TY - BOOK ID - 96571726 TI - Communicating moral concern : an ethics of critical responsiveness PY - 2013 SN - 9781461931171 1461931177 9780262314039 0262314037 9780262018944 0262018942 0262314045 PB - Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, DB - UniCat KW - Ethics. KW - Communication KW - Moral and ethical aspects. KW - PHILOSOPHY/General KW - CULTURAL STUDIES/Critical Theory KW - Deontology KW - Ethics, Primitive KW - Ethology KW - Moral philosophy KW - Morality KW - Morals KW - Philosophy, Moral KW - Science, Moral KW - Philosophy KW - Values UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:96571726 AB - 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. ER -