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Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to d...
Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality asks what happens when the sense that "I must" collides with the realization that "I can't." Bringing together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology, Lisa Tessman here examines moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that "ought implies can." In some cases, it is because two non-negotiable requirements conflict that one of them becomes impossible to satisfy, and yet remains binding. In other cases, performing a particular action may be non-negotiably required -- even if it is impossible -- because not performing the action is unthinkable. After offering both conceptual and empirical expla...
Suppose that in an emergency evacuation of a hospital after a flood, not all of the patients can make it out alive. You are the doctor faced with the choice between abandoning these patients to die alone and in pain, or injecting them with a lethal dose of drugs, without consent, so that they die peacefully. Perhaps no one will be able to blame you whatever you decide, but, whichever action you choose, you will remain burdened by guilt. What happens, in cases like this, when, no matter what you do, you are destined for moral failure? What happens when there is no available means of doing the right thing? Human life is filled with such impossible moral decisions. These choices and case studie...
Universities teach courses in ethics, but do they teach students how to be ethical in practice? Lisa Kretz’s Ethics, Emotion, Education, and Empowerment explores the ways that philosophical ethics are currently taught and argues that dominant approaches fail to adequately support ethical action, in part because emotions are all too often ignored or repressed in university classrooms. In isolation, abstract theoretical content fails to motivate. The ability to reason through an ethical dilemma does not, by itself, of necessity impact ethical action. Empowered action requires intentional emotional engagement. Kretz argues that part of the reason affective pedagogy fails to get sufficient upt...
At the interface of race and Jewish studies, Tessman and Bar On (philosophy and women's studies, Binghamton U.-SUNY) introduce 13 provocative personally-infused theoretical essays by academics on the phenomenology of otherness and hyphenated identities in the post-Holocaust context of social constructions of race beyond white/black. Includes feminist and other critical readings of the identity motif in Buber's texts and the Talmud. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This book turns to virtue language as an important resource for understanding moral injury, a form of subjectivity where one feels they can no longer strive to be good as a result of wartime experience. Drawing specifically on Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, and examining the experiences of civilians during the Bosnian War (1992-5), Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon argues that current research into war and current understandings of subjectivity need new ways to articulate the moral dimension of being a subject if we are to understand how violence affects one’s moral being and development. He develops an understanding of the human person as a tensile moral subject, one that forefronts the moral challenges and vulnerability inherent in lives affected by war. With these resources, Wiinikka-Lydon argues for a moral vocabulary and images of the human as a moral being that can better articulate the experience of violence and moral injury.
What are the moral obligations of participants and bystanders during—and in the wake of –a conflict? How have theoretical understandings of justice, peace and responsibility changed in the face of contemporary realities of war? Drawing on the work of leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, political theory, international law, religious studies and peace studies, the collection significantly advances current literature on war, justice and post-conflict reconciliation. Contributors address some of the most pressing issues of international and civil conflict, including the tension between attributing individual and collective responsibility for the wrongs of war, the trade-offs made between the search for truth and demands for justice, and the conceptual intricacies of coming to understand just what is meant by ‘peace’ and ‘conflict.’ Individual essays also address concrete topics including the international criminal court, reparations, truces, political apologies, truth commissions and criminal trials, with an eye to contemporary examples from conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and North and South America.
Written in an engaging narrative style these philosophical investigations undermine racist hierarchies along with false natualistic conceptions of the meanings of race and universalistic understandings of gender, by considering whiteness as it shapes and is infused by gender, class, sexuality, and culture. Central to this project are questions about how it is that culture and the state create such a wide range of different people who understand themselves as white. The essays collected here discuss how one learns to be a good white Southern woman, what it means to pass as white, and whether there really is a dilemma that accompanies white privilege.
To be truly reflective, moral thinking and moral philosophy must become aware of the contexts that bind our thinking about how to live. These essays show how to do this, and why it makes a difference. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Most works on moral psychology consider morality an unalloyed good. Drawing primarily on social-psychological theory and research, this book looks at morality as a problem. The problem is that we often fail live up to our own moral standards. Why?