Hostname: page-component-54dcc4c588-scsgl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-09-30T09:32:45.681Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Think No Evil: Ethics and the Appeal to Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Paul Lauritzen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay distinguishes three types of appeals to experience in ethics, identifies problems with appealing to experience, and argues that appeals to experience must be open to critical assessment, if experientially-based arguments are to be useful. Unless competing and potentially irreconcilable experiences can be assessed and adjudicated, experientially-based arguments will be problematic. The paper recommends thinking of the appeal to experience as a kind of story telling to be evaluated as other stories are.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Spring 1997 , pp. 83 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 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.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Benhabib, Seyla. 1987. The generalized and the concrete other: The Kohlberg‐Gilligan controversy and moral theory. Ii Women and moral theory, ed. Kittay, Eva Feder and Meyers, Diana T.Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Booth, Wayne. 1988. The company we keep. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bordo, Susan. 1990. Feminism, postmodernism, and gender‐scepticism. In Nicholson 1990: 133–156.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Cheshire. 1992. Emotional work. In Cole and Coultrap‐McQuin 1992.Google Scholar
Card, Claudia, ed. 1991. Feminist ethics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Cole, Eve Browning, and Coultrap‐McQuin, Susan M., eds. 1992. Explorations in feminist ethics: Theory and practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Gilligan, Carol. 1982-1993. In a different voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gilligan, Carol. 1995. Hearing the difference: Theorizing connection. Hypatia 10(2): 120–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1990. A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In Nicholson 1990.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 1993. Reinventing ourselves as other: More new agents of history and knowledge. In Kauffman 1993.Google Scholar
Held, Virginia. 1984. Rights and goods: Justifying social action. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Held, Virginia. 1993. Feminist morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Jaggar, Alison M. 1991. Feminist ethics: projects, problems, prospects. In Card 1991.Google Scholar
Jones, Serene. 1995. “Women's experience” between a rock and a hard place: Feminist, womanist and mujerista theologies in North America. Religious Studies Review 21(3) (July): 171–179.Google Scholar
Kauffman, Linda S., ed. 1993. American feminist thought at century's end: A reader. Cambridge: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kruks, Sonia. 1995. Identity politics and dialectical reason: Beyond an epistemology of provenance. Hypatia 10(2): 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lauritzen, Paul. Ethics and experience: The case of the curious response. Hastings Center Report 26(1): 6–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LeGuin, Ursula. 1990. Dancing at the edge of the world. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Martin, Emily. 1987. The woman in the body. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Nicholson, Linda J., ed. 1990. Feminism/postmodernism. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1990. Love's knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pritchard, Jack A., MacDonald, Paul C., and Gant, Norman F. 1995. Williams obstetrics. 17th Edition. Norwalk, CT: Appleton‐Century‐Crofts.Google Scholar
Rawls, John. 1974/75. The independence of moral theory. Proceedings and addresses of the american philosophical association 67: 5–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and imperialism. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Scott, Joan W. 1992. Experience. Ii Feminists theorize the political, ed. Butler, Judith, and Scott, Joan W.New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sherwin, Susan. 1992. No longer patient: Feminist ethics and health care. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Suleiman, Susan. 1986. (Re)Writing the body: The politics and poetics of female eroticism. Ii The female body in western culture, ed. Suleiman, Susan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tong, Rosemarie. 1993. Feminine and feminist ethics. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.Google Scholar
Trebilcot, Joyce. 1991. Ethics of method: Greasing the machine and telling stories. In Card 1991.Google Scholar
Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Walker, Margaret Urban. 1992. Moral understandings: Alternative “epistemology” for a feminist ethics. In Cole and Coultrap‐McQuin 1992.Google Scholar