moral understandings a feminist study in ethics sep 2007

[...]... epistemology have been much appreciated Several years of conversations in a shifting but resilient feminist reading group have taught me much, and I thank Patricia Mann, Kate Mehuron, Lee Quinby, and Elaine Rapping for what I have learned My colleagues for several years in an interdisciplinary Fordham faculty ethics seminar have shown me kinds of thinking about ethics that philosophers often just don’t do; a special... expose causal mechanisms that predict or explain what in fact is going to happen between human beings Rather, theories of morality are attempts to find out what people are doing in bringing moral evaluation to bear (in judgment, feeling, and response) on what they and others do and care about, and whether some ways of doing what they are doing are better ways than others It is not obvious in advance,... in a family of practices that show what is valued by making people accountable to each other for it Practices of making morally evaluative judgments are prominent among moral practices, but they do not exhaust them There are also habits and practices of paying attention, imputing states of affairs to people’s agency, interpreting and redescribing human actions, visiting blame, offering excuses, in icting... or as a compact set of law-like propositions that “explain” the moral behavior of a well-formed moral agent (not, however, in the sense of predicting what will happen or revealing the causal mechanisms underlying what does happen, but rather by “explaining” what should happen) The doubts I want to raise are about the adequacy of this model as a kind of characterization of morality It represents morality... Pictures of Morality I aim first to raise doubts about a certain view of moral theorizing and its allied conception of morality I call the view a theoretical-juridical model of morality and moral theory This is not a moral theory; it is a kind of template for organizing The Subject of Moral Philosophy 7 moral inquiry into the pursuit of a certain kind of moral theory It prevailed as the template for “serious”... living we can justify not standing for So I conclude in chapter 10 with some discussion of moral criticism and objectivity, within and across moral cultures It will be obvious now that I am maintaining that moral philosophy bears a far greater descriptive and empirical burden, in pursuing details of actual moral arrangements, than is commonly thought I will also argue for a distinctive and unfamiliar... 1986 was a turning point for me; I am grateful to Carol Gilligan for her intellectual support of my earliest efforts to bring moral philosophy together with feminism A week as instructor at an NEH summer seminar on ethics and the liberal arts at Bethany College in West Virginia in July 1991 was a useful and agreeable rehearsal for my ideas about an expressive-collaborative model for ethics; I thank Nancy... feeling and learning to feel particular things in response to what one is aware of; for expressing judgment and feeling in the responses appropriate to them This means I do not recognize something that sets morality’s terms and standards anterior or exterior to human life and human beings’ awareness The Subject of Moral Philosophy 5 and judgment, such as a divine moral authority or a natural law of morality,... societies, as well as contrasting cases within them Objects of comparison are important because moral philosophers inevitably reflect on morality from within lifeways embodying particular forms of morality, and from a particular position within those lifeways They may thus find salient only some kinds of understandings and practices and may be completely unaware of others They may also find interactions intelligible... or a world without human awareness but nonetheless containing moral facts But I do not give up the right to talk about moral reality, because I think morality is a strikingly real dimension of every human group’s social life Because I believe that many claims about morality (as well as within it) are false (for example, that moral judgments serve only to express individuals’ feelings, or that women are . Bodies Cressida J. Heyes Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender Ellen K. Feder Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, Second Edition Margaret Urban Walker MARGARET URBAN WALKER MORAL UNDERSTANDINGS A. Press. Walker, Margaret Urban, 1948– Moral understandings: a feminist study in ethics / Margaret Urban Walker. –2nd ed. p. cm. — (Studies in feminist philosophy) Includes bibliographical references. have been much appreciated. Several years of conversations in a shifting but resilient feminist reading group have taught me much, and I thank Patricia Mann, Kate Mehuron, Lee Quinby, and Elaine