This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring capacities and relations in a violent world, and the embodied ethical and political transformations at the heart of learning to care otherwise. From manifestos calling for ‘universal care’ in defiance of the state-sanctioned horrors of the pandemic era, to the abolitionist politics of care developed by BLM organizers through movement building and healing, and the proliferation of mutual-aid infrastructures to meet needs and distribute resources in the face (...) of overwhelming crisis and neglect—these examples and so many others illustrate with undeniable clarity that radical care is finally on the agenda. In what follows, I hope to contribute to this urgent conversation by pointing to how care is shaped in fundamentally contradictory ways under conditions of entrenched structural violence, and the limitations of normative frameworks when confronting this reality. To unambiguously valorize care in ethical and political life is to risk occluding the constitutive violence of existing social structures and norms, its impact on the intimacies of caring relations, and ultimately the ways that communities mobilize alternate economies and practices of care towards healing and social change. While it is crucial to value care and work for a more caring society, I claim that efforts to transform patterns of relational harm and develop new sensibilities should also be highlighted as integral components of radical caring praxis. (shrink)

This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture is right to stress the interdependency of justice and care in addressing structural oppressions, but wrong in upholding liberalism’s capacity for doing so. Against her procedural mechanism of education for caregiving skills in particular, I point to the critical and generative methods of social reproduction feminism and Transformative Justice as models of radical praxis in the collective work of politically centering and radically (...) transforming cultures of care. (shrink)

Virginia Held's Feminist Morality defends the idea that it is possible to transform the "public" sphere by remaking it on the model of existing "private" relationships such as families. This paper challenges Held's optimism. It is argued that feminist moral inquiry can aid in transforming the public sphere only by showing just how much the allegedly "private" realms of families and personal relationships are shaped-and often misshapen-by public demands and concerns.

Virginia Held assesses the ethics of care as a promising alternative to the familiar moral theories that serve so inadequately to guide our lives. The ethics of care is only a few decades old, yet it is by now a distinct moral theory or normative approach to the problems we face. It is relevant to global and political matters as well as to the personal relations that can most clearly exemplify care. This book clarifies just what the ethics of (...) care is: what its characteristics are, what it holds, and what it enables us to do. It discusses the feminist roots of this moral approach and why the ethics of care can be a morality with universal appeal. Held examines what we mean by "care," and what a caring person is like. Where other moral theories demand impartiality above all, the ethics of care understands the moral import of our ties to our families and groups. It evaluates such ties, focusing on caring relations rather than simply on the virtues of individuals. The book proposes how such values as justice, equality, and individual rights can "fit together" with such values as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity. In the second part of the book, Held examines the potential of the ethics of care for dealing with social issues. She shows how the ethics of care is more promising than Kantian moral theory and utilitarianism for advice on how expansive, or not, markets should be, and on when other values than market ones should prevail. She connects the ethics of care with the rising interest in civil society, and considers the limits appropriate for the language of rights. Finally, she shows the promise of the ethics of care for dealing with global problems and seeing anew the outlines of international civility. (shrink)

In this book, the author examines the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence systems as they integrate and replace traditional social structures in new sociocognitive-technological environments. She discusses issues related to the integrity of researchers, technologists, and manufacturers as they design, construct, use, and manage artificially intelligent systems; formalisms for reasoning about moral decisions as part of the behavior of artificial autonomous systems such as agents and robots; and design methodologies for social agents based on societal, moral, and legal values. Throughout (...) the book the author discusses related work, conscious of both classical, philosophical treatments of ethical issues and the implications in modern, algorithmic systems, and she combines regular references and footnotes with suggestions for further reading. This short overview is suitable for undergraduate students, in both technical and non-technical courses, and for interested and concerned researchers, practitioners, and citizens. (shrink)

Two studies investigated the development of infants' visual preferences for the human body shape. In Study 1, infants of 12,15 and 18 months were tested in a standard preferential looking experiment, in which they were shown paired line drawings of typical and scrambled bodies. Results indicated that the 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for the scrambled body shapes over typical body shapes, while the younger infants did not show differential responding. In Study 2, 12- and 18-month-olds were tested with the (...) same procedure, except that the typical and scrambled body stimuli were photographic images. The results of Study 2 again indicated that only the 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for the scrambled body shapes. This finding contrasts sharply with infants' precocious preferences for human faces, suggesting that infants' learning about human faces and human bodies follow different developmental trajectories. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Virginia Held assesses the ethics of care as a promising alternative to the familiar moral theories that serve so inadequately to guide our lives. The ethics of care is only a few decades old, yet it is by now a distinct moral theory or normative approach to the problems we face. It is relevant to global and political matters as well as to the personal relations that can most clearly exemplify care. This book clarifies just what the ethics of (...) care is: what its characteristics are, what it holds, and what it enables us to do. It discusses the feminist roots of this moral approach and why the ethics of care can be a morality with universal appeal. Held examines what we mean by "care," and what a caring person is like. Where other moral theories demand impartiality above all, the ethics of care understands the moral import of our ties to our families and groups. It evaluates such ties, focusing on caring relations rather than simply on the virtues of individuals. The book proposes how such values as justice, equality, and individual rights can "fit together" with such values as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity. In the second part of the book, Held examines the potential of the ethics of care for dealing with social issues. She shows how the ethics of care is more promising than Kantian moral theory and utilitarianism for advice on how expansive, or not, markets should be, and on when other values than market ones should prevail. She connects the ethics of care with the rising interest in civil society, and considers the limits appropriate for the language of rights. Finally, she shows the promise of the ethics of care for dealing with global problems and seeing anew the outlines of international civility. (shrink)

How is feminism changing the way women and men think, feel, and act? Virginia Held explores how feminist theory is changing contemporary views of moral choice. She proposes a comprehensive philosophy of feminist ethics, arguing persuasively for reconceptualizations of the self of relations between the self and others and of images of birth and death, nurturing and violence. Held shows how social, political, and cultural institutions have traditionally been founded upon masculine ideals of morality. She then identifies a distinct (...) feminist morality that moves beyond culturally embedded notions about motherhood and female emotionality. Examining the effects of this alternative moral and ethical system on changing social values, Held discusses its far-reaching implications for altering standards of freedom, democracy, equality, and personal development. Ultimately, she concludes, the culture of feminism could provide a fresh perspective on--even solutions to--contemporary social problems. Feminist Morality makes a vital contribution to the ongoing debate in feminist theory on the importance of motherhood. For philosophers and other readers outside feminist theory, it offers a feminist moral and social critique in clear and accessible terms. (shrink)

I explore some new directions-suggested by feminism-for medical ethics and for philosophical ethics generally. Moral philosophers need to confront two issues. The first is deciding which moral issues merit attention. Questions which incorporate the perspectives of women need to be posed-e.g., about the unequal treatment of women in health care, about the roles of physician and nurse, and about relationship issues other than power struggles. "Crisis issues" currently dominate medical ethics, to the neglect of what I call "housekeeping issues." The (...) second issue is how philosophical moral debates are conducted, especially how ulterior motives influence our beliefs and arguments. Both what we select-and neglect-to study as well as the "games" we play may be sending a message as loud as the words we do speak on ethics. (shrink)

Analyzing Montaigne's triptych painting, “Of the Education of Children,” reveals a series of ever-morphing, Dorian Gray–like canvases that depict metaphor mutations through which Montaigne defined education by distinguishing between schooling a child into a learned man and educating him into an able, active, and gentle person. Montaigne used metaphor and metaphor clusters to image key points in his educational philosophy, advanced his argument by intertwining, transmuting, and inverting metaphors, and thereby drew and vividly painted his philosophy of how to educate (...) a person from cradle to coffin. Because the etymology and pronunciation of “essay” (from the French essai) support Montaigne's imaging and exploiting of this genre's creative potential, Virginia Worley begins by considering the term's etymology before positioning her analysis of Montaigne's work within metaphor research. She then examines the metaphors Montaigne used to paint the triptych word painting that embodies his philosophy of education: the meaning and value of educating in and for the art of living well. (shrink)

There are many different forms and interpretations of rewilding: the concept and its practice vary from country to country, with distinct interpretations according to its geographical location. Despite the term rewilding having been present in the lexicon for three decades, the concept of rewilding in England has experienced a prolonged developmental stage. This paper argues that a unique form of English rewilding is now emerging, which is distinct from rewilding in other parts of the world. Compared to other locations rewilding (...) in England operates at smaller spatial scales; its ambitions to increase biodiversity, restore ecosystem functioning and increase natural autonomy are somewhat curtailed; it involves higher levels of human intervention; and, perhaps most tellingly of all, it goes by another name - 'wilding', 'wild' or 'wilder' with little mention of the much-maligned prefix 're'. This conclusion has been developed following a comparative case study of two English 'rewilding' sites (the Avalon Marshes and Wild Ennerdale) involving 49 semi-structured interviews: twelve expert interviews and nineteen and eighteen stakeholder/practitioner interviews at the Avalon Mashes and Wild Ennerdale respectively. (shrink)

Nearly two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote what is considered to be the first major work of feminist political theory: A Vindication of the Rights of Women . Much has been written about this work, and about Wollstonecraft as the intellectual pioneer of feminism, but the actual substance and coherence of her political thought have been virtually ignored. Virginia Sapiro here provides the first full-length treatment of Wollstonecraft's political theory. Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft's works and treating them (...) thematically rather than sequentially, Sapiro shows that Wollstonecraft's ideas about women's rights, feminism, and gender are elements of a broad and fully developed philosophy, one with significant implications for contemporary democratic and liberal theory. The issues raised speak to many current debates in theory, including those surrounding interpretation of the history of feminism, the relationship between liberalism and republicanism in the development of political philosophy, and the debate over the canon. For political scientists, most of whom know little about Wollstonecraft's thought, Sapiro's book is an excellent, nuanced introduction which will cause a reconsideration of her work and her significance both for her time and for today's concerns. For feminist scholars, Sapiro's book offers a rounded and unconventional analysis of Wollstonecraft's thought. Written with considerable charm and verve, this book will be the starting point for understanding this important writer for years to come. (shrink)

Contemporary society is in the grip of contractual thinking. Realities are interpreted in contractual terms, and goals are formulated in terms of rational contracts. The leading current conceptions of rationality begin with assumptions that human beings are independent, self-interested or mutually disinterested, individuals; they then typically argue that it is often rational for human beings to enter into contractual relationships with each other.

As in science, so in bioethics: if prohibiting conflicts of interest is not feasible, rigorous requirements for disclosure can at least manage them.

Carol Gilligan has identified two orientations to moral understanding; the dominant justice orientation and the under-valued care orientation. Based on her discernment of a voice of care, Gilligan challenges the adequacy of a deontological liberal framework for moral development and moral theory. This paper examines how the orientations of justice and care are played out in medical ethical theory. Specifically, I question whether the medical moral domain is adequately described by the norms of impartiality, universality, and equality that characterize the (...) liberal ideal. My analysis of justice -oriented medical ethics, focuses on the libertarian theory of H.T. Engelhardt and the contractarian theory of R.M. Veatch. I suggest that in the work of E.D. Pellegrino and D.C. Thomasma we find not only a more authentic representation of medical morality but also a project that is compatible with the care orientation's emphasis on human need and responsiveness to particular others. (shrink)

Nursing professionalization is both ongoing and global, being significant not only for the nursing workforce but also for patients and healthcare systems. For this reason, it is important to have an in‐depth understanding of this process and the factors that could affect it. This literature review utilizes a welfare state approach to examine macrolevel structural determinants of nursing professionalization, addressing a previously identified gap in this literature, and synthesizes research on the relevance of studying nursing professionalization. The use of a (...) welfare state framework facilitates the understanding that the wider social, economic, and political system exercises significant power over the distribution of resources in a society, providing a glimpse into the complex politics of health and health care. The findings shed light on structural factors outside of nursing, such as country‐level education, health, labor market, and gender policies that could impact the process of professionalization and thus could be utilized to strengthen nursing through facilitating increased professionalization levels. Addressing gender inequalities and other structural determinants of nursing professionalization could contribute to achieving health equity and could benefit health systems through enhanced availability, skill‐level, and sustainability of nursing human resources, improved and efficient access to care, improved patient outcomes, and cost savings. (shrink)

We explored the comprehension of the informed consent in 77 cancer patients previously enrolled in randomised phase II or phase III clinical trials, between March and July 2011, at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milano. We asked participants to complete an ad hoc questionnaire and analysed their answers. Sixty-two per cent of the patients understood the purpose and nature of the trial they were participating in; 44% understood the study procedures and 40% correctly listed at least one of the (...) major risks or complications related to their participation in the trial. We identified three factors associated with comprehension of the informed consent: age, education and type of tumour/investigator team. We suggest several possible improvements of how to obtain informed consent that will increase patient awareness, as well as the validity and effectiveness of the clinical trials. (shrink)

In A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf considers with energy and wit the implications of the historical exclusion of women from education and from economic independence. In A Room of One's Own, she examines the work of past women writers, and looks ahead to a time when women's creativity will not be hampered by poverty, or by oppression. In Three Guineas, however, Woolf argues that women's historical exclusion offers them the chance to form a political (...) and cultural identity which could challenge the drive towards fascism and war. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.

I explore some new directions—suggested by feminism—for medical ethics and for philosophical ethics generally. Moral philosophers need to confront two issues. The first is deciding which moral issues merit attention. Questions which incorporate the perspectives of women need to be posed—e. g., about the unequal treatment of women in health care, about the roles of physician and nurse, and about relationship issues other than power struggles. “Crisis issues” currently dominate medical ethics, to the neglect of what I call “housekeeping issues.” (...) The second issue is how philosophical moral debates are conducted, especially how ulterior motives influence our beliefs and arguments. Both what we select—and neglect—to study as well as the “games” we play may be sending a message as loud as the words we do speak on ethics. (shrink)

Many activities formerly not in the market are being “marketized,” and women's labor is increasingly in the market. I consider the grounds on which to decide what should and what should not be “in” the market. I distinguish work that is paid from work done under “market norms,” and argue that market values should not have priority in education, childcare, healthcare, and many other activities. I suggest that a feminist ethics of care is more promising than Kantian ethics or utilitarianism (...) for recommending social decisions concerning limits on markets. (shrink)

In Three Guineas, first published in June, 1938 Virginia Woolf set about answering three questions. How should war be prevented? Why does the government not support education for women? Why are women prevented from engaging in professional work? Many at the time saw the matter of how best to prevent war as entirely unconnected with “women’s issues”; Woolf linked together the answers, and connected them too with discussions of such matters as social class, in what has come to be (...) acknowledged as a landmark both of feminist and of anti-war writing. Included in the first and other early editions—and integral to the work—was a series of five photographs of men of high position wearing garments that mark their status . Unlike most editions available today, this facsimile edition includes the illustrations as well as the text of the original. (shrink)

This paper deals with custom in action, namely, with the relationship between custom and action against the background of Amedeo Giovanni Conte’s nomotropism. Starting with Frerichs’ provocation of the peculiarity of saying ‘handeln nach der Sitte’ (acting according to custom) in favor of ‘sich handelnd nach was üblich ist’ (acting after what is usual), this paper will begin an exploratory research regarding the semantics and the ontology of custom to investigate the possibility of a nomotropic behavior in the field of (...) custom. Therefore, this paper will quote, at first, Rudolf von Jhering’s theory, and, at second, Ferdinand Tönnies’ theory. In conclusion, this paper suggests that an inquiry into custom in action (and in particular Tönnies’ ontology of the normative) could benefit from the nomotropic categories of analysis – such as adeontic and deontic regularities. (shrink)

Denounced by neighbors and scrutinized by demonologists, the early modern French witch also confessed, self-identified as a witch and as the author of horrific deeds. What led her to this point? Despair, solitude, perhaps even physical pain, but most decisively, demonology's two-pronged prosecutorial and truth-seeking confessional apparatus. This book examines the systematic and well-oiled machinery that served to extract, interpret, and disseminate witches' confessions in early modern France. For the demonologist, confession was the only way to find out the truth (...) about the clandestine activities of witches. For the witch, however, trial confessions opened new horizons of selfhood. In this book, Virginia Krause unravels the threads that wove together the demonologist's will to know and the witch's subjectivity. By examining textual and visual evidence, Krause shows how confession not only generated demonological theory but also brought forth a specific kind of self, which we now recognize as the modern subject. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transformed Lives: Making Sense of Atonement Today by Cynthia S. W. CrysdaleVirginia W. LandgrafTransformed Lives: Making Sense of Atonement Today Cynthia S. W. Crysdale new york: seabury books, 2016. 192 pp. $16.00Cynthia Crysdale aims to show how atonement can have meaning for modern and postmodern Christians who reject the idea that God wills Jesus's violent death. She starts with stories of people who were estranged from God but (...) have been given grace to love God anew. Their subsequent lives are not perfect and involve multiple deaths of the old self and resurrections into the new. Yet there is a reconciliation not present beforehand: not a change in God, who has always loved us, but a change in us. Crysdale seeks to navigate between two undesirable positions: a penal substitutionary doctrine of the atonement, which she thinks posits a violent God, or a rejection of the idea of atonement altogether. She sees atonement as not only moral influence showing an example but a relationship that involves our whole being.Crysdale then presents a historical overview to show that this understanding of atonement is a plausible interpretation of scripture and tradition. Biblical sacrifices were not intended to propitiate an angry deity but to expiate human sin. New Testament writers who saw Jesus's death on the cross in continuity with these sacrifices were not implying that God was punishing Jesus. Jesus's statements about giving his life as a ransom prophesied the subversion of patron–client power relations rather than predicting a transaction whereby Jesus would pay for sin. Subsequent writers who saw Jesus as gaining victory over the devil saw God and Jesus as united against the powers and Jesus as attaining justice by love. Even Anselm, sometimes blamed for the penal substitutionary view, intended to avoid the idea of the crucifixion as God's punishment of Jesus. In the honor code of the time, either satisfaction or punishment was required. Therefore, Jesus's act of making satisfaction is precisely not punishment. Crysdale sees subsequent conflations of satisfaction and punishment as distorting Anselm's original intent and implying that God requires violent punishment of sin. [End Page 208]Crysdale then takes readers on a tour of changes in scientific, historical, and epistemological consciousness in the modern era to ask how theology might be done today. Drawing on Bernard Lonergan, she describes multiple dimensions of conversion that are all instances of grace when they occur. She then interprets the incarnation as indicating God's offer of friendship with humanity and Jesus's death and resurrection as indicating the transformation of power and oppression. Believing that an abstract atonement over the heads of human beings does not exist, she concludes with further stories of lives transformed by an encounter with God, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day.This book is suitable for educated lay adults, advanced undergraduates, or introductory seminary courses. Protestant audiences may find it typically Catholic, even though Crysdale is an Anglican, because it emphasizes changed lives rather than God's act of justification prior to any change in us. Theologically, it does not deal with every possible objection to its thesis. Those concerned with cultures of impunity, where malevolent lawlessness gets its way, may think that rejecting any sense of punishment of sin in the crucifixion throws the baby out with the bathwater. Recently, Fleming Rutledge (in The Crucifixion), drawing on Karl Barth, has made a point of retaining punishment as one meaning of the atonement even while emphasizing that God's wrath is always in the service of God's love. Transformed Lives does not have the last word on the atonement and would not claim to, since Crysdale wants to invite readers to do theology befitting their changing context. However, readers at many levels will benefit from its accessible treatment of its topic and invitation to reflection that befits a loving, reconciling, evil-opposing God.Virginia W. LandgrafAmerican Theological Library AssociationCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

It is widely agreed that social factors are related to health outcomes: much research served to establish correlations between classes of social factors on the one hand and classes of disease on the other hand. However, why and how social factors are an active part in the aetiology of disease development is something that is gaining attention only recently in the health sciences and in the medical humanities. In this paper, we advance the view that, just as bio-markers help trace (...) the causal continuum from exposure to disease development at the biological level, socio-markers ought to be introduced and studied in order to trace the social continuum from exposure to disease development. We explain how socio-markers differ from social indicators and how they can be used in combination with bio-markers in order to reconstruct the mixed mechanisms of health and disease, namely mechanisms in which both biological and social factors have an active causal role. (shrink)

We review major developmental evidence on the continuity from action to gesture to word and sign in human children, highlighting the important role of caregivers in the development of multimodal communication. In particular, the basic issues considered here and contributing to the current debate on the origins and development of the language-ready brain are: (1) links between early actions, gestures and words and similarities in representational strategies; (2) importance of multimodal communication and the interplay between gestures and spoken words; (3) (...) interconnections between early actions, gestures and signs. The innovation of this report is in connecting these themes together to relevant findings from studies on children between 6 and 36 months of age and highlighting interesting parallels in studies on ape communicative behavior. (shrink)

The present study investigates the types of verb and symbolic representational strategies used by 10 deaf signing adults and 13 deaf signing children who described in Italian Sign Language 45 video clips representing nine action types generally communicated by five general verbs in spoken Italian. General verbs, in which the same sign was produced to refer to several different physical action types, were rarely used by either group of participants. Both signing children and adults usually produced specific depicting predicates by (...) incorporating, through a representational strategy, the object and/or the modality of the action into the sign. As for the different types of representational strategies, the adults used the hand-as-object strategy more frequently than the children, who, in turn, preferred to use the hand-as-hand strategy, suggesting that different degrees of cognitive complexity are involved in these two symbolic strategies. Addressing the symbolic iconic strategies underlying sign formation could provide new insight into the perceptual and cognitive processes of linguistic meaning construction. The findings reported here support two main assumptions of cognitive linguistics applied to sign languages: there is a strong continuity between gestures and language; lexical units and depicting constructions derive from the same iconic core mechanism of sign creation. (shrink)

Theories of justice, argues Virginia Held, are usually designed for a perfect, hypothetical world. They do not give us guidelines for living in an imperfect world in which the choices and decisions that we must make are seldom clear-cut. Seeking a morality based on actual experience, Held offers a method of inquiry with which to deal with the specific moral problems encountered in daily life. She argues that the division between public and private morality is misleading and shows convincingly (...) that moral judgment should be contextual. She maps out different approaches and positions for various types of issues, including membership in a state, legal decisions, political activities, economic transactions, interpersonal relations, diplomacy, journalism, and determining our obligation to future generations. Issues such as these provide the true test of moral theory, since its success is seen in the willingness of conscientious persons to commit themselves to it by acting on it in their daily lives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 123-126 [Access article in PDF] Beyond the Usual Alternatives? Buddhist and Christian Approaches to Other Religions Virginia Straus Boston Research Center for the 21st Century In regard to the three commonly accepted attitudes toward other religions—exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist—Terry C. Muck presents an extremely persuasive critique of the existing paradigm. He objects to the ideological stereotyping "The Paradigm" promotes. He proposes that we make (...) a shift in the use of The Paradigm: Instead of labeling people and their points of view, it would identify modes of thinking about certain beliefs and practices, without negative connotations. He calls this a shift to an instrumental or functional use of The Paradigm. His cost/benefit analysis of this shift attributes to the benefit side of the ledger the following advantages: less name-calling, more engagement with the substantive ideas being presented, new openings for dialogue among Christians formerly separated from each other by negative use of The Paradigm, and possible resonance with the logic of non-Western traditions.As I read these ideas I recalled a recent paper written by Miriam Levering, who, with no knowledge of Muck's novel and irreverent approach to The Paradigm, wrote about Buddhist thinking, answering Muck's question about whether his idea resonates with non-Western traditions. Levering presents a fascinating description and analysis of the position taken by certain Chinese Buddhist teachers and two contemporary Buddhist leaders, Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama. She says Buddhists, when making judgments about religions, tend to divide them into three parts: teachings, practices, and realization. In regard to teachings, she says Buddhists use discernment to evaluate other teachings. As Levering describes the use of discernment, she cites three modes of thinking that resonate rather well with Muck's instrumental approach. She says Buddhists distinguish among three kinds of teachings:Teachings that are wrong, unskillful, and do not lead to liberation (that is, they take an exclusivist position on a particular doctrine);Teachings that, while partial or shallow, can lead people to make progress on the path to liberation (an inclusivist position); andFully liberative teachings (a pluralist position). [End Page 123]In regard to practices, Levering indicates that the Buddhists she has studied do not apply discernment to practices. They all appear to take a pluralist position at all times on all practices, whether old, new, or yet to be invented. Although she does not say so, I am sure she would agree that this is not true of all Buddhist traditions. Pure Land, Nichiren Buddhists, and others have specific practices to which they are exclusively committed. In Levering's discussion of the third dimension of religions—the one she terms "realization"—she finds the Buddhist view to be primarily inclusivist rather than pluralist.With this in mind, I would like to raise two questions that may provide a helpful starting point for discussion. First, how does the recent scholarship aimed at developing a fourth alternative relate to this paper?Muck, with his justifiably jaundiced view of the use to which The Paradigm has been put, shares the dissatisfaction with the existing paradigm that has motivated this recent scholarly work. Yet he claims to be "skeptical that simply expanding The Paradigm by adding new forms would really get us anywhere." I wonder if he is not too quick to write off this promising work. In fact, I think this scholarship would help those searching for a fourth way (Levering included) and further refine the reflections they make on the pluralist position and also would suggest a fourth alternative mode of thinking to be used in the instrumental way Muck suggests.Specifically, I am thinking of James Fredericks's work on what he calls comparative theology, which he considers a process or practice rather than a theory. In essence, he, like Muck, is shifting to an instrumental use. By emphasizing the comparative approach, Fredericks hopes to understand a religion 1 on its own terms without glossing over differences as in the pluralist approach. Another thinker on this subject, James Wiggins, would substitute the term... (shrink)