Revised 2023 Fall
The Women’s Age in Philosophy is a term used by your instructor to designate an ongoing social movement that began in the second half of the 19th Century.
Declaration of Sentiments (1848)
www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/senecafalls.asp
Other “beginnings” [e.g. Wollstonecraft] may be found for “The Women’s Age in Philosophy” but we take this a reasonable starting point.
Jane Addams
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.html
Seeing Jane Addams in Context
“The Women of Hull House Part 1.” Written and Produced by Mary Ann Johnson, Jane Addams Hull House Museum, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1992. Uploaded by Michael Vimont, YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aFyTcXVAr8
Democracy and Social Ethics
(a Jane Addams classic primary source text)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15487/15487-h/15487-h.htm
“To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one’s self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.” (Introduction)
A Note on the Turn to Social Ethics
From the question of “me” to the question of “we”
Jane Addams introduces “Social Ethics” or “social adjustment” — and in the chapter on “Filial Relations” poses the problem of adjusting social habits at the level of “we the people.” This challenges a view of ethics that would otherwise primarily consider the question of “me the individual.”
Social ethics may also be distinguished from social policy in the sense that (following Kant) law regulates behavior as a constraint, whereas ethics makes its contribution through “will” or some inner motivation.
Social ethics is therefore a “me” question to the extent that it must involve a free choice by each and every participant, but the object of the free choice involves a willingness to act in a way that supports democratic culture.
The turn toward social ethics may be exemplified in a 2019 article by bioethicist Bruce Jennings, who argues for a “relational” mode of bioethics that “seeks to present normative interpretations of historically embedded patterns of agency, interdependency, and institutional structures of power.”
Says Jennings: “In this article my aim is to advance the discussion of relational approaches within bioethics by an interpretive analysis of the concept of solidarity and the concept of care when seen as modes of moral and political practice. . . . In bioethics and public health ethics today, solidarity should be taken seriously and not dismissed as an obsolete idea from a bygone political era, and a recent surge of interest in the concept attests to this. On the other hand, care is an extremely influential normative concept in bioethics and has been for several decades. . . . The practices of care are also essential to the core problems with which health policy and public health must grapple.”
Jennings, Bruce. “Solidarity and Care as Relational Practices.” BIOETHICS, vol. 32, no. 9, pp. 553–561. NOV 2018. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/bioe.12510. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019.
Here, solidarity and care are treated as social practices or social habits. They are treated as possible (what we would call ‘social ethical’) approaches to “the core problems” of “policy,” but they cannot be directly implemented by any policy making authority apart from the will of the particpants.
Mary McCleod Bethune
“History of B-CU.” Bethune-Cookman University,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethune%E2%80%93Cookman_University
“Mary McCleod Bethune: South Carolina Hall of Fame.” South Carolina ETV, 20 Feb. 2020,
“What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?” America’s Town Meeting of the Air, New York City, 23 Nov. 1939, American Radio Works, American Public Media,
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/mmbethune.html
“Mary McLeod Bethune’s Last Will and Testament,” The Freeman Institute Foundation,
https://freemaninstitute.com/bethune.htm
Simome de Beauvoir
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir
Ethics of Ambiguity
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/index.htm
Second Sex (abridged)
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/index.htm
The Coming of Age
http://books.google.com/books?id=2c_2H6XvSGAC
Gilligan
http://ethicsofcare.org/interviews/carol-gilligan/
check your library for ebooks by searching for “Author” Carol Gilligan and checking the filter for “eBooks”
Butler
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q50nQUGiI3s
check your library for ebooks by searching for “Author” Judith Butler and checking the filter for “eBooks”
Islamic Modernity
Bint al-Huda al-Sadr. Virtue Prevails. Shiavault.com
Sara Ahmed. Feminist Killjoys Blog.
Katie Cannon. Black Womanist Ethics. Google Book
Layli Phillips, Editor. The Womanist Reader. Google Book
Database suggestion:
Jaggar, Alison M. “A Feminist Critique Of The Alleged Southern Debt.” Hypatia 17.4 (2002): 119. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Jan. 2014.
CourseLinks 