Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T05:09:48.809Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Care, Narrativity, and the Nature of Disponibilité

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Melvin Chen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper attempts to make more explicit the relationship between narrativity and feminist care ethics. The central concern is the way in which narrativity carries the semantic load that some accounts of feminist care ethics imply but leave hanging. In so doing, some feminist theorists of care‐based ethics then undervalue the major contribution that narrativity provides to care ethics: it carries the semantic load that is essential to the best care. In this article, I defend the narrative as the central medium though which we make sense of and communicate our lives and their attendant hopes and cares. More than just working with the narrative of the cared‐for, caring is about investing in the narrative of the cared‐for in order to meet the needs of this cared‐for and how this narrative might turn out. I will further demonstrate how the attitude of caring or investing in a narrative would amount to what Gabriel Marcel has described as the attitude of disponibilité.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , Fall 2015 , pp. 778 - 793
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baier, Annette. 1985a. What do women want in a moral theory? Nous 19: 53–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baier, Annette. 1985b. Postures of the mind: Essays on mind and morals. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Baier, Annette. 2010. Reflections on how we live. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartky, Sandra Lee. 1990. Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 1999. Sexual difference and collective identities: The new global constellation. Signs 24 (2): 335–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brennan, Mike, and Kirkland, John. 1983. Perceptual dimensions of infant cry signals: A semantic differential analysis. Perceptual and Motor Skills 57 (2): 575–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bubeck, Diemut. 1995. Care, gender, and justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cavell, Stanley. 1969/1976. Knowing and acknowledging. In Must we mean what we say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. Between acknowledgement and avoidance. In The claim of reason: Wittgenstein, skepticism, morality, and tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cavell, Stanley. 1987. The avoidance of love: A reading of King Lear. In Disowning knowledge in six plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Melvin. 2014. Strawson contra Strawson: Moral responsibility and semi‐compatibilism. Philosophical Forum 45 (1): 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, Melvin Forthcoming. Apologia pro vita‐fabula sua: Defending narrativity and how we make sense of our lives. Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (3).Google Scholar
Fisher, Berenice, and Tronto, Joan. 1990. Toward a feminist theory of caring. In Circles of care: Work and identity in women's lives, ed. Abel, Emily K. and Nelson, Margaret K. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Frank, Arthur. 1997. The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a different voice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Held, Virginia. 2005. The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1797/1949. On a supposed right to lie from altruistic motives. In Immanuel Kant: Critique of practical reason and other writings in moral philosophy. Trans. White Beck, Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kiegelmann, Mechthild. 2009. Making oneself vulnerable to discovery: Carol Gilligan in conversation with Mechthild Kiegelmann. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 10 (2). http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1178/2718 (accessed April 18, 2015).Google Scholar
Kittay, Eva F. 2007. Beyond autonomy and paternalism: The transparent caring self. In Autonomy and paternalism: Reflections on the theory and practice of health care, ed. Nys, Thomas, Denier, Yvonne, and Vandevelde, Toon. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Publishers.Google Scholar
Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1981. Essays on moral development, Vol. 1: The philosophy of moral development. San Francisco: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Lindemann, Hilde. 2001. Damaged identities, narrative repair. New York: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Lindemann, Hilde. 2005. An invitation to feminist ethics. New York: McGraw‐Hill.Google Scholar
Lumsden, David. 2013. Whole life narratives and the self. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 20 (1): 1–10.Google Scholar
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After virtue. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marcel, Gabriel. 1995. The philosophy of existentialism. Trans. Manya Harari. New York: Carol Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Meyers, Diana Tietjens. 2004. Narrative and moral life. In Setting the moral compass: Essays by women philosophers, ed. Calhoun, Cheshire. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Murdoch, Iris. 1970/1985. The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Murdoch, Iris. 1997. Existentialists and mystics: Writings on philosophy and literature. London: Chatto & Windus.Google Scholar
Noddings, Nel. 1984/2003. Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love's knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Parfit, Derek. 2011. On what matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Paulsen, Jens Erik. 2011. A narrative ethics of care. Health Care Analysis 19 (1): 28–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudd, Anthony. 2012. Self, value, and narrative: A Kierkegaardian approach. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schechtman, Marya. 1996. The constitution of selves. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Schrage, Laurie. 1994. Moral dilemmas of feminism: Prostitution, adultery, and abortion. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the self. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tekin, Şerife. 2013. How does the self adjudicate narratives? Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 20 (1): 25–28.Google Scholar
Tronto, Joan. 1989. Women and caring: What can feminists learn about morality from caring? In Gender/body/knowledge: Feminist reconstructions of being and knowing, ed. Jaggar, Alison M. and Bordo, Susan. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Tronto, Joan. 2013. Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Velleman, J. David. 2003. Narrative explanation. Philosophical Review 112 (1): 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Margaret. 1989. Moral understandings: Alternative “epistemology” for a feminist ethics. Hypatia 4 (2): 15–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Margaret. 2007. Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar