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This chapter argues that social structures are not made up of individuals but of ontologically real relations. Thus the typical market (whether for shirts or petroleum) is a long chain of social relations extending from the persons producing a product to the ultimate consumer who buys it. This view is superior, the chapter argues, to both the individualistic view in mainstream economics (where markets are abstract and the harms they cause are understood as unintended consequences) and to the holistic view of many in sociology (where social structures exert such causal force that individuals are unable to resist). Both views exonerate the individual consumer or corporate executive from any moral responsibility for harms that markets cause to distant others. The chapter proposes a “relational ethics” that understands, for example, a firm, its employees, their families, and all its stakeholders as part of a single “relational subject.”

In practice, the relational approach of this book turns out to have much in common with the perspectives of impartial concern, global egalitarianism, or demanding global beneficence whose foundations it undermines. Combined with the real if limited transnational demands of beneficence, the transnational interactions whose moral impact has been traced generate a vast sum of unmet responsibilities of people in developed countries to help needy people in all developing countries. Despite the limited efficacy of foreign aid, fulfillment of these responsibilities would provide great benefits to these people, at significant cost to some disadvantaged people in developed countries. Within stringent limits of political feasibility, efforts to reduce irresponsibility should give priority to the neediest, the same priorities as follow from impartial concern. The positive long‐term goal unifying these efforts is an aspiration to replace subordination and deprivation with global civic friendship, paralleling the aspiration to civic friendship among compatriots while taking very different forms.

Chapter 1 traces the debate between ‘poststructuralist’ ethics and its critics in IR and Politics, in which poststructuralist approaches are accused of ‘leading nowhere’. In response to the accusation that these approaches to ethics encounter their limits when pushed to account for their political implications it asks what assumptions inform the construction of the question of progressive politics as problematic for poststructuralism. The chapter offers an outline of the ways in which poststructural work calls into question foundational theoretical approaches to ethics through the concept of relationality. It then discusses the tensions which emerge when the challenge of making ethics ‘politically useful’ is taken up by poststructuralist authors, with particular focus on the concepts of alterity and difference in the work of David Campbell and Simon Critchley. Finally, it outlines alternative approaches which provide resources for thinking about ethics and politics without reproducing the limits put in place by this dominant context.

This chapter offers an account of individual rights and agency, and it considers both the liberal dimension and the communitarian dimension of public health ethics. It examines the relationship between social justice and social epidemiology and offers a particular interpretation of social justice as being crucially informed by a relational ethics of mutuality and solidarity. It provides a study premised on the hypothesis that relational theorizing and conceptualization developed in ecological epidemiology has its analogue in ethics. The chapter discusses how relational theorizing in both ethics and epidemiology can provide a promising pathway to a critical public health ethics. It considers the philosophy of epidemiology and the constitutive concepts guiding relational or social theorizing in the field.

In Joyce's Ireland, the past is not over until it has found its expressions in the present, and it is these spectral premonitions that allowed Irish culture to come to terms with the traumatic fall of Parnell. The shock of Parnell's death was such that many believed he had staged his death, leading to the rumor that he had re-surfaced as Christiaan De Wet in South Africa to lead the Boer War against the British empire. In Ulysses, the capacity to see a resemblance of a lost person in the face of another is explored to suggest the possibility of finding a new substitute for an inconsolable loss. The refusal in melancholia to accept the finality of death is reworked in terms of the relational ethics of Judith Butler, in which one element in a bond of attachment may be lost, but the affective ties live on, affording new possibilities of hope in the future.

In this chapter, the constituent parts of the book's preferred theory of justice for animals is outlined. This theory is rights-based, interest-based and capacity-oriented. Moreover, it utilizes the equal consideration of interests principle, associated with Singer, and the moral individualism of Rachels. It is shown that a rights-based approach is particularly appropriate for a theory of justice, and that there is a strong case for adopting an interest-based, rather than a will-based, theory of rights. Finally, the chapter seeks to demonstrate, with particular reference to the work of Donaldson and Kymlicka and Palmer, that a capacity-oriented ethic is essential to an adequate theory of justice for animals, whilst a relational ethic remains on the periphery of such a theory.

The purpose of this chapter is to propose and illustrate an integrative framework that can be used to guide participatory action research that aims to develop palliative care programs within long term care (LTC) homes for elderly people. The framework consists of participatory action research (PAR) as an overarching approach, capacity development model, and, four practice principles: cultural competence, empowerment, relational ethics, and partnerships. Based on five years of experience conducting PAR with LTC homes in Ontario, Canada, the authors offer this framework as a resource to guide the work of other researchers and long term care homes who wish to develop palliative care programs. Further, the authors believe that our framework could apply to any research focusing on palliative care capacity development in a defined community or organization.

This chapter discusses the use of film to teach students about the theories and practices of relational ethics in health care. It explains some key themes often addressed in movies featuring serious illness and the patient-clinician relationship: empathetically understanding and respecting the experience and perspective of the suffering other; reflecting on the full range of personal emotions and judgments that emerge in response to the patient's situation; exploring the “proper” professional connection between clinician and patient; and considering how to translate these dimensions into meaningful relationships in “real” clinical situations. These foci reflect the essential elements of relational ethics: that interactions with others are the location for ethical action and a source of moral knowing; that emotional engagement is as important as cognitive understanding in developing empathy for the other; and that mutual respect must anchor all relationships.

In this chapter, Judith Butler emphasises the importance of ambivalence in our affective ties, including the maternal ties that Cavarero celebrates. Butler indicates that Cavarero’s stereotypical reading risks enacting the very move that she seeks to avoid, for it could work to deny the dependency of the male subject. Butler shows how Kant’s description of the vertigo that philosophy experiences in the encounter with the sublime reveals the inclination that is already at the heart of philosophy. To finish, Butler argues that it may be necessary to distinguish inclination from bodily posture and from pre-dispositions if we are to think non-violence productively. Indeed, we may choose not to act on an inclination understood as a pre-disposition, and this may be the decisive moment in resisting violent action.

The ways in which humans relate to their environments have been studied from different perspectives, including ethics, sociology, behavioral sciences, and genetics. This chapter discusses an emerging approach within neuroethics—environmental neuroethics—that focuses on ethical and social implications of environmental influences on brain health and mental health. It begins with an overview of different disciplinary approaches to examine the relationship between the environment and human health and follows with a discussion of environmental effects on brain and mental health. It then argues for the importance of generating normative discussion about related issues, particularly because these matters are of global concern with linked social justice implications. This section also lays the foundations for the first generation of environmental neuroethics. The chapter concludes with key questions and challenges ahead for environmental neuroethics.

This chapter focuses on Lisa Kron’s play Well (2004) that draws on Kron’s mother’s experience with chronic allergies and on her own story of illness, treatment and recovery as well as intertwining the theme of illness in the individual with a discussion of illness in the community. The chapter reads the play in the context of the uncertainties and debates surrounding contested illnesses such as chronic fatigue and multiple chemical sensitivity and the ethics of relational life writing. Examining the collision between solo performance and more traditional theatrical conventions, the analysis shows how Kron’s metafictional gestures in Well gradually dismantle the initially chosen ‘professional, theatrical context’ in which to explore so-called universal questions of health, challenge ‘expert knowledge’ and deconstruct the previously erected oppositions between the healthy and the ill. By emphasising a vision that engages with inadequacy, failure and reworking,the chapter concludes that Well helps generate other ways of performing that can offer important insights to the fields of medicine and medical education.

This chapter opens by noting that, since the Romantics and Hegel became enraptured by Hamlet, two philosophical assumptions have been commonly made about it: first, that it embodies a mimetic understanding of theatrical art by holding ‘a mirror up to nature’, and, second, that it illustrates an early modern, ‘Cartesian’ conception of a mental, interior self. Both of these assumptions are brought into question by casting in high relief the fact that the essential speech acts of plays are interactive, or ‘dialogic’, and that it is by continuously refining and reflecting on this foundation of his artistic medium that Shakespeare significantly contributes to the history of philosophy. The dialogic self is, in short, the ethical (relationally engaged) rather than the isolate self, and this dialogical understanding of selfhood indeed provides the basis for nothing less than a philosophical conception of the soul.