Talk: Virginia Held

Professor Held is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the City University of New York. She specializes in Social and political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy.  Details about her talk are below.

Title: Distributive Justice and the Ethics of Care

Abstract: The focus of normative political theory in recent decades has been overwhelmingly on distributive justice. Developed for institutions within national societies, questions of justice have also dominated consideration of the global problems that morality ought to address. For matters of war and peace, just war theory has been central, for other issues, distributive justice.

This “justice-dominated discourse” is now being challenged by the alternative outlook of the ethics of care being developed by feminist moral and political theorists. I’ll look at this alternative view and some of its implications.