as a ground for establishing the moral status of people with PMLD. The participatory options I examine each make some call on agency, if only as something hoped for in the future, including when hope flies in the face of expectation. Accordingly I look at conceptions of actual and potential participation in social life, and at the idea of treating people as if they have the potential to participate, even when the existence of any such potential is unlikely. I conclude with some thoughts on the relation between participation and the moral status of profoundly disabled people, and about how much, and how little, the argument has achieved. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to augment the ethical discussion among nurses with the findings from empirical research on autonomy of older adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus. There are many factors influencing autonomy. These include: health conditions, treatment, knowledge, experience and skills, personal approach as well as familial patterns, type of relationship, life history and social context. Fifteen older adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus were interviewed in a nurse-led diabetes clinic. These participants perceive three processes which support (...) autonomy in responsive relationships: preserving patterns of concern and interaction, nurturing collaborative responsibilities and being closely engaged in trustful and helpful family relations. People with diabetes realize autonomy in various responsive relationships in their unique life context. Next, we performed a literature review of care ethics and caring in nursing with regard to relational autonomy. We classified the literature in five strands of care: attitude-oriented, dialogue-oriented, activity-oriented, relationship-oriented and life-oriented. According to our respondents, autonomy in responsive relationships is fostered when patient, nurses, professionals of the health team and family members carry out care activities supported by a relational attitude of care. They can best realize autonomy in relationships with others when several essential aspects of care and caring are present in their lives. Therefore, we advocate a comprehensive approach to care and caring. (shrink)

This article extends current theorizations of the ethics of the commons by drawing on feminist thought to propose a relational embodied ethics of the commons. Departing from abstract ethical principles, the proposed ethical theory reconsiders commoning as a process emerging through social actors’ embodied interactions, resulting in the development of an ethics that accounts for their shared corporeal concerns. Such theorizing allows for inclusive alternative forms of organizing, while offering the ethical and political possibility of countering forms of economic competition (...) and addressing the issues of viability that have long bedeviled commoning practices. This, we suggest, is achieved in the context of social organizing processes whereby social actors are able to reproduce their resource systems and communities based on recognition of their actual corporeal vulnerabilities, which drives reciprocity and embodied relationality with the other. (shrink)

Unlike Kongzi 孔子, Xunzi 荀子 emphasizes that serving the dead is as important as serving the living. This is best shown in his emphasis on simu 思慕, or “appreciative mourning.” Xunzi views simu as an important component of self-cultivation. In mourning deceased parents, one deeply reflects on their kindness and develops further respect and appreciation for them. Through mourning rituals and processes, one strengthens the family relationship that seems to have been broken and continues to become a more filial and (...) noble person. (shrink)

This paper challenges current dominant thinking in Universities about the processes of ethical appraisal of research studies in the Social Sciences. It considers this to be founded on unjustifiable and inappropriate principles, the origins of which are presented before discussing alternative, more inclusive and ethically defensible approaches. The latter are based on dialogic processes to sustain respectful and empowering ethical reviews which appreciate the situated nature of research. The empirical evidence for this comes from papers about ethnographic studies with children (...) and adults in various educational spaces in Western Europe, originally a symposium on the practice of ethics in educational ethnography at ECER, 2017, now forming a book published by Routledge, 2019. The dialogic processes help researchers to carry out culturally-appropriate research with the demonstrable ethical integrity that participants and stakeholders reasonably expect. The authors argue that currently risk-averse Universities need to change their research cultures to support all research methodologies and fieldwork practices that have ethical integrity and create valuable research that is socially beneficial, to enhance their lustre. (shrink)

Most work addressing clinical workers' professional responsibilities concerns the norms of conduct within established professional–patient relationships, but such responsibilities may extend beyond the clinical context. We explore health workers' professional responsibilities in such “informal” encounters through the example of a doctor witnessing the misdiagnosis and mistreatment of a serious long-term condition in a television documentary, arguing that neither internalist approaches to professional responsibility nor externalist ones provide sufficiently clear guidance in such situations. We propose that a mix of both approaches, (...) emphasizing the noncomplacency and practical wisdom of virtue ethics, but grounding the normative authority of virtue in an external source, is able to engage with the health worker's responsibilities in such situations to the individual, the health care system, and the population at large. (shrink)

In this dissertation I examine the topics of ethics, religion, and their relationship in the work of Charles Taylor. I take Taylor's attempt to confront modern disenchantment by seeking a kind of re-enchantment as my guiding thread. Seeking re-enchantment means, first of all, defending an `engaged realist' account of strong evaluation, i.e., qualitative distinctions of value that are seen as normative for our desires. Secondly, it means overcoming self-enclosure and achieving self-transcendence, which I argue should be understood in terms of (...) transcending a `lower' mode of selfhood for a `higher' one in concern for `strong goods'. One of the main issues that Taylor raises is whether re-enchantment requires theism for its full adequacy. He advances - often as `hunches' - controversial claims regarding the significance of theism (1) for defending strong evaluative realism and (2) for motivating an ethic of universal human concern. I seek to fill out his hunches in terms of a theistic teleological perspective that is centered on the `telos of communion'. I argue that such a view is important for overcoming the problem of what Bernard Williams calls the `radical contingency' of ethical beliefs, which seems to undermine their normative authority. However, I argue that if a non-theistic view of cosmic purpose (e.g., Thomas Nagel's view) can be regarded as a viable option, then it could also help to address this problem and support a kind of re-enchantment. Taylor also advances the controversial view that (3) there is an ineradicable draw to `transcendence' in human life in connection to the quest for the meaning of life. Here he opposes certain mainstream theories of secularization that see it as a process involving the ineluctable fading away of the relevance of religion. I seek to fill out and defend Taylor's view in this matter. Besides providing a reading of Taylor's work as a whole and advancing further some of the issues he raises, I also examine his general evaluative framework based on his account of strong evaluation. In doing so I show how he provides a distinct and important perspective among contemporary moral philosophers. (shrink)

In this article, we critique two theoretical positions that analyze the place of emotions in education: the psychological strand and the cultural feminist strand. First of all, it is shown how a social control of emotions in education is reflected in the combination of psychological and cultural feminist discourses that function to govern one’s self effectively and efficiently. These discourses perpetuate an assumed divide between the rational and the emotional, and reinforce the existing power hierarchies and the status quo of (...) stereotypes about the role of emotion in education. Then we use the Foucauldian notions of parrhesia and care of the self to suggest alternative ways of thinking about emotions in education. Instead of campaigning for one side or the other of the rational/emotional divide, we suggest that it may be more interesting and fruitful to examine the particular ways discourses of emotion in education construct their own brand of parrhesia. (shrink)

(2011). Casuistry: Case-based Reasoning for the Ethical Journalist. Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Vol. 26, Media Accountability Part Two, pp. 88-92. doi: 10.1080/08900523.2011.532386.

Contemporary ideas about caring in welfare states can wreak havoc if applied to one's own life. In this essay, a mother offers a personal commentary on the debate regarding diakonia and caring. She identifies three concepts, popular in contemporary caring discourse, that threaten her ability to genuinely and effectively care for those around her, particularly her family. The first problematic concept is that the state ought to provide care on our behalf. The second is that people have rights to claim, (...) but no one in particular bears the responsibility. The third is that the Church is responsive rather than normative in the social setting. (shrink)

Against the background of current reforms in higher education, we analyze the traditional education of Japanese doctoral students in philosophy of education from Western and Japanese perspectives by focusing on learning as self-education, on being and learning with others, on the socialization into the profession, and on the study of the foreign subject. Imai's explication of the Japanese construction of the adult self as instrumental is compared to Gadamer's ideas on self-education and education with others. A significant element of doctoral (...) education in Japan involves the learning of certain forms ( kata ) of professional conduct: belonging to a group, occupying a clear position in the social hierarchy, and developing a close mentoring relationship that fosters strong feelings of loyalty, harmony and respect. Furthermore, reciprocal dependence ( amae ) is analyzed and contrasted with the Western ideal of autonomy and maturity. Finally, the study of the foreign subject is considered in light of Gadamer's and Hegel's notion of making a home in the alien. Saito affirms a cross-cultural reading of foreign philosophical texts, claiming that they destabilize the native culture and turn a teacher in philosophy of education into a translator and prophet of her own as well as the foreign culture. (shrink)

To mitigate animal suffering under industrial farming conditions, biotechnology companies are pursuing the development of genetically disenhanced animals. Recent advances in gene editing biotechnology have brought this to reality. In one of the first discussions of the ethics of disenhancement, Thompson argued that it is hard to find compelling reasons to oppose it. We offer an argument against disenhancement that draws upon parallels with human disenhancement, ecofeminism’s concern with the “logic of domination,” and a relational ethic that seeks to preserve (...) a meaningful relationship between farmers and their animals. In addition, we respond to two arguments in favor of animal disenhancement—one grounded in the non-identity problem and one that argues disenhancement is the best we can do to protect animal well-being right now. We argue that animal disenhancement does not address the fundamental issue of oppression of animals in the context of contemporary animal agriculture. Therefore, we conclude that animal disenhancement is not nearly as valuable as it might appear initially. (shrink)

The article attempts to present the complexity of relationships between women, capitalism, democracy, and competitive dog training in post-communist Poland. The article documents the correlation between increased involvement of women in competitive canine sports in Poland after 1989, changes in the methods of dog training, and the transformation in politics from totalitarianism to democracy. The correlation suggests that in the early years of democracy in Poland women were more open to shaping their bonds with companion animals and to taking into (...) account the ethical dimension of these relationships. Secondly, the article attempts to argue that the primary motivation for women who participate in dog sports is the desire to create a relationship in which the non-human other shares their desires, primarily the desire for interaction. (shrink)

Attention is drawn to the movements of the body and to the ethical imperative that emerges in compelling, flowing moments of teaching. Such moments of teaching are not primarily intellectual, discursive events, but physical, sensual experiences in which the body surrenders to its own movements. Teaching is recognized momentarily as a carnal intensity embedded in and emerging from the flesh. The ethical imperative to this teaching is felt proprioceptively and kinaesthetically when one holds in self-motion the well-being of another as (...) being of the same flesh. The teaching caress offers a primary example. This gesture of intimacy discloses an embodied ethic that contrasts with the transcendental ethics of curricular prescriptions, professional codes of conduct, and the presumptions of self-monitoring behavior. It is a gesture of care for another person, without fastidious carefulness. It is a gesture of pure duration, without sanctimonious purity, in its contact with the beauty, truth and value of the teachable moment. From earliest engagements with children to the dynamics of the university classroom, what makes for good teaching is essentially attentiveness to intimate gestures, such as the caress, that guide teachers kinethically in the moment. (shrink)

Gender greatly impacts access to opportunities, potential, and success in corporate leadership roles. We begin with a general presentation of why such discussion is necessary for basic considerations of justice and fairness in gender equality and how the issues we raise must impact any ethical perspective on gender in the corporate workplace. We continue with a breakdown of the central categories affecting the success of women in corporate leadership roles. The first of these includes gender-influenced behavioral factors, such as the (...) requirements and expectations of gendered verbal and nonverbal communication styles as well as appearance. We move on to address the impact of family on corporate leadership opportunities and success, discussing the asymmetrical evaluation of an individual’s potential, authority, and competence based on gender stereotypes of familial obligations and expectations. Finally, we address how gender impacts access to networking and sponsorship opportunities and the long-term effects of systematic limitations on women’s inclusion in the upper echelons of corporate leadership. We conclude with a summary of the questions and issues raised by our discussion and direct individuals to consider how different ethical systems and moral requirements might influence their interpretations of gender and leadership in the corporate workplace. (shrink)

This paper attempts to construct a concept of moral autonomy thai is compatible with a relationally-based or care-based ethical theory. After critiquing the traditional liberal identification of the ethical self with an abstract rational self detached from community and historical narrative, I argue that the ethical self emerges in a dialectical relation with the community itself. Essentially, I argue for a concept of autonomy that will be analyzed as a critical perspective from within a community rather than as a privileged (...) view from outside. Central to this argument is an understanding of the nature and role of moral conversation in the regeneration of community. The nature of that conversation is examined. (shrink)

The societal dynamism of modernity results in the theoretical upgrading and the actual development of personal reflective capacities, for example abstract reasoning, Kantian morality, and the development of the idiocentered perspective. These capacities are created in the disembedding of prereflective capacities, for example context-sensitive intelligence, care-morality, and mundocenteredness. The reflective capacities become the prerequisite of further modernization. The development-potential offered by the demands of modernity is accompanied by a risk of assimilative stress, for example pseudological reasoning, varieties of postmodernism, making (...) a fetish of the medium, and the forfeit of the morality of care. (shrink)

Student–teacher relationships have been examined by many studies. However, an omission still exists, the existing scales are not appropriate for studying STRs in private colleges because of the special character of these schools. This paper presents the development and validation of Private-College Student–Teacher Relationship Scale, the first instrument to evaluate student–teacher relationships in private colleges. The PCSTRS has six dimensions: trust, interaction, intimacy, care, approval, and comfort. In our main study, the validity and reliability of the six-factor PCSTRS model were (...) demonstrated. The result of internal consistency coefficient indicated the high reliability of the scale, and the result of concurrent validity indicated the significant correlational relationships between the PCSTRS with other STR measures. In supplementary study, the PCSTRS was administered to 360 participants to confirm the applicability of PCSTRS and investigate the relation of STRs and students’ traits, performance, and wellbeing, as well as the differences between the private school and the public school in this relation; the analyses revealed that there were significant differences in trust, intimacy, and care between private and public colleges; positive correlations were found between STRs and self-esteem, self-efficacy, academic performance, extracurricular activity involvement, and subjective wellbeing. Present research firstly develops the PCSTRS, examined the reliability and validity, and provides the proposed nomological network among related constructs. (shrink)

What is the significance of attentiveness in teaching? A spontaneous answer would be that attentiveness is a crucial aspect in the practice of teaching, because if the students do not pay attention...

Derridean hospitality is seen to undergird ethical teacher–student interactions. However, hospitality is marked by three aporias that signal incommensurable and irreducible ways of being and responding that need to be held together in tension without eventual synthesis. Due to the sociopolitical materiality of race and the phenomenological difference that constitutes racialized bodies, educators of color in interaction with white students are called to live the aporetic tensions that characterize hospitality in distinctive ways that are not currently emphasized in the discourse (...) on the educator’s responsibility as it is informed by an ethic of hospitality. The asymmetrical nature of hospitality is reconfigured through the terms of eros and hospitality’s link to education aimed at social justice is posited to be stronger than is currently suggested in the educational theory literature. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the challenge that political activism runs the risk of generating abstract freedoms for oppressed subjects and neglecting the effects of oppression on the development of subjectivity. I argue that a political activism in concert with a companion ethics of advocacy and listening is best positioned to improve the political and economic conditions of individuals as well as ensure that they are able to realize their freedom in meaningful action. In this paper I distinguish political (...) emancipation from human emancipation using the political and ethical writings of Simone de Beauvoir. I then argue that a feminist ethics of advocacy and listening can serve the project of human emancipation as emancipatory advocacy. I then return to Beauvoir to illuminate the dynamics of privilege, risk, and ambiguity in emancipatory advocacy through her own activism and advocacy in the case of Djamila Boupacha and Algerian independence. (shrink)

Much of the literature supports the moral development theory as a justification for teachers to care, where teachers should care for their students because it contributes to their moral education as caring persons. If no causal relationship can be established, the question remains whether we would want teachers to care, preferably one that does not merely import its external normative significance into teaching. I argue that an understanding of teaching, and moreover, of good teaching already has embedded within it conceptions (...) of care. Understanding that teaching involves care would then challenge virtue/character-based conceptions of the good teacher. While these clarifications are modest in scope, taking caring seriously in teaching has implications on how we conceptualize the good teacher, which in turn affects how both teacher education and professional ethics might be understood. (shrink)

Over the past 20 years, there has been a shift in history education away from a view of history as the pursuit of an objective, universal story about the past toward ‘historical consciousness,’ which seeks to cultivate an understanding of the past as something that makes moral demands on us here and now. According to Roger Simon, historical consciousness calls us to ‘live historically’ – to live in a particular kind of ethical relationship with the past. However, no matter how (...) much educators might believe in the importance of learning to live historically, if students do not see it that way, even the most thoughtfully designed program in history education will never get off the ground. This paper is an attempt to see whether the notion of ‘caring for the past,’ based on Nel Noddings' ethic of care, might help us begin to address the problem of moral motivation in educating for historical consciousness. (shrink)

(2011). Journalism Ethics for a New Era. Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Vol. 26, Media Accountability Part Two, pp. 84-88. doi: 10.1080/08900523.2011.532380.

Prior research has shown that human trafficking has multiple facets and is deeply enmeshed in societies around the world. Two central challenges for anti-trafficking organizations pertain to confronting systemic injustices and establishing caring organizations for survivors to start the process of healing and restoration. Analyzing the work of an anti-trafficking organization, International Sanctuary in Mumbai, we seek to elucidate how a space for caring for trafficking survivors is constructed in a largely non-egalitarian and unjust context. We contribute to discussions on (...) how caring infrastructures are possibly developed so that they do not write off existing gendered and in-egalitarian social structures and how they shape individual biographies. We also highlight how the specific, situated context—defined by those very structures—shapes and influences the transformative potential of care interventions. (shrink)

This study presents the Italian adaptation of the Measure of Moral Orientation, second revision. Based on Carol Gilligan’s theory of the Ethics of Care, the MMO-2 was designed to measure two complementary moral stances, namely, Care and Justice. For this study, questionnaire responses from 683 university students were assessed against an Italian-adapted MMO-2 scale. Data were analyzed through exploratory structural equation modeling first as separate scenarios and then as a single model. The final model comprises 4 intercorrelated pairs of latent (...) variables and shows highly satisfactory goodness of fit indices with moderate construct validity and reliability. Strengths, limitations, and directions for the future developments of the MMO-2 are discussed. (shrink)

Educational theorists working within the tradition of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas’s thought, posit teaching to be a site of implied ethics, that is, a realm in which non-violent or less violent relations to the other are possible. Derrida links ethics to the realm of friendship, enabling one to understand teaching as a site of the ethics of friendship. I clarify how friendship, as a re-metaphorization of differance, opens us up to a conception of teaching that provides a counterpoint to (...) the current discourse of ‘effective’ teaching. I draw out the implications of the Derridean conception of friendship for the educator in his or her philosophical orientation towards teaching and attempt to show that friendship points the educator towards an orientation that enables a ‘fine tuning’ and opening up of one’s sense of obligation and responsibility to one’s students in ways that cannot be circumscribed to current or institutionally sanctioned ways of understanding the activity of teaching, especially as it is often envisioned in American public education. (shrink)