Plaisance, Ch. 8 “Community”

Autonomy and Community Plaisance: “Our singular cultural focus on self-betterment and our right to live our lives as we see fit may satisfy our egos, but it also threatens to distort our understanding of ourselves as moral beings” MacIntyre: “The self has to find its moral identity in and through its membership in communities”

Philosophical Roots of Community Aristotle Mill Rawls Kant Ross Benhabib

Ross’ The Right and the Good Prima facie duties Duty sans phrase

Benhabib and Other Feminists “Feminist ethics is concerned with identifying and challenging social and political sources of gender, racial, and class oppression. . . . It wants to account not only for how individuals might act morally . . . But also how society might be transformed so that social institutions and social processes are more moral. This social ethic challenges the ways in which the dominant social culture—associated with masculine , capitalistic centers of power—routinely trivializes and excludes more ‘communal values’ such as nuturance, empathy, collaboration.”

Feminism, continued Plaisance: “ . . . Feminist theory questions the assumption that the ‘rational autonomous individual’ should be considered a model of moral life, since by definition this model denies the profound connectedness that largely defines what it is to be human. A feminist ethics insists that the obligation of ‘care’ implicit in all relationships, rather than an abstract ideal of rationality or aspiring to a universal norm, should be given priority.”

Feminism, continued Plaisance, quoting Steiner: “Feminists propose an ethic that acknowledges the moral self as embedded in a web of family and communal relationships that regards caring and empathy as morally significant and legitimate virtues”