Ethics

Ethics Study Guide Women are able to empathize with others and are concerned about how they might feel if the same thing happened to them. Caring and compassion are key virtues. The primary obligation is not to turn away from others in need. Ethics of care is also a basis for care-focused feminists theorizing on maternal ethics. Feminist theorists suggest caring should be performed and care givers valued in both public and private spheres. This proposed paradigm shift in ethics encourages that an ethic of caring be the social responsibility of both men and women. Ethics of care theories are similar to Hume’s notion of sympathy. According to Hume, sympathy is the natural tendency of people to share feelings with others. He believed sympathy was a natural part of human psychology to have a social nature and sympathetic identification with others. Hume’s sympathy is the means of communication through which we come to understand the sentiments (pains and pleasures) of others and from which we can determine vice and virtue. Sympathy is seen as the tool to help us bridge the gap between the self and others. Both theories find that his is limited to a person’s immediate social network, not necessarily extended to people in general. 6.2 Simone de Beauvoir Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher who, with Sartre, was a leading exponent of existentialist philosophy. Her most famous work, The Second Sex , marked the beginning of modern feminism. Simone de Beauvoir also authored The Ethics of Ambiguity , where she defines two types of freedom: creative freedom and free will. Free will represents one’s inescapable ability to make choices about his or her actions. Whether or not to use creative freedom is a choice. Not choosing creative freedom would rob a person of his or her unique, true, and meaningful life. Existentialists such as de Beauvoir value freedom above all else. Freedom means that you will not blindly accept the values handed down to you in childhood. It involves deciding your own values through the course of living and being an authentic being. De Beauvoir describes the widespread attitude of bad faith and attributes it to the person she identifies as the serious individual. Bad faith can be described as living in self-deception and involves three types of conduct. First, bad faith involves a shift between the two definitions of the French verb être , which means “to be.” The two meanings of “to be” in existentialism are: being-in-itself , which is pure being, nothing more than existence, and being-for-itself , which is characterized by consciousness or knowledge of existing. The term bad faith is a metaphysical pun. It uses both literal definitions of the word being to achieve an end that is advantageous, in that it encourages or reinforces existing restraint on one’s freedom. ©2018 Achieve Page 45 of 116