Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics / Edition 2

by Margaret Urban Walker

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195315400
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/13/2007
Series:	Studies in Feminist Philosophy
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	9.16(w) x 6.25(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Margaret Urban Walker is Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University. She is author of Moral Contexts and Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations After Wrongdoing, and editor of Mother Time: Women, Aging and Ethics and Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, with Peggy DesAutels.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition
Preface the First edition
Part One. The Mis-en-scene: Moral Philosophy Now
1. The Subject of Moral Philosophy, with Postscript, 2007
2. Where Do Moral Theories Come From? Henry Sidgwick and Twentieth Century Ethics
Part Two. Clearer Views: An Expressive-Collaborative Model
3. Authority and Transparency; The Examples of Feminist Skepticism
4. Charting Responsibilities: From Established Coordinates to Terra Incognita
Part Three. Self- (and Other) Portraits: Who Are We, and How Do We Know?
5. Picking Up Pieces: Lives, Stories and Integrity
6. Career Selves: Plans, Projects, and Plots in "Whole Life ethics"
7. Made A Slave, Born a Woman: Knowing Others' Places
8. Unnecessary Identities: Representational Practices and Moral Recognition
Part Four: Testing Sight Lines
9. The Politics of Transparency and the Moral Work of Truth
10. Peripheral Visions, Critical Practice
Epilogue: Some Questions About Moral Understandings
Notes
Bibliography