Lisa Tessman – författare

Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality asks what happens when the sense that "I must" collides with the realization that "I can't." Bringing together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology, Lisa Tessman here examines moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that "ought implies can." In some cases, it is because two non-negotiable requirements conflict that one of them becomes impossible to satisfy, and yet remains binding. In other cases, performing a particular action may be non-negotiably required -- even if it is impossible -- because not performing the action is unthinkable. After offering both conceptual and empirical explanations of the experience of impossible moral requirements and the ensuing failures to fulfill them, Tessman considers what to make of such experience, and in particular, what role such experience has in the construction of value and of moral authority. According to the constructivist account that the book proposes, some moral requirements can be authoritative even when they are impossible to fulfill. Tessman points out a tendency to not acknowledge the difficulties that impossible moral requirements and unavoidable moral failures create in moral life, and traces this tendency through several different literatures, from scholarship on Holocaust testimony to discussions of ideal and nonideal theory, from theories of supererogation to debates about moral demandingness and to feminist care ethics.

Suppose that in an emergency evacuation of a hospital after a flood, not all of the patients can make it out alive. You are the doctor faced with the choice between abandoning these patients to die alone and in pain, or injecting them with a lethal dose of drugs, without consent, so that they die peacefully. Perhaps no one will be able to blame you whatever you decide, but, whichever action you choose, you will remain burdened by guilt. What happens, in cases like this, when, no matter what you do, you are destined for moral failure? What happens when there is no available means of doing the right thing? Human life is filled with such impossible moral decisions. These choices and case studies that demonstrate them form the focus of Lisa Tessman's arresting and provocative work. Many philosophers believe that there are simply no situations in which what you morally ought to do is something that you can't do, because they think that you can't be required to do something unless it's actually in your power to do it. Despite this, real life presents us daily with situations in which we feel that we have failed morally even when no right action would have been possible. Lisa Tessman boldly argues that sometimes we feel this way because we have encountered an 'impossible moral requirement.' Drawing on philosophy, empirical psychology, and evolutionary theory, When Doing the Right Thing Is Impossible explores how and why human beings have constructed moral requirements to be binding even when they are impossible to fulfill.

Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them - traits that Tessman refers to as "burdened virtues." These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer's own well being. Tessman's work focuses on issues that have been missed by many feminist moral theories, and her use of the virtue ethics framework brings feminist concerns more closely into contact with mainstream ethical theory. This book will appeal to feminist theorists in philosophy and women's studies, but also more broadly, ethicists and social theorists.

Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them - traits that Tessman refers to as "burdened virtues." These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer's own well being. Tessman's work focuses on issues that have been missed by many feminist moral theories, and her use of the virtue ethics framework brings feminist concerns more closely into contact with mainstream ethical theory. This book will appeal to feminist theorists in philosophy and women's studies, but also more broadly, ethicists and social theorists.

Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality asks what happens when the sense that "I must" collides with the realization that "I can't." Bringing together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology, Lisa Tessman here examines moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that "ought implies can." In some cases, it is because two non-negotiable requirements conflict that one of them becomes impossible to satisfy, and yet remains binding. In other cases, performing a particular action may be non-negotiably required -- even if it is impossible -- because not performing the action is unthinkable. After offering both conceptual and empirical explanations of the experience of impossible moral requirements and the ensuing failures to fulfill them, Tessman considers what to make of such experience, and in particular, what role such experience has in the construction of value and of moral authority. According to the constructivist account that the book proposes, some moral requirements can be authoritative even when they are impossible to fulfill. Tessman points out a tendency to not acknowledge the difficulties that impossible moral requirements and unavoidable moral failures create in moral life, and traces this tendency through several different literatures, from scholarship on Holocaust testimony to discussions of ideal and nonideal theory, from theories of supererogation to debates about moral demandingness and to feminist care ethics.

This volume brings together essays that reflect on ontological and moral dilemmas regarding Jewish identity and race. The reflections offered here are cognizant of themselves as taking place in the context of post-Holocaust transformations and pay special attention to the double processes of the de-racialization of Jews qua Jews and the recasting of Jews both in re-racialized and other terms. As a result, the essays bring together and create a few intersections between Jewish studies and critical theories of race and help stretch the limits of, as well as fill in, some of the gaps in each. While each essay in the volume is unique, they do have four distinct foci. Thus, one group explores personal identity and mixes autobiographical and theoretical lines of inquiry that emphasize the extent to which Jewish identity, while a function of group membership is inhabited and actively lived by each person, hence, also self-fashioned. A second group examines the racial classifications of (different groups of) Jews, grappling with the history and the politics of these classifications as they take place in contexts that are to a greater or lesser degree affected by the dominance of a black/white paradigm of race. A third group describes and analyzes the dynamic relationship between Jews and the cultural worlds in which they find themselves, which is articulated and reverberates through variegated networks and associations and engages people creatively — even if in their own assimilation, which is rarely not at the same time also entangled resistance. Finally the fourth group deploys Jewish texts specifically in order to develop theoretical analyses and generalizations that result from their application, doing so in a way that throws a different light on the familiar. The essays in this volume are both provocative and preserving of the tension between the contributions that can be made to critical theories of race and Jewish studies. Were they to smooth over difficult and troubling questions they would be unable

Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal is a collection of feminist essays that self-consciously develop non-idealizing approaches to either ethics or social and political philosophy (or both). Characterizing feminist ethics and social and political philosophy as marked by a tendency to be non-idealizing serves to thematize the volume, while still allowing the essays to be diverse enough to constitute a representation of current work in the fields of feminist ethics and social and political philosophy.Each of the essays either serves as an instance of work that is rooted in actual, non-ideal conditions, and that, as such, is able to consider any of the many questions relevant to subordinated people; or reflects theoretically on the significance of non-idealizing as an approach to feminist ethics or social and political philosophy.The volume will be of interest to feminist scholars from all disciplines, to academics who are ethicists and political philosophers as well as to graduate students.