Communicating moral concern : an ethics of critical responsiveness / Elise Springer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Springer, Elise, 1970-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethics.

Communication--Moral and ethical aspects.

Communication.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (340 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

A novel reframing of moral agency, emphasizing the responsive habits and skills by which we engage one another's attention to moral concerns.Modern moral theories have crystallized around the logic of individual choices, abstracted from social and historical context. Yet most action, including moral theorizing, can equally be understood as a response, conscious or otherwise, to the social world out of which it emerges. In this novel account of moral agency, Elise Springer accords central importance to how we intervene in activity around us. To notice and address what others are doing with their moral agency is to exercise what Springer calls critical responsiveness. Her account of this responsiveness steers critics away from both of the conventionally familiar ideals--justifying and expressing reactive attitudes on one hand, and prescribing and manipulating behavioral outcomes on the other. Good critical practice functions instead as a dynamic gestural engagement of attention, reaching further than expressive representation but not as far as causal control.To make sense of such engagement, Springer unravels the influence of several entrenched philosophical dichotomies (active vs. passive, representation vs. object, illocution vs. perlocution). Where previous accounts have been preoccupied with justified claims or with end results, Springer urges the cultivation of situated critical engagement--an unorthodox virtue. Moral agency can thereby claim a creative and embodied aspect, transforming the world of action through a socially extended process of communicating concern.

Contents:

Contents; Acknowledgments; 1 Higher-Order Responsiveness: The Social Dimension of Moral Agency; 1.1 Social Responsiveness and Moral Complexity; 1.2 Moral Solipsism in Two Modern Flavors; 1.3 Non-Ideal Theory and Social Complexity; 1.4 Toward Virtue Ethics and Beyond; 1.5 Concerns and Systematic Moral Theory; 1.6 Glancing Ahead; 2 Responsiveness Ain't in the Head: Recognizing Critical Gesture; 2.1 Critical Responsiveness as a Frame of Understanding; 2.2 When People Confound Expectations: Anomalous Conduct or Critical Gesture?; 2.3 Critical Engagement in Observation and Representation

2.4 Some Suggestions about Relations between Moral Philosophy and Psychology3 Communicating Moral Concern: The Point of Critical Engagement; 3.1 Beyond Cool Judgment: The Practical Face of Moral Criticism; 3.2 What Is the Practical Point of Moral Criticism?; 3.3 Sketching a Third View: Communication of Moral Concern; 3.4 Problems and the Transfer of Concern; 3.5 Forward-Looking and Backward-Looking Concern; 3.6 Moral Address as Communicative Gesture; 4 Dynamics of Engagement: Time, Interaction, and Uptake; 4.1 Metaphilosophical Aside

4.2 Temporal and Interpersonal Dimensions of Critical Agency4.3 Inoculating Ourselves against Speech Act Theory; 4.4 The Moral Mischief Wrought by Speech Act Theory; 4.5 Getting Something Across: Communicative Transfer and Its Metaphorical Ground; 4.6 Reframing Resentment and Guilt as Phases of Communication; Interlude: From a Modular to a Transformative Account; 5 Unconventional Threads of Communication: The Social Elaboration of Inarticulate Concern; 5.1 To Play the Moral Game or to Change It?; 5.2 Inarticulate Competence: Not an Exclusively Individual Affair

5.3 Concern as the Social Life of Unresolved Attention5.4 Clues, Claims, and Emergent Meanings; 5.5 Three Ways of Listening to Moral Testimony; 5.6 Continuity of Concern Despite Lack of Shared Claims; 5.7 Mishandled Concerns; 6 Contingency beyond Contagion: A Social Geography of Moral Concerns; 6.1 Tracing Currents of Concern within a Social Field; 6.2 Moral Geography: Moral Address within a Social Field; 6.3 Dynamic Geography of Moral Concerns; 6.4 Boundaries or Horizons? (Or, "You Can't Get There from Here"); 6.5 Contagion Narratives in Constructivist Sociology

6.6 Connective Agency: An Example7 The Transformation of Concerns: Economic and Ecological Models; 7.1 The Economic Stance toward a Field of Concerns; 7.2 Economy as Transformation, Transportation, and Exchange; 7.3 Critical Mediation through an Economic Lens; 7.4 Positional Evaluation of Our Moral Concerns; 7.5 The Challenge of Ecology; 7.6 Embodiment, Creativity, and Identity; 7.7 Bodily Difference: Dangerously Essentialist or Simply Essential?; 7.8 Continuity and Synthesis?; 8 Critical Engagement with Virtue Ethics: An Unconventional Fit; 8.1 Promising Aspects of Virtue Ethics

8.2 The Profile of Critical Engagement as a Virtue

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-262-31404-5

0-262-31403-7

OCLC:

848917264