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. (shrink)

The impact of gender on assessments of leadership performance and leadership potential was examined through two clusters of leadership behaviors, one set related to traditional constructions of leadership labeled directing others and another associated with contemporary constructions of leadership labeled engaging others. Based on data collected from a sample of 91 senior leaders in one US financial services organization over a 3-year period prior to Covid-19, the results showed a negative relationship between directing others behaviors and leadership potential ratings for (...) females and a positive relationship between these variables for males. A negative relationship between engaging others behaviors and performance assessments was also found for females. This study highlights the continuing bias in leadership assessments of women and explores the contradictions between the perception and the reality of women's leadership. (shrink)

Our paper examines the impact of the intersection of cultural and gender identity on moral reasoning. Much research has been done on gender differences in moral thinking/reasoning, and increasingly research has also examined cultural differences in moral thinking. In agreement with a number of scholars we support the following claims about culture, moral reasoning, and concepts of self: concepts of self and approaches to moral reasoning are connected, concepts of self are differing by gender and culture, moral reasoning differs by (...) gender and culture. We propose that philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, follow the lead of psychology and strive to be as inclusive as possible by including the full range of human diversity and experience. For philosophers, this would mean embracing – indeed, starting from – a multicultural, feminist approach to moral theories and questions; this approach would not only be sensitive to gender and cultural bias, but also offer an alternative model to the paradigmatic rational, autonomous, independent agent of traditional moral theory. The implications of this go far beyond moral reasoning, but also have implications for other areas of philosophy as well, such as recent work in philosophy of mind on the idea of extended cognition. (shrink)

As women advance into leadership roles, the gender discrimination they face is a pressing issue that demands attention from a business ethics perspective. This paper considers the downstream consequences of such gender discrimination on their subordinates. Previous research indicates that women leaders in male-dominated organizations often face gender bias, which may prompt them to distance themselves from their gender identity as a coping mechanism (self-group distancing behavior). By integrating concepts from management, psychology, and business ethics, we investigate the following research (...) question: _What are the downstream consequences of gender discrimination experienced by women leaders on their subordinates?_ We hypothesize that women leaders’ self-group distancing responses create uncertainty belonging among women subordinates, which leads to adverse outcomes such as decreased leadership aspirations and increased turnover intentions. Our results suggest that when a woman leader engages in self-group distancing because of gender discrimination, women subordinates experience reduced feelings of belonging, increased differentiation, diminished leadership aspirations, and heightened turnover intentions. In contrast, male subordinates’ sense of belonging, differentiation, leadership aspirations, and turnover intentions do not significantly differ when a woman leader engages in self-group distancing behavior. (shrink)

Since the late 1960s, philosophy for children has become a global, multi-disciplinary movement involving innovations in curriculum, pedagogy, educational theory, and teacher education; in moral, social and political philosophy; and in discourse and literary theory. And it has generated the new academic field of philosophy of childhood. Gareth B. Matthews (1929-2011) traced contemporary disrespect for children to Aristotle, for whom the child is essentially a pre-intellectual and pre-moral precursor to the fully realized human adult. Matthews Matthews dubbed this the “deficit (...) conception of childhood” and wrote extensive critiques of its perpetuation in Jean Piaget’s stage model of cognitive development and in Lawrence Kholberg’s stage model of moral development. He published the first book (1994) in the field of philosophy of childhood and wrote a column of reviews of philosophically-oriented children’s books. He argued that even academic philosophers can benefit from the freshness and directness of children’s thinking. For Matthew Lipman (1923-2010) and Ann Margaret Sharp (1942-2010), the child is only potentially a philosophical agent and grows into becoming such by means of a philosophical education. Lipman invented the literary genre of children’s philosophical fiction, which systematically reconstructs key philosophical issues and positions in language accessible by children, attempts to help children recognize philosophical dimensions of their own experience, and models philosophical dialogue. Lipman and Sharp developed a protocol for a “community of philosophical inquiry,” in which people with diverse experiences, ideas and concerns dialogue together around a shared philosophical question, with the aim of forming reasonable, meaningful judgments about the matter. The early success of philosophy for children was due in part to its coincidence with the critical thinking movement in education, in which Lipman was an important figure. Its emphasis on ethics has justified its use as a program of ethics, character, and even religious education. It has also been used for civics education, because of how it instantiates democratic deliberation and power-sharing. At the same time, philosophy for children has been criticized by religious and social conservatives, developmental psychologists, and philosophers. Today, the diversity of approaches, aims, materials, and grounding theories of philosophy for children signifies different understandings of philosophy, childhood and education, which have become “essentially contested concepts” within the movement. Philosophy for children is no longer unified by an identifiable theory, purpose, pedagogy, method or curriculum, but is now used to further a number of disparate educational agendas. Shaun Gallagher’s (1992) heuristic of four schools of hermeneutics is helpful in understanding these competing agendas. Conservative hermeneutics is the attempt to devise methods of interpretation that uncover and preserve truth or original meaning without distortion or bias. This is consonant with the use of philosophy for children to help young people appropriate the fundamental questions, ideas and skills of (Western) philosophy as a resource for understanding the world and managing their own experience, and with the understanding critical thinking as a way of avoiding prejudice and approaching truth. Critical hermeneutics approaches interpretation—including teaching and learning—as a method of liberating the interpreter from the racist, sexist, homophobic, capitalist, religiously fanatical, and other kinds of ideologies that commonly distort thinking, feeling and behavior. This is consonant with those who argue that the attributes of mutual criticism, inclusion, solidarity, self-regulation, and distributed power make the community of philosophical inquiry an ideal site for recognizing and overcoming ideology. Others find philosophy for children politically ineffectual due to the limited role of students and teachers in co-constructing the curriculum and its lack of an explicit component of political critique and action. Radical hermeneutics suggests that because every text is open to a plurality of meanings, the purpose of interpretation is not to artificially constrain that plurality but to play with the signs that constitute the text in order to achieve fresh insights. A radical hermeneutical strand is identifiable in the philosophy for children literature when scholars resist the idea that the aim of philosophical dialogue is to find consensus or to narrow down on the most reasonable conclusions. Moderate hermeneutics holds that the work of interpretation is the attempt to reach meaning or shared understanding in a process modeled on dialogue between the familiar and the strange. This is consonant with those who argue that philosophical traditions can still give meaning to (young) people’s lives, but that those traditions must be continually reinterpreted (including by children) in order to survive and flourish. Fifty-odd years since its inception, philosophy for children has deepened and diversified, both theoretically and as a field of practice. Perhaps the only point of agreement among (most) everyone in the movement is that children’s philosophical thinking, variously understood, is necessary for the realization of the intellectual, moral, and political agency the movement attributes to them. (shrink)

If particularism is right, the broad moral claims we make are usually riddled with exceptions. But such generalizations can still be a useful, even necessary part of moral life. They help us show what we should do, and they are essential for understanding why we should do it.

Moral virtue is, for Aristotle, a state to which an agent’s motivation is central. For anyone interested in Aristotle’s account of moral development this invites reflection on two questions: how is it that virtuous motivational dispositions are established? And what contribution do the moral learner’s existing motivational states make to the success of her habituation? I argue that views which demand that the learner act with virtuous motives if she is to acquire virtuous dispositions misconstrue the nature and structure of (...) the habituation process, but also obscure Aristotle’s crucial insight that the very practice of virtuous actions affords a certain discovery and can be transformative of an agent’s motivational states. Drawing attention, in Aristotle’s account, to an asymmetry between the agential perspective and the observation of others, I consider what the agential perspective affords the learner, and offer a novel interpretation of the role a learner’s existing motives play in her habituation. (shrink)

Businesses that produce bioscience products—gene tests and therapies, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and medical devices—are regularly confronted with ethical issues concerning these technologies. Conflicts exist between those who support advancements in bioscience and those who fear the consequences of unfettered scientific license. As the debate surrounding bioscience grows, it will be increasingly important for business managers to consider the larger consequences of their work. This groundbreaking book follows industry research, development, and marketing of medical and bioscience products across a variety of fields, (...) including biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and bio-agriculture. Compelling and current case studies highlight the ethical decisions business managers frequently face. With the increasing visibility and public expectation placed on businesses in this sector, managers need to understand the ethical and social issues. This book addresses that need and provides a framework for incorporating ethical analysis in business decision making. (shrink)

"Most modern legal theorists seek to limit their enquiries to a particular sort of law, on the assumption that law is necessarily restricted in its interactions with other social practices. margaret Davies deliberately - and provocatively - questions the usefulness of such 'positivist' dogmas, asserting that the law can and should be seen as multi-dimensional. Davies argues that the law is everywhere - in metaphysics, the social environment, language and the psyche. In a persuasive meeting of postmodern discourse, deconstruction, (...) feminism and legal theory, Davies creates new ways of thinking about the law by creating links with other practices and disciplines where none previously existed. This is a powerful critique of the ideology and theory of law in the West, providing a much-needed link between conventional legal philosophy and modern movements in legal theory." --From back cover. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a distinction between subjective and value laden aspects of judgements showing why equating the former with the latter has the potential to confuse matters when the goal is uncovering the influence of political influences on scientific practice. I will focus on three separate but interrelated issues. The first concerns the issue of ‘verification’ in computational modelling. This is a practice that involves a number of formal techniques but as I show, even these allegedly objective (...) methods ultimately rely on subjective estimation and evaluation of different types of parameters. This has implications for my second point which relates to uncertainty quantification—an assessment of the degree of uncertainty present in a particular modelling scenario. I argue that while this practice also involves subjective elements, in no way does that detract from its status as an epistemic exercise. Finally I discuss the relation between accuracy and uncertainty and how each relates to judgements that embody social/ethical/political concerns, in particular those associated with high consequence systems. (shrink)

In a well-known series of articles, Norman Daniels has drawn a contrast between wide reflective equilibrium and a more traditional method of theory acceptance in ethics that would be employed by a sophisticated moral intuitionist. The more traditional method is geared towards achieving a narrow equilibrium, or ‘an ordered pair of a set of considered moral judgments acceptable to a given person P at a given time, and a set of moral principles that economically systematizes.’ Although we might achieve narrow (...) reflective equilibrium by deducing particular moral judgments from self-evident moral principles, the more plausible approach is to start from our particular moral judgments. Here we begin by screening our intial moral judgments to eliminate those in which we have little confidence and those made under circumstances conducive to error. We then search for general moral principles that best account for the remaining ‘considered’ moral judgments. (shrink)

This essay argues that the concept of ‘reasonableness’plays an important role in Scanlon's, Rawls's, and Barry's theories of justice (or morality). The relationship between moral motivation and reasonableness is critically analysed. Specifically, the paper questions whether it is plausible to impute to the agents of construction the desire ‘to justify our actions to others on impartial terms’. It also argues that most of the work is done by the assumption that people are reasonable rather than by the contractarian formulation. Indeed, (...) the paper argues, the argument could proceed entirely by making explicit and arguing for the moral assumptions embedded in the concept of reasonableness [1]. (shrink)

Many have asked how and why feminist theory makes a distinctive contribution to bioethics. In this essay, I outline two ways in which feminist reflection can enrich bioethical studies. First, feminist theory may expose certain themes of androcentric reasoning that can affect, in sometimes crude but often subtle ways, the substantive analysis of topics in bioethics; second, it can unearth the gendered nature of certain basic philosophical concepts that form the working tools of ethical theory.

What is a social rule? This paper first notes three important problems for H.L.A. Hart’s famous answer in the Concept of Law. An alternative account that avoids the problems is then sketched. It is less individualistic than Hart’s and related accounts. This alternative account can explain a phenomenon observed but downplayed by Hart: the parties to a social rule feel that they are in some sense ‘bound’ to conform to it.

How is one to act so as to do as well as possible according to one’s ranking of the possible outcomes? How—as it may be put—is one to act rationally? Sometimes the possible outcomes are not under one’s own control: an outcome is a combination of one’s own and another agent’s action. Often, then, one must try to work out what the other agent will do, in order to do as well as possible in one’s own lights. It is situations (...) of this sort—situations of “strategic interaction”—that most concern the game theorist. (shrink)

Russell Hardin writes from a particular perspective, that of rational choice theory. His broad—and ambitious—overall project is to “understand the sway of groups in our time” or, in an alternative formulation, “to understand the motivations of those who act on behalf of groups and to understand how they come to identify with the groups for which they act”.

A high level of citizen involvement in civic life is presumed crucial to the well-being of democracy, but the actual discourse of citizen involvement has rarely been analyzed. This article analyzes citizen participation in the school board meetings of one US community that was in the midst of conflict. After providing background on education governance practices and the community that was studied, citizen participation is examined. Citizen commentaries at school board meetings are shown to be a distinct speech genre and (...) the genre is described. Then, we characterize the discourse practices used to express negative sentiment. Feeling-limned description, avowal of feelings, rhetorical questions, reported speech, use of god and devil terms, and using meeting rules as weapons were the main negative sentiment strategies. In the conclusion we suggest when low levels of citizen involvement should be acceptable, and why `reasonable hostility' is a desirable form of citizen expression. (shrink)

Drawing on earlier work of the author that is both clarified and amplified here, this article explores the question: what is it for two or more people to intend to do something in the future? In short, what is it for people to share an intention? It argues for three criteria of adequacy for an account of shared intention (the disjunction, concurrence, and obligation criteria) and offers an account that satisfies them. According to this account, in technical terms explained in (...) the paper, people share an intention when and only when they are jointly committed to intend as a body to do such-and-such in the future. This account is compared and contrasted with the common approach that treats shared intention as a matter of the correlative personal intentions, with particular reference to the work of Michael Bratman. (shrink)

This article examines two modalities of law, depicted spatially as the vertical and the horizontal. The intellectual background for seeing law in vertical and horizontal dimensions is to be found in much socio-legal scholarship. These approaches have challenged the modernist, legal positivist and essentially vertical view of law as a system of imperatives emanating from a hierarchically superior source such as a sovereign. In keeping with the socio-legal critical tradition, but approaching it from the perspective of legal philosophy, my aim (...) is to address three matters. First, why is vertical law problematic for feminists? Second, what are the theoretical characteristics of law in its horizontal register? Third, how is an appreciation of this ‘flat’ law useful for feminist legal theory and practice? In particular, I consider the ways in which feminist legal theory operating in the horizontal dimension can transgress, without transcending, the vertically determined perimeters of the nation state. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Observations on Collective Action Approaches to Collective Action The Personal Intentions Approach The ‘We ‐ Intentions’ Approach The Joint Commitment Approach Concluding Remarks Further reading.

This essay focuses on what patriotism is, as opposed to the value of patriotism. It focuses further on the basic patriotic motive: one acts with this motive if one acts on behalf of one's country as such. I first argue that pre-theoretically the basic patriotic motive is sufficient to make an act patriotic from a motivational point of view. In particular the agent need not ascribe virtues or achievements to his country nor need he feel towards it the emotions characteristic (...) of love. Why should one ever act on behalf of one's country as such, if one does not particularly admire it or feel a special affection for it? In answer to this question I offer a further articulation of the basic patriotic motive, invoking a particular understanding of what it is to be the member of a political society. Building on this articulation I then consider how one might characterize a patriotic act, a patriotic person, and the relationship of patriotism and pride. (shrink)