Page 216 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHENOMENOLOGY AND ECOFEMINISM 209

and deciding upon principles of legislation are very different sorts of
activity. The demand that one moral principle serve all these functions
is not obviously a sound demand. It can also be shown that contexts can
differ so significantly that one principle might not be the most ap-
propriate one to use in each context. Deciding how to handle issues
which arise within a family, where each person is known individually and
where promises can significantly be made and where there is great
opportunity to affect the life of an individual person, is a different matter
from deciding what one should do about starvation in a remote country.
Different again is the making of laws to govern just distribution
between a large number of people, most of whom are strangers to each
other. To demand that the principles which provide ethical guidance in
dealings with business associates should guide decisions affecting wild
animals and future generations seems doctrinaire. To acknowledge that
a number of moral principles can be employed, whether as an expedient
until we know a great deal more about the world or as a permanent
necessity in a world which we will never fully understand, is a morally
responsible stance. It is not the same as claiming that I have a right to
do whatever I wish. It is not the same as saying that two different
actions in the same context can be morally right, one right for me, the
other right for you. This kind of subjectivism is not justifiable, even if
one can make sense of such use of the concept of right, but the
alternative to subjectivism need not be an equally extreme monistic moral
absolutism.
What ecofeminists are saying, it seems to me, is that we must hear
the many voices of the world's people, to heed their personal narratives.
This says to me that we must be far broader and more open in
attending to the lived worlds of other people who share this planet. This
does not mean that we must eventually judge them all to be of equal
value. It does mean that we must not be too hasty in rejecting the voices
of those who cry out to us in their suffering, in their anxiety.
The complaint that philosophy has placed too great a weight on
intellect and has had too little respect for the emotional aspects of
conscious life can be misunderstood. What some people seem to hear
in this is a call to replace thought with emotionalism. Indeed some
feminists may have become far too uncritical, far too willing to trust
emotion blindly. This is not the case with all feminists, however, and it
is not the only alternative to the excessively abstract rationalism which
feminism opposes. Blind emotionalism is simply an excessive reaction to