Relational dimensions of ethical decision making are a potentially interesting focus to enrich our understanding of decision-making processes. This study examines decision preferences and reactions to decisions in a situation of possible harm. Two ethical value orientations, just value orientation and relational value orientation , are introduced. Participants chose relational cooperation, instrumental cooperation, or independence in dealing with an uncertain situation of possible harm. JVO contributes to a decision of relational cooperation. Only RVO was related to expected mutual benefit and (...) relational connection. Overall, this study supports our central thesis that a relational dimension of ethical decisions provides interesting insights into behavioral ethics in organizations and could expand the scope of ethical decision research. (shrink)

Taking Wittgenstein's love of music as my impetus, I approach aporetic problems of epistemic relativity through a round of three overlapping (canonical) inquiries delivered in contrapuntal (higher and lower) registers. I first take up the question of scepticism surrounding ‘groundless knowledge’ and contending paradigms in On Certainty (physics versus oracular divination, or realism versus idealism) with attention given to the role of ‘bedrock’ certainties in providing stability amidst the Heraclitean flux. I then look into the formation of sedimented bedrock knowledge, (...) or practices of knowing, by comparing Wittgenstein's remarks on animal habituation and initiate training into human forms of life. In the latter case, mastery of techniques—our common education—secures agreement in judgment. Finally, I entertain Wittgenstein's obscure references to Einstein's Relativity in Zettel, showing initiate training as a way of ‘setting the clocks’ with variable degrees of certainty, relative to the language‐games played. Together, these three approaches help us to stop the ‘endless circling’ when philosophers try to address knowledge questions through the logic of object and designation, or verification of correspondence between propositions and things. Instead, attention moves to the way we educate our children and how we employ agreements and bedrock certainties in practices. (shrink)

Even after two millennia, through her adherence to the Hegelian/sartrean model of transcendence versus immanence, Simone de Beauvoir perpetuated the valorization of male risk-taking over the creation and nurture of life, obligations she assigned solely to the female. Nonetheless, her dispassionate, meticulous, phenomenological description of women's lived experience in The Second Sex, combined with her insistence that women, in spite of their oppression, must choose to become subjects, to `engage in freely chosen projects', has spurred contemporary feminist theorists to expand (...) the definition of the ethical and the moral to value female experience. The emancipatory discourse, therefore, has been extended by the work of feminists such as Martha Nussbaum, Luce Irigaray and Carol Gilligan, who insist upon the inclusion of marginalized `others' in the definition of `human being' and `ethical activity'. (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning of social justice and development in post-apartheid South Africa. It begins with social justice as a process of equalisation, presenting some evidence of the challenge and explaining the difficulty of achieving racial equality. Recognition of changes in national development strategy in the post-apartheid era, and their implications for inequality, leads to discussion of alternative development ethics, which involves reconsideration of what stands for the good life. The possibility of a combination of traditional African communitarianism and (...) the ethic of care is explored, as a basis for an alternative conception of the good. Some impediments to the realisation of such a vision are identified. (shrink)

If, as Lefebvre argues, every society produces its own social space, then modernity might be characterized by that (anti-)social and instrumental space epitomized and idealized in Le Corbusier's writings. This repetitively patterned space consumes and regulates the differences between places and people; it encapsulates a normalizing morality that seeks to reduce all differences to an economic order of the Same. Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of 'difference' can both help explain the operation of this (im)moral landscape and offer the possibility of alternative (...) post-modern social spaces that might produce and respect Otherness. In this sense Lefebvre's work is an incipient 'difference ethics'. (shrink)

There is an awakening of interest in links between geography and moral philosophy, or ethics. This paper reviews a range of issues where common ground might be found on this new disciplinary interface. These issues include the historical geography of moralities, the notion of moral geographies, inclusion and exclusion in the context of the bounding of spaces, and the moral significance of distance and proximity, as well as the more familiar concern with social justice. Environmental ethics provides a link with (...) the physical side of the subject. Some suggestions are made as to the possible contribution of geography to the understanding of moral issues. (shrink)

The paper draws upon new conceptions of place, space, interaction and community in Geography and Media Studies to explore the possibilities of extending existing conceptions of care and caring from the context with which they are traditionally associated—face-to-face encounters within a shared physical locale. It proposes three structures of ‘caring at a distance’, all of which have a core element of mediated or distanciated interaction, and concludes that mass media and electronic networks play a significant role in extending the scope (...) of beneficence beyond our ‘nearest and dearest’ to embrace distant others. (shrink)

This essay examines debates over alternative ethical formulations that break from the Kantian model through contemporary fiction—Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005). The essay returns to the theory, the ethics of care, put forward by Carol Gilligan in In a Different Voice (1982), which has regained significance in the context of questions surrounding care in contemporary ethical thinking. While the three novels are concerned with ideas of (...) care, beauty, justice and the tyranny of the mainstream, this essay examines particular themes in particular texts which suggest that ideas with otherwise subversive potential—like care or beauty or justice—lose their radicalism when they are incorporated within the impersonal, masculinist mainstream. Carol Gilligan’s feminine ethics of care, with its respect for the particular, is not only still important as the stimulus to thinking about alternatives to overarching ethical discourses, but it could also re-confer these concepts of care, beauty and justice their revolutionary potential. (shrink)

This article examines the Israeli women’s movement, Checkpoint Watch, as a case from which to argue that the strategic use of the politics of care can challenge existing social and political orders. The conscious decision of activists to direct the practice of care toward the ‘wrong’ subject – toward Palestinians rather than Israeli soldiers – challenges the dehumanisation of Palestinians in Israeli society. While the politics of care may call the political order into question, the service of a behaviour that (...) is considered essentialist may paradoxically reinforce the existing social order. I argue that the politics of care has the potential to challenge both the political and the social order, though not simultaneously. (shrink)

This article is a critique, first, of the theory of identity advanced by Judith Butler and many of the feminist critics of identity politics, and, second, of identity politics itself. I argue that Butler's rejection of the modernist subject for its opposite, the fictional, substanceless subject, is untenable. Looking to object relations theory, I argue instead for a concept of the subject as an ungrounded ground, occupying a middle ground between the postmodern and the modern subject. With regard to identity (...) politics I argue that instead of populating the political realm with multiple identities, we should instead remove identity entirely from the political realm. (shrink)

The object of this essay is to explore the central role played by the ‘ethic of care’ in debates within and beyond feminist legal theory. The author claims that the ethic of care has attracted feminist legal scholars in particular, as a means of resolving the theoretical, political and strategic difficulties to which the perceived ‘crisis of subjectivity’ in feminist theory has given rise. She argues that feminist legal scholars are peculiarly placed in relation to this crisis because of their (...) reliance on the social ‘woman’ whose interests are the predominant concern of feminist legal engagement. With the problematisation of subjectivity, the object of feminist legal attention disappears and it is in attempts to deflect the negative political consequences of this that the ethic of care has been invoked, the author argues, unsuccessfully. The essay concludes with suggestions as to how the feminist project in law might proceed in the wake of the crisis of subjectivity and the failure of the ethic of care to resolve it. (shrink)

This paper draws on research conducted in Manchester, UK, examining service responses to African, African-Caribbean, Irish, Jewish and South Asian women experiencing domestic violence (Batsleer et al., 2002). Popular discourses of domestic violence, which also feature in services, are underpinned by ‘victim-blaming’ together with an assumption that women only show agency and control when they leave violent relationships, and/or what are constructed as oppressive minority cultures. Contrary to these perceptions, firstly, I note competing notions ascribed to ‘independence’. Secondly, I highlight (...) the strategies of resistance used by minoritized women whether they stay, or leave, abusive relationships, and examine the inter-relationships between gender, class and culture. Thirdly, I outline the level and type of support on offer, including key barriers and dilemmas to accessing sensitive and relevant services that respond to women's positions of minoritization, focusing particularly on refuge or shelter provision as they offer one of the key points of transition for women using domestic violence services. Lastly, I indicate some positive steps that can be taken by helping agencies to respond more appropriately to minoritized women facing domestic violence. (shrink)

This article discusses and develops some recent debates in feminist epistemology, by outlining the concept of an ‘emancipatory value’. It outlines the optimum conditions that a ‘community’ of knowers must satisfy in order that its members have the best chance of producing knowledge claims. The article thus covers general ground in epistemology. The article also argues that one of the conditions that any ‘emancipatory community’ must satisfy is that its underlying values should not oppress women. It is related to feminist (...) debates, therefore, in two ways: first, it develops its arguments by drawing on those debates; and second, after developing the general concepts of emancipatory value and epistemic community, it argues that feminist values are one set of emancipatory values to which an epistemic community should pay regard. (shrink)

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues that although all subjects-of-a-life have equal inherent value, there are often differences in the value of lives. According to Regan, lives that have the highest value are lives which have more possible sources of satisfaction. Regan claims that the highest source of satisfaction, which is available to only rational beings, is the satisfaction associated with thinking impartially about moral choices. Since rational beings can bring impartial reasons to bear on decision making, (...) Regan maintains that they have an additional possible source of satisfaction that nonrational beings do not have and, consequently, the lives of rational beings turn out to have greater value.. (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)

Straipsnyje, analizuojant skirtingus Carol Gilligan darbus, pristatoma šiuo metu vis didesnį matomumą šiuolaikinėje moralės filosofijoje įgaunanti, bet Lietuvoje dar mažai žinoma rūpesčio etika. Gilligan yra amerikiečių psichologė, kurios pagrindiniai darbai skirti moterų psichologijos ir mergaičių vystymosi problematikai. Nors ir pripažįstamas jos, kaip rū-pesčio etikos pradininkės, statusas, tačiau neretai akcentuojamas jos darbų psichologinis, o ne etinis aspektas, tai yra, plėtojami empiriniai tyrimai, paneigiantys ar patvirtinantys moterų ir vyrų moralinio žodyno skirtumus, moralinių samprotavimų ir lyties koreliaciją. Šiame straipsnyje analizuosime, kaip Gilligan darbuose (...) susipina etinė bei psichologinė plotmės, ir teigsime, kad ją galima laikyti naujos etinės paradigmos pradininke, kadangi normatyvinę rūpesčio sampratą ji grindžia nauja moralės filosofijai reliacinio subjekto prielaida, tokio subjekto, kurį formuoja ir konstituoja santykiai su konkrečiais žmonėmis. (shrink)