The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. They examine moral exemplars and the "moral saints" debate, the morality of rescue during the Holocaust, role morality as lying between "personal" and "impersonal" perspectives, Carol Gilligan's theory of women and morality, Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, and moral responsiveness in young children.

In the last few decades, the ethics of care as a feminist ethic has given rise to extensive literature, and has affected moral inquiries in many areas. It offers a distinctive challenge to the dominant moral theories: Kantian moral theory, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics. This chapter outlines the distinctive features and promising possibilities of the ethics of care, and the criticisms that have been made against it. It then examines the ethics of care’s recognition of human dependency and of the (...) importance of responding to needs; its interpretation of the roles of emotion and reason in moral understanding; and its critique of liberal individualism and development of a conception of the person as relational. The ethics of care contrasts care with justice, tries to integrate them, and reconceptualizes public and private life and morality. (shrink)

Most contemporary moral philosophy is concerned with issues of rationality, universality, impartiality, and principle. By contrast Laurence Blum is concerned with the psychology of moral agency. The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. Blum takes up the challenge of Iris Murdoch to articulate a vision of moral excellence that provides a worthy aspiration for human beings. Drawing on (...) accounts of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust Blum argues that impartial principle can mislead us about the variety of forms of moral excellence. (shrink)

Embodied Care is the first work to argue for the body's centrality to care ethics, doing so by analyzing our corporeality at the phenomenological level.

Sara HeinSmaa rediscovers neglected passages of Le Duexi_me Sexe in her quest to follow Simone de Beauvoir's line of thinking. She finds the masterpiece to be grounded in the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.

Partiendo de la fenomenología del cuerpo de M. Merleau-Ponty discutimos la tendencia postmoderna a convertir el cuerpo en un simple producto sociocultural y el género en un mero artificio y reivindicamos su comprensión como constancia abierta a infinitas variaciones; lo hacemos reconsiderando el cuerpo como sujeto-objeto, quiasma entre naturaleza y cultura o dialéctica entre materia trabajada interior y exteriormente. El cuerpo, entendido como Leib y como totalidad, no se opone cartesianamente al intelecto, sino que de él, en tanto ser-en-el-mundo, brota (...) la percepción y una razón encarnada que se va haciendo histórica e interpretativamente y se amplia hasta incorporar las voces y deseos de libertad de las mujeres. Esta razón ha sido dominada por la razón estratégica imperante, pero late todavía en el afán de universalidad y autonomía de los seres humanos. Desde ese logos sentiente y sensible, planteamos la necesidad de profundizar en las diferencias sin abandonar el compromiso por la igualdad y la libertad de los oprimidos. Tal compromiso puede basarse en las experiencias de las 'mujeres, pero también en una aspiración a la racionalidad como telos universal, una razón dialógica y superadora de los antagonismos y reduccionismos. (shrink)