Engaging Ethics: A Campus Quality Enhancement Plan

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.

This book discusses the philosophical foundations of bioethics, with a particular focus on the tensions and potential dilemmas generated by the intuitionist meta-ethical commitments of the predominant normative theory, namely “the four principles approach.” This view is based on the prima facie norms of respect for autonomy (one ought to respect the autonomous choices of subjects of scientific research/patients), non-maleficence (one ought to refrain from inflicting harm), beneficence (one ought to do good and prevent, or remove, harm) and justice (one ought to treat people fairly).

In Caring, Peta Bowden extends and challenges recent debates on feminist ethics. She takes issue with accounts of the ethics of care that focus on alleged principles of caring rather than analysing caring in practice. Caring, Bowden argues, must be understood by 'working through examples'. Following this approach, Bowden explores four main caring practices: mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship. Her analysis of the differences and similarities in these practices - their varying degrees of intimacy and reciprocity, formality and informality, vulnerability and choice - reveals the practical complexity of the ethics of care. Caring recognizes that ethical practices constantly outrun the theories that attempt to explain them, and Bowden's unique approach provides major new insights into the nature of care without resorting to indiscriminate unitary models. It will be essential reading for all those interested in ethics, gender studies, nursing and the caring professions.

Ontic Ethics: Exploring the Influence of Caring on Being claims that to care more and better is to exist more and better. Much has been written about how character affects action, but this book describes how actions and passions affect character ontologically. H. G. Wright identifies an independent, not culturally relative, source for the ethics of care in an ontology of the self. Ethical and aesthetic flourishing is therefore at once ontological flourishing of the largest, truest self. The book includes many illustrations of how behavior and attitudes have consequences not only for who, but for how much we are. It refines the concept of flourishing, originating with Aristotle, and shows how values that encourage flourishing of the world as it relates to any person, reflexively enhance the flourishing of that person, hence offering a bridge across the fact/value chasm and a cure for ethical relativism. Wright engages classical and modern philosophers writing about the nature of a self to provide a platform from which further advances can be made on several problems in general philosophy that relate to the ontology of a self. These include the use of the term "existence," a bundle theory showing a way substance can be made up of attributes, an exploration of unity in a self, an evaluation of necessary constituents of selfhood, a theory of how persons are constituted in space and time, a portrayal of how existential intensity relates to the exercise of power, and a proposal about how free acts and stances can be connected to character. In the final chapters the author outlines applications of an ontology of care to problems of partiality, specialization, limitation, age and death. All these issues explicate the connection between ontological and ethical flourishing of the self/world combination. The insights in Ontic Ethics will be of interest not only to philosophers working in ethics and metaphysics, but also to scholars working in economics, theology, sociology, and evolutionary theory.