The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation argues for the philosophical importance of the notion of need and for an ethical framework through which we can determine which needs have moral significance. In the volume, Sarah Clark Miller synthesizes insights from Kantian and feminist care ethics to establish that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the needs of others. Further, she argues that we are obligated not merely to meet others’ needs but (...) to do so in a manner that expresses "dignifying care," a concept that captures how human interactions can grant or deny equal moral standing and inclusion in a moral community. She illuminates these theoretical developments by examining two cases where urgent needs require a caring and dignifying response: the needs of the elderly and the needs of global strangers. Those working in the areas of feminist theory, women’s studies, aging studies, bioethics, and global studies should find this volume of interest. (shrink)

The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation argues for the philosophical importance of the notion of need and for an ethical framework through which we can determine which needs have moral significance. In the volume, Sarah Clark Miller synthesizes insights from Kantian and feminist care ethics to establish that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the needs of others. Further, she argues that we are obligated not merely to meet others’ needs but (...) to do so in a manner that expresses "dignifying care," a concept that captures how human interactions can grant or deny equal moral standing and inclusion in a moral community. She illuminates these theoretical developments by examining two cases where urgent needs require a caring and dignifying response: the needs of the elderly and the needs of global strangers. Those working in the areas of feminist theory, women’s studies, aging studies, bioethics, and global studies should find this volume of interest. (shrink)

An overview of relational approaches to ethics, which contrast with individualist and holist ones, particularly as they feature in the Confucian, African, and feminist/care traditions.

I reconsider the concept of dignity in several ways in this article. My primary aim is to move dignity in a more relational direction, drawing on care ethics to do so. After analyzing the power and perils of dignity and tracing its rhetorical, academic, and historical influence, I discuss three interventions that care ethics can make into the dignity discourse. The first intervention involves an understanding of the ways in which care can be dignifying. The second intervention examines whether the (...) capacity to care should be considered a distinguishing moral power – as rationality often is – in light of which humans have dignity. In the third intervention, I cast dignity as a fundamentally relational concept and argue that relationality is constitutive not only of dignity but also of the wider enterprise of normativity. I understand relationality as the condition of connection in which all human beings stand with some other human beings. A thought experiment involving the last person on earth helps to reframe the normative significance of human relatedness. Dignity emerges as fundamentally grounded in relationality. (shrink)

The ethics of care addresses aspects of the human condition that other moral theories overlook—our vulnerability to injury, inevitable dependencies, and ubiquitous needs. In the grip of these experiences, we require care from others to survive and flourish. The precarious nature of human existence represents a related experience, one less thoroughly explored within care ethics. Through examination of these occasions for care, this article offers two contributions: First, a map of the conceptual relations between care ethics’ four key concepts: need, (...) vulnerability, dependency, and precariousness. As a subset of these efforts, I investigate the relevance of precariousness and precarity for care ethics by asking what they require of caring relations that vulnerability does not. Second, a more precise articulation of care ethics’ normative foundations and accompanying elucidation of the alternative vision of moral responsibility care ethics advances. Examining need, vulnerability, dependency, and precariousness through the lenses of finitude and embodiment exposes two common forms of conflation: between precarity and vulnerability and between dependency and vulnerability. Analysis of the moral significance of the body as a site for care reveals a novel portrayal of the normative foundations of care ethics and the reasons why we care for one another ethically. (shrink)

After offering an opening consideration of the hazards of neoliberalism, I address the general shape of the crisis of care that has evolved under its auspices. Two aspects of this crisis require greater attention: the moral precarity of caregivers and the relational harms of neoliberal capitalism. Thus, I first consider the moral precarity that caregivers experience by drawing on a concept that originates in scholarly work on the experiences of healthcare workers and combat veterans, namely, moral injury. Through this concept, (...) we can see how caregivers in late-stage capitalism face a seemingly unavoidable violation of their own significant moral beliefs. Second, I examine how the crisis of care results not only in individual harms of moral injury but also in harms to relationships themselves, as I continue to track the impact of moral injury on our intrapersonal and interpersonal lives. Ultimately, I argue that an important facet of the crisis of care is how it operates as a crisis of relationality in which our intrapersonal and interpersonal connections are placed under practical and moral strain. In taking a broader view, we can see how the fraying of particular intrapersonal and interpersonal connections can accumulate, resulting in the unraveling of wider webs of interdependency, just when we need them most. Throughout the paper, I zero in on the moral implications of the crisis of care driven by neoliberalism, featuring the damages that caregivers and their relationships sustain when situated in morally precarious ways. In doing so, I drive home the point that the crisis of care under neoliberalism is as much a moral and relational crisis as it is a political and economic one. (shrink)

All humans experience needs. At times needs cut deep, inhibiting persons’ abilities to act as agents in the world, to live in distinctly human ways, or to achieve life goals of significance to them. In considering such potentialities, several questions arise: Are any needs morally important, meaning that they operate as morally relevant details of a situation? What is the correct moral stance to take with regard to situations of need? Are moral agents ever required to tend to others’ well-being (...) by meeting their needs? What justification or foundation, if any, can be given for requiring moral agents to respond to others’ needs? (shrink)

Rather than focusing on the legal and political questions that surround genocidal rape, in this paper I treat a vital area of inquiry that has received much less attention: the moral significance of genocidal rape. My aim is to augment existing moral accounts of rape in order to address the specific contexts of genocidal rape. I move beyond understanding rape primarily as a violation of an individual's interests or agential abilities. The account I offer builds on these approaches (as well (...) as on a pluralist approach), by arguing that rape, as a moral injury, negatively affects the very human dignity of victims. My account also emphasizes the relational harm that marks genocidal rape. (shrink)

The ethics of care addresses aspects of the human condition that other moral theories overlook—our vulnerability to injury, inevitable dependencies, and ubiquitous needs. In the grip of these experiences, we require care from others to survive and flourish. The precarious nature of human existence represents a related experience, one less thoroughly explored within care ethics. Through examination of these occasions for care, this article offers two contributions: First, a map of the conceptual relations between care ethics’ four key concepts: need, (...) vulnerability, dependency, and precariousness. As a subset of these efforts, I investigate the relevance of precariousness and precarity for care ethics by asking what they require of caring relations that vulnerability does not. Second, a more precise articulation of care ethics’ normative foundations and accompanying elucidation of the alternative vision of moral responsibility care ethics advances. Examining need, vulnerability, dependency, and precariousness through the lenses of finitude and embodiment exposes two common forms of conflation: between precarity and vulnerability and between dependency and vulnerability. Analysis of the moral significance of the body as a site for care reveals a novel portrayal of the normative foundations of care ethics and the reasons why we care for one another ethically. (shrink)

Rather than focusing on political and legal debates surrounding attempts to determine if and when genocidal rape has taken place in a particular setting, this essay turns instead to a crucial, yet neglected area of inquiry: the moral significance of genocidal rape, and more specifically, the nature of the harms that constitute the culpable wrongdoing that genocidal rape represents. In contrast to standard philosophical accounts, which tend to employ an individualistic framework, this essay offers a situated understanding of harm that (...) features the importance of interdependence and relationality and that conceptualizes harms as embodied and contextual. The paper ultimately reveals what is distinctive about this particular crime of sexual violence by exploring the logic of genocidal rape: genocidal rape involves the harm of forced self-betrayal unleashed relationally, causing victims as representatives of their group to participate inadvertently in the destruction of that group. (shrink)

This chapter begins by discussing what feminist ethics is and does through examination of a specific example of the spheres into which our lives are separated: the public and the private. After demonstrating how feminist ethicists critique, complicate, and expand the content and experiences of such categories, I characterize the overarching aims of feminist ethics as (1) critical and (2) creative. I then turn to major themes in feminist ethics, exploring four of them in depth: oppression, vulnerability and dependency, relationality, (...) and the nonideal. Having provided an overview of the ethical themes that matter to feminists, I also depict three different varieties of feminist ethics—liberal, care, and transnational—before concluding. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to address an aspect of the general inattention to miscarriage by examining a pressing topic: the moral meanings of pregnancy loss. I focus primarily on the import of such meanings for women in their ethical relationship with themselves, while also finding significant the meaning of miscarriage in community, that is, for our shared moral lives. Exploring miscarriage as a moral phenomenon is critical for figuring out miscarriage’s impact on our ethical self-conception—on how we understand ourselves (...) as moral agents—and in forming and deforming how we understand one another in the broader context of our moral communities—in intimate realms, in public realms, and in various realms in between. -/- I begin by articulating the need for a dedicated perinatal ethics, then developing an overview of this approach. It is against this backdrop that miscarriage’s complex moral meaning can best emerge. I then consider a few promising yet problematic concepts for comprehending the moral meanings of miscarriage, including moral agency, reactive attitudes (in this case, betrayal and guilt), moral responsibility, and moral standing. (shrink)

There are many ways to understand the meanings of the #MeToo movement. Analyses of its significance have proliferated in popular media; some academic analyses have also recently appeared. Commentary on the philosophical and epistemic significance of the #MeToo movement has been less plentiful. The specific moment of the #MeToo movement in which Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony garnered a widespread social media response from sexual violence survivors highlighted the power of a particular form of epistemic response, what I call ‘epistemic (...) refusal.’ In breaking our silence, those of us who are sexual violence survivors have used this strategy to refuse the dominant epistemic structures that have kept us tightly in check. Mass informal disclosure of survivor status represented in conjunction with hashtags such as #MeToo, #WhyIDidntReport, and #BelieveHer creates space for epistemic, ethical, and political community between survivors of sexual violence by denying hegemonic epistemic discourses of contemporary rape culture. Regarding Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony and the social media response it garnered, analysis of three main elements proves particularly illuminating: the nature of mass informal disclosure of sexual violence, what the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport reveals about refusing silence, and what the hashtags #BelieveHer and #BelieveSurvivors can show us about what it takes to begin to overcome epistemic gaslighting. (shrink)

Over the past decade, sexual rumor spreading, slut-shaming, and homophobic labeling have become central examples of bullying among young women. This article examines the role these practices— what adults increasingly call “bullying” and what girls often call “drama”— play in girls’ gendering processes. Through interviews with 54 class and racially diverse late adolescent girls, I explore the content and functions of “sexual drama.” All participants had experiences with this kind of conflict, and nearly a third had been the subject of (...) other girls’ rumors about their own sexual actions and/or orientations. Their accounts indicate that sexual drama offers girls a socially acceptable site for making claims to, and sense of, gendered sexuality in adolescence. While they reproduce inequality through these practices, sexual drama is also a resource for girls—one that is made useful through the institutional constraints of their high schools, which reinforce traditional gender norms and limit sexuality information. (shrink)

In this essay, I develop the duty to care. I argue that certain needs do require a moral response. Under the duty to care, moral individuals must act so as to bolster and safeguard the agency of those in need. Substantively, the duty to care features five qualities. It endorses a wide variety of forms of care. It does not demand that caretakers feel certain emotions for their charges. It places limits on the extent of self-sacrifice involved in meeting others’’ (...) needs. It is action oriented. Finally, it is nonpaternalistic. I take a unique approach to develop the duty to care, bringing Kantian ethics and feminist care ethics into conversation with one another in order to highlight the exciting contributions that both have to offer this account. I propose that building on the Kantian duty of beneficence, one can articulate a duty that explains why we are obligated to respond to certain needs found in others. Although the Kantian duty of beneficence provides some resources to use in developing this explanation, I also employ a care ethics perspective to offer an important angle of critique through which one can see both moments when Kant’s account fails (which I consider in a series of four objections) and why care ethics must be incorporated into any worthwhile discussion of meeting needs. Thus the duty to care, while drawing upon the duty of beneficence for its foundation, moves beyond it. Demonstrated through the duty to care’s responsiveness to perceptive objections that care ethicists might raise, the duty to care emerges as a distinctive duty in its own right, one sensitive to the moral concerns of agency, need, and care. (shrink)

The primary aim of this essay is to investigate modalities of resistance to sexual violence. It begins from the observation that the nature of what we understand ourselves to be resisting—that is, how we define the scope, content, and causes of sexual violence—will have profound implications for how we are able to resist. I critically engage one model of resistance to sexual violence: feminist philosophical scholarship on self-defense, highlighting several shortcomings in how the feminist self-defense discourse inadvertently frames sexual violence. (...) Holding these criticisms in mind, I expand the landscape of resistance to sexual violence by considering the new possibilities that empathy might offer. The work of two contemporary women of color feminists—Roxane Gay and Tarana Burke—launches further exploration of empathy’s alternative modes of resistance. By focusing on empathy between survivors of sexual violence, we can expand our understanding of the possibilities of resistance by redistributing and broadening our attention in three main ways: from action to affect and attitude, from a spatially and temporally limited event to something more expansive, and from the individual through the interpersonal to the structural. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to move toward a relational moral theory of harm through examination of a common yet underexplored form of child maltreatment: childhood psychological abuse. I draw on relational theory to consider agential, intrapersonal, and interpersonal ways in which relational harms develop and evolve both in intimate relationships and in conditions of oppression. I set forth three distinctive yet interconnected forms of relational harm that childhood psychological abuse causes: harm to the relational agency of individuals, harm (...) to the relationships individuals hold with themselves, especially with regard to how they respect, know, and trust themselves, and harm to interpersonal relationships of both a direct and indirect nature in present and future timeframes. I close by noting that while relationships can be the site of human brutality that destroys the relational self, paradoxically and promisingly, they also can be a primary means of the relational reconstitution of the self. Ultimately, relational analyses of the harms of childhood psychological abuse reveal several key elements of a relational theory of harm and demonstrate the significance of relational harms for moral philosophy. (shrink)

This essay demonstrates that Beauvoir's La Vieillesse is a phenomenological study of old age indebted to Husserl's phenomenology of the body. Beauvoir's depiction of the doubling in the lived experience of the elderly--a division between outsiders' awareness of the elderly's decline and the elderly's own inner understanding of old age--serves as a specific illustration of Beauvoir's particular method of description and analysis.

Do adult children have a particular duty, or set of duties, to their aging parents? What might the normative source and content of filial obligation be? This chapter examines Kant’s duty of beneficence in The Doctrine of Virtue and the Groundwork, suggesting that at its core, performance of filial duty occurs in response to the needs of aging parents. The duty of beneficence accounts for inevitable vulnerabilities that befall human rational beings and reveals moral agents as situated in communities of (...) dependence and mutual aid. Other accounts of filial obligation, such as those based on a notion of gratitude, virtue, or friendship, generate various difficulties and fail to adequately address and emphasize four morally significant features of the adult child/ aging parent relationship. First, the relationship between adult children and their aging parents is one of dependency created by the increasing frailty and need of those parents. Second, the obligations that adult children have to aging parents take place in the context of a relationship not voluntarily assumed, but not coerced. Third, given a cultural tendency toward paternalistic care of elderly individuals, the content of filial obligation should safeguard against such treatment. Fourth, because dependency relations between adult children and aging parents can involve an immense degree of sacrifice on the part of the caretaker, an acknowledgment of duties should be accompanied by a concurrent acknowledgment of the necessary limitation of duties. Addressing these four issues is essential in offering a coherent account of the normative source, content, nature, and scope of adult children’s duty to care for their aging parents. This essay demonstrates that the Kantian duty of beneficence, when functioning as the philosophical foundation of filial obligation, allows for ample light to be shed upon and for proper analysis to take place of these four issues. (shrink)

It is fairly easy to charge intergenerational justice accounts that recommend a distribution of healthcare resources favoring the young as being ageist. Clearly, such policies strongly privilege the interests of one age group over those of another. In a time of tight resources, the elderly are to get the short end of the stick, though for reasons that some theorists believe are ethically justifiable. What is not as immediately clear, however, is the sexist nature of rationing healthcare resources for the (...) elderly. In this essay, I contend that perspectives capitalizing on justice, fairness, or equity between age groups do not readily reveal, and perhaps even obstruct, a clear view of such sexist dimensions. (shrink)

Contemporary ethical and political discourses frequently refer to the moral force of needs as justifying access to resources and rights to goods. Can needs make normative claims on anyone, and if so, how? What obligations do moral agents have to respond to the needs of other people? As finite creatures, humans inevitably experience need. Certain kinds of needs, namely fundamental needs, must be met if individuals are to avoid the harm of compromised agency. Fundamental needs involve agency-threatening events or circumstances (...) to which another must respond in order to cultivate, sustain or restore the agency of the one in need. I establish that fundamental needs have moral significance through an argument demonstrating the good of agency. I develop a robust account of agency, one that moves beyond the traditional identification of agency with rational capacities, to incorporate both emotional and relational abilities. Following the Kantian duty of beneficence, I then argue that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the fundamental needs of others. Next, drawing upon care ethics, I suggest that moral agents are obligated not only to meet fundamental needs present in others, but also to do so in a manner indebted to forms of dignifying care. It is not enough that we meet the needs of others. How we do so carries with it the conferral or denial of dignity and inclusion in a moral community. Finally, I demonstrate the applied ethical import of the foregoing theoretical account by discussing practices of caring for the fundamental needs of elderly individuals, who are often relegated to the margins of agency. Specifically, I consider two cases: recommended rationing of healthcare resources for the elderly and filial obligation. (shrink)

A shocking number of people worldwide currently suffer from malnutrition, disease, violence, and poverty. Their difficult lives evidence the intractability and pervasiveness of global need. In this paper I draw on recent developments in metaethical and normative theory to reframe one aspect of the conversation regarding whether moral agents are required to respond to the needs of distant strangers. In contrast with recent treatments of the issue of global poverty, as found in the work of Peter Singer (1972 and 2002), (...) who employs a broadly consequentialist framework focusing on suffering, and Thomas Pogge (2002), who inventively reframes the issue in terms of a negative duty not to harm, I explore this issue through an alternative approach: a social view of deontic moral reasons that features the idea of relational normativity. I address whether moral agents must respond to needy others by considering how the needs of distant strangers make implicit claims on those able to help them. Ultimately, I demonstrate why indifference in the face of global need is morally unacceptable, hence supporting the idea of an obligation that requires response to others’ basic needs. (shrink)

This paper reports on the experiences of creative practice graduate researchers and academic staff as they seek to comply with the requirements of the Australian National Statement on the Ethical Conduct of Research Involving Humans. The research was conducted over a two-year period as part of a wider project ‘iDARE – Developing New Approaches to Ethics and Research Integrity Training through Challenges Presented by Creative Practice Research’. The research identified the appreciation of ethics that the participants acquired through their experience (...) of institutional research ethics procedures at their university. It also revealed a disjunction between the concepts of ethics acquired through meeting institutional research ethics requirements, the notion of ethics that many researchers adopt in their own professional creative practice and the contents of professional codes of conduct. A key finding of the research was that to prepare creative practice graduates for ethical decision-making in their professional lives, research ethics training in universities should be broadened to encompass a variety of contexts and enable researchers to develop skills in ethical know-how. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical discourse on global responsibility has sustained a nearly unwavering focus on justice. In response, I investigate an underrepresented element in global justice discussions: insights from feminist philosophy, and more specifically, from the ethics of care. I assess current theories of cosmopolitanism, criticizing the shortcomings of cosmopolitan justice from the perspective of cosmopolitan care. Through the concepts of dependence, vulnerability, and need, I develop a feminist global obligation--the global duty to care--and explore the distinctive vision it offers as the (...) ground and content of a feminist theory of global responsibility. (shrink)

This article offers a feminist engagement with and evaluation of Rainer Forst’s concept of transnational justice, especially as he articulates it in his most recent book, Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification. While focusing on this book, the analysis I offer also builds on his earlier writings on a critical theory of transnational justice and the concept of the right to justification. Feminist theoretical resources, including current transnational feminist theory, provide a series of lenses that bring into focus (...) the strengths and weaknesses of Forst’s approach. This is particularly true with regard to the issue of whether he offers a theory of transnational justice sensitive to the gendered dimensions of global injustice, as well as to the realities of a non-ideal world. At key moments in the paper, I draw on examples of transnational gender-based and sexual violence as representative of a specific and prolific form of gendered global injustice to illustrate my argument. The argument advances in two main steps. First, I consider ways in which Forst’s work is feminist in nature and explore how he might reinforce feminist theoretical efforts. I then identify limitations of Forst’s theory from a transnational feminist perspective, exploring how feminist philosophers might challenge aspects of his approach. In this vein, I offer reflections relating to two main concepts: the tensions between ideal and non-ideal theory within Forst’s work and the idea of adaptive preferences. (shrink)

Interventional cardiologists are commonly faced with patients who prefer percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rather than coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG). Many prefer PCI even when CABG is recommended. Doctors may wonder whether (as the cardiac surgeons suspect) they consciously or unconsciously influence patients to choose PCI. We consider reasons why patient preferences in this context are not irrational.