Diversity Reading List

Synopsis generated from the paper: Ruether defines ecofeminism as the meeting of deep ecology and feminism. Deep ecology asks how symbolic, psychological, and ethical patterns of human–nature relation became destructive, while feminism, at its cultural level, charts how domination of women is linked to male monopolies of resources and power. She traces that link through Mediterranean and Western European culture. Early identification of women with nature and men with culture rests on women’s reproductive and maintenance labor, and is hardened by plow agriculture, property, and slavery, which treat women, slaves, animals, and land as linked forms of male property. In Near Eastern myth, the mother goddess is killed and made into the stuff of the cosmos; Hebrew scripture casts God as patriarchal lord and nature as under divine, then male, stewardship; Greek philosophy ties mother to matter and ranks male mind above female and animal bodies; Christian asceticism and medieval ambivalence deepen the repudiation of sexuality, women, and mortal nature. Calvinism strips nature of sacramental presence while keeping a demonic universe, and the Scientific Revolution secularizes nature into dead matter obedient to male scientific control, alongside colonial expropriation of land and labor. That industrial–colonial system now produces ecological crisis, poverty, and militarization. An ecofeminist ethic must replace hierarchical dualism with mutual interdependency: reintegrate human production into ecological patterns, reconceive God as the immanent life-source of the planetary community, convert men to equal share in nurture and household work, and accept mortality and the life cycle instead of fleeing them. Symbolic change must be matched by new social practice and solidarity with the victims of the present order.

This essay argues that Simone Weil appropriates Marx's notion of labor as life activity in order to reposition work as the site of spirituality. Rather than locating spirituality in a religious tradition, doctrine, profession of faith, or in personal piety, Weil places it in the capacity to work. Spirit arises in the activity of living, and more specifically in laboring—in one's engagement with materiality. Utilizing Marx's distinction between living and dead labor, I show how Weil develops a critique of capital as a “force” that disrupts the individual's relation to her own work by reducing it to the mere activity of calculable “production.” Capital reduces labor to an abstraction and thereby uproots human subjectivity, on a systemic scale, from its connection to living praxis, or what Weil calls spirituality. Life itself is exchanged for a simulacrum of life. In positioning living labor as spiritual, Weil's work offers a corrective to these deadening practices.

A threat to women is obscured when we treat “abortion-as-evacuation” as equivalent to “abortion-as-killing.” This holds only if evacuating a fetus kills it. As technology advances, the equivalence will fail. Any feminist account of abortion that relies on the equivalence leaves moral room for women to be required to give up their fetuses to others when it fails. So an account of the justification of abortion-as-killing is needed that does not depend on the equivalence.

One of the most striking contributions of particularism to moral philosophy has been its emphasis on the relative opacity of the moral scene to the tools of rational analysis traditionally used by philosophers. Particularism changes the place of the philosopher in relation to the moral life, pointing up the limits to what philosophy can do here. The modern moral philosopher who takes particularism seriously no longer has the luxury, endemic in our tradition, of imagining that moral philosophy can be done with only passing illustrative reference to experience, or that the truth about the whole of our moral life may be read of a list of a priori moral principles, whose rationality is underwritten by the mechanistic account of what it is to follow a rule that pre-Wittgensteinian philosophers took for granted.