Moral understandings: a feminist study in ethics

Oxford: Oxford University Press (2007)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This is a revised edition of Walker's well-known book in feminist ethics first published in 1997. Walker's book proposes a view of morality and an approach to ethical theory which uses the critical insights of feminism and race theory to rethink the epistemological and moral position of the ethical theorist, and how moral theory is inescapably shaped by culture and history. The main gist of her book is that morality is embodied in "practices of responsibility" that express our identities, values, and connections to others in socially patterned ways. Thus ethical theory needs to be empirically informed and politically critical to avoid reiterating forms of socially entrenched bias. Responsible ethical theory should reveal and question the moral significance of social differences. The book engages with, and challenges, the work of contemporary analytic philosophers in ethics. Moral Understandings has been influential in reaching a global audience in ethics and feminist philosophy, as well as in tangential fields like nursing ethics; research ethics; disability ethics; environmental ethics, and social and political theory. This revised edition contains a new preface, a substantive postscript to Chapter 1 about "the subject of moral philosophy"; the addition of a new chapter on the importance of emotion in practices of responsibility; and the addition of an afterword, which responds to critics of the book

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Chapters

AUTHORITY AND TRANSPARENCY

In an age of moral skepticism, moral philosophers are often casual about their own positions to represent moral life in societies segmented by gender, race, class, and other differences. Drawing on resources of feminist epistemology and naturalized epistemology, this chapter critiques a th... see more

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
282 (#65,595)

6 months
21 (#100,772)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?