In Good Conscience: Reason And Emotion In Moral Decision Making

From the start, feminists have been critical of mainstream moral theories because of a number of observed flaws in their methods. In Susan Sherwin's judgments, both feminist ethics and medical ethics share a sense of frustration about the level of abstraction and generalization that one finds in mainstream work in bioethics. To correct this, womanists have been committed to including contextual details in their analyses, and for making space for personal aspects of relationships in their moral decision making (21-22). "A feminine consciousness regards the gender traits that have been traditionally associated with women--in particular, nurturance, compassion, caring--as positive human traits," Rosemarie Tong explains. Feminist philosophers have stressed the particularity and embodiment of all

Manning's Speaking from the Heart: A Feminist Perspective on Ethics (1992). In the first, Callahan offers an optimistic analysis of the heart's contributions to morality. Her eight untechnical chapters provide a clear picture of a complex phenomenon, one that takes into account new psychological understandings of the self, emotion, reason, intuition, developmental change and problem solving. Central to Callahan's case for realism in making moral decisions is her conviction that complete detachment and objectivity are not only impossible, they are undesirable, since the stronger our convictions and the more we appreciate something, the deeper our affections. Callahan argues that emotion, reason, and intuition should be fully integrated and engaged in our depictions of decision making, that we "need to make decisions in a wholistic way that does justice to all our moral resources" (113). She reminds us that "Huck Finn is not the only character in the world who chose correctly following his heart"