Global Ethics 10 Nov 06

not one of my best responses, but i put my effort this week into prepping to lead class discussion today. enjoy anyway:

In examining the Midgley and Hutchings articles and preparing to lead class discussion, I decided to focus on how the concept of Gaia can inform feminist ethics. Hutchings states in the introduction that the unifying thought in feminism is that paying attention to how life exemplifies gender can help us understand how that life (“social reality”) can be “judged and may be changed (111).” What Midgley adds is that the concept of Earth and life as “Gaia” helps us see reality as a systemic whole. By acknowledging Gaia, we are saying that social reality is a complex, multi-faceted, in fact indivisible entity of which we can examine parts but can never understand while looking at only those parts. Where Hutchings says that feminist ethics champions a normative ethic for the “contemporary international context (122),” Midgley says that Gaia can assist. What was first a nameless concept became famous as the Greek earth-goddess and only was accepted when Lovelock changed the image from “mother of gods and men” to the “damaged… patient for whom we humans are the only available doctor (35).” Goddess as damsel-in-distress sells better than “mother of gods and men.” Gaia can bring us all together to face a normative ethic put forward by feminists and tree huggers, but is this really helpful if she must be a powerless image in order to be a powerful concept? That Gaia has found strongholds in recent history and in progressive environmentalism is not all that helpful to international ethics... unless she has a renaissance. Just as Lovelock remade Gaia in another image, it must be done again, this time (since the environmental movement has such vocal renewed religious support) as the sum of Creation, blessed by YHWH, Allah, and God, and a whole being unto it(her?)self of which humans – men and women – are a part. Midgley argues that people cannot really process non-immediate dangers (42) and therefore cannot make best use of the warnings we have already received from Earth. However, the reunification of thought regarding a planet which has been divided into a thousand management plans by a thousand government agencies and intergovernmental panels seems like a good start toward looking at the big picture: a living, breathing, homeostatic organism with billions of living, breathing, dynamic components who do their best to make sure she stays that way. What Midgley presents as an answer to individualism (41), Hutchings references as Ruddick's "'Maternal thinking... a discipline in attentive love (114).'"

(readings in how might we live?: global ethics in the new century. ed. ken booth, tim dunne, and michael cox)