Hilde Lindemann - Böcker

Feminist ethics addresses how power, through gender, affects moral practice and theory. This enterprise is more important than ever before in an age of sharpened attention and concern for feminist issues and injustices. Yet the number of terms which have entered mainstream discussion can quickly overwhelm the novice: intersectionality, gender neutrality, androcentrism. An Invitation to Feminist Ethics offers an easy-to-understand, hospitable approach to the study of feminist moral theory and practice from a renowned ethicist, underscoring its need and the clarifying light it casts on some of the most pressing topics in contemporary society. The work surveys feminist ethical theory, beginning with an explanation of ethics, feminism, and gender before discussing the concepts of discrimination, oppression, gender neutrality, and androcentrism. The work further discusses in-depth intersectionality and microagressions before examining personal identities and how identities are vulnerable to oppression, and what can be done about it. The book also includes a helpful overview of three standard moral theories--social contract theory, utilitarianism, and Kantian ethics--and a discussion of their failings from a feminist point of view, followed by introductions to feminist care theory and feminist responsibility ethics. A "close-ups" section explores three social practices--bioethics, violence, and the globalized economy--within which these concepts are applied, and the need for feminist ethics is most urgent.

Health and social care decisions, and how they impact a family, are often viewed from the perspective of the individual family member making them--for example, the role of the parent in surrogacy questions, the care of the elderly, or decisions that involve fetuses or organ donations. What About the Family? represents a concerted, collaborative effort to depart from this practice--it rather shows that the family unit as a whole is intrinsic and inseparable from patient's ethical decisions. This deeper level of thinking about families and health care poses an entirely new set of difficult questions. Which family members are relevant in influencing a patient? What is a family, in the first place? What duties does a family have to its own members? What makes an ethics of families distinctive from health care ethics, an ethic of care or feminist ethics is that it theorizes relationships characterized by ongoing intimacy and partiality among people who are not interchangeable, and remains centered on the practices of responsibility arising from these relationships. What About the Family? edited by bioethicists Hilde Lindemann, Marian Verkerk, and Janice McLaughlin, represents an interdisciplinary effort, drawing, among other resources, on its authors' backgrounds in sociology, nursing, philosophy, bioethics, and the medical sciences. Contributors begin from the assumption that any ethical examination of the significance of family ties to health and social care will benefit from a dialogue with the debates about family occuring in these other disciplinary areas, and examine why families matter, how families are recognized, how families negotiate responsibilities, how families can participate in treatment decision making, and how justice operates in families.

The social practice of forming, shaping, expressing, contesting, and maintaining personal identities makes human interaction, and therefore society, possible. Our identities give us our sense of how we are supposed to act and how we may or must treat others, so how we hold each other in our identities is of crucial moral importance. To hold someone in her identity is to treat her according to the stories one uses to make sense of who she is. Done well, holding allows individuals to flourish personally and in their interactions with others; done poorly, it diminishes their self-respect and restricts their participation in social life. If the identity is to represent accurately the person who bears it, the tissue of stories that constitute it must continue to change as the person grows and changes. Here, good holding is a matter of retaining the stories that still depict the person but letting go of the ones that no longer do. The book begins with a puzzling instance of personhood, where the work of holding someone in her identity is tragically one-sided. It then traces this work of holding and letting go over the human life span, paying special attention to its implications for bioethics. A pregnant woman starts to call her fetus into personhood. Children develop their moral agency as they learn to hold themselves and others in their identities. Ordinary adults hold and let go, sometimes well and sometimes badly. People bearing damaged or liminal identities leave others uncertain how to hold and what to let go. Identities are called into question at the end of life, and persist after the person has died. In all, the book offers a glimpse into a fascinating moral terrain that is ripe for philosophical exploration.

The social practice of forming, shaping, expressing, contesting, and maintaining personal identities makes human interaction, and therefore society, possible. Our identities give us our sense of how we are supposed to act and how we may or must treat others, so how we hold each other in our identities is of crucial moral importance. To hold someone in her identity is to treat her according to the stories one uses to make sense of who she is. Done well, holding allows individuals to flourish personally and in their interactions with others; done poorly, it diminishes their self-respect and restricts their participation in social life. If the identity is to represent accurately the person who bears it, the tissue of stories that constitute it must continue to change as the person grows and changes. Here, good holding is a matter of retaining the stories that still depict the person but letting go of the ones that no longer do. The book begins with a puzzling instance of personhood, where the work of holding someone in her identity is tragically one-sided. It then traces this work of holding and letting go over the human life span, paying special attention to its implications for bioethics. A pregnant woman starts to call her fetus into personhood. Children develop their moral agency as they learn to hold themselves and others in their identities. Ordinary adults hold and let go, sometimes well and sometimes badly. People bearing damaged or liminal identities leave others uncertain how to hold and what to let go. Identities are called into question at the end of life, and persist after the person has died. In all, the book offers a glimpse into a fascinating moral terrain that is ripe for philosophical exploration.

Coming to terms with dementia is one of the great challenges of our time. This volume of new interdisciplinary essays by internationally established scholars offers new ways of understanding and dealing with it. It explores views of dementia that go beyond the idea of loss, and rather envisions it as multilayered transformation and change of personhood and identity, and as development that mostly is socially shared with others. The studies collected here identify new empirical, theoretical, and methodological areas that will be crucial to future research and clinical practice concerned with age-related dementia. Three general themes are singled out as of particular importance and interest: persons and personhood, identity and agency, and the social and the communal.

Naturalized bioethics represents a revolutionary change in how health care ethics is practised. It calls for bioethicists to give up their dependence on utilitarianism and other ideal moral theories and instead to move toward a self-reflexive, socially inquisitive, politically critical, and inclusive ethics. Wary of idealisations that bypass social realities, the naturalism in ethics that is developed in this volume is empirically nourished and acutely aware that ethical theory is the practice of particular people in particular times, places, cultures, and professional environments. These essays situate the bioethicist within the clinical or research context, take seriously the web of relationships in which all human beings are nested, and explore a number of the different kinds of power relations that inform health care encounters. Naturalized Bioethics aims to help bioethicists, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, disability studies scholars, medical researchers, and other health professionals address the ethical issues surrounding health care.