Kathryn J. Norlock

Existing accounts of meaning in reproductive contexts, especially those put forward in debates concerning abortion, tend to focus on the (moral) status of the fetus. This issue on miscarriage, pregnancy loss, and fetal death accomplishes a shift this conversation, in the direction of pushing past embryo-centric value judgments. To put it bluntly, the miscarried embryo is not the one who has to live with the experience. The essays in this special issue are a significant addition to the scarce literature on miscarriage and fetal death. Contributions are from specialists in continental and analytical philosophy, feminism, bioethics, theoretical and applied ethics, social and political philosophy, social epistemology and philosophy of language, narrative, aesthetics, popular culture, and gender studies. As guest editors, we sought to offer a variety of approaches to the topic, to further the understanding of miscarriage and fetal death as important to many areas of philosophy, especially social philosophy. We suggest that the unchosenness and invisibility of miscarriage are central to its seeming irrelevance to social identities and social norms of testimony, recognition, and ascription of significance to experiences.

This collection of previously published essays by Cheshire Calhoun, with an original introduction, supplies an absorbing assemblage of some well-known and some lesser-known essays that hang together remarkably well. The overall effect is that of a robust and provocative approach to ethical theory. Calhoun builds a persuasive case for morality as an enterprise constituted as much by social practices as by abstract theorizing. Calhoun's is not merely the position that moral theory has feasibility constraints when applied. On the contrary, she offers these essays as multiple viewing angles on her position that, "absent a social practice, there is no morality, although there might be moral knowledge" (13). Conventionally, we conceive of morality as a correct action guide, a theory that aims for accuracy in an attempt to "get it right," which we then carry into application in the world. Calhoun argues that our critically reflective aim of theorizing toward accuracy supervenes on -- and often unwittingly presumes -- the backdrop of a social practice of morality (17).

The author develops her account of Claudia Card's ethical work as nonideal ethical theory (NET). She clarifies Card's role in ethical theorizing of the recent past, partly in order to brief the unfamiliar reader on Card's ethics and nonideal theory, and partly to enter Card's contributions into the story of nonideal theory's emergence in philosophy. She then recommends, to other NET philosophers, the prioritization of (i) Card's rejection of the "administrative point of view", and (ii) Card's focus on "intolerable harms" as critical to excellent ethical theorizing. She ends with the observation that NET may helpfully point toward reasons to take a pessimistic stance toward moral progress as elaborated in some classic texts in political philosophy; her appreciation of Card's insights yields a variety of pessimism that Card herself did not share.

In this dissertation, I argue that a feminist and multidimensional account of forgiveness must take seriously our everyday experience with forgiving, and the nature of the power relationship in which forgiver and forgiven stand. According to my model, forgiveness is a moral act with at least two dimensions, namely the choice to take up, or take seriously, a new attitude toward one's wrongdoer for moral reasons and the performative utterance to the wrongdoer of one's making this choice. It is my position that and are distinct, that either can be discussed as a discreet occasion of forgiveness separately from the other, and the ethical recommendations regarding one of these dimensions can be discussed apart from ethical recommendations regarding the other. ;Mainstream accounts of forgiveness inadequately consider that forgiveness inevitably involves one's relationship with another, and that women and men have disparate experience with forgiveness in their often unequal relations. I argue for a feminist framework which holds we are constituted by our relations , and attends to women's experience with this traditionally feminine virtue. I argue that the statement, "I forgive you," is itself an instance of forgiveness; it is what J. L. Austin calls a performative utterance because more than reporting, truly or falsely, how one feels, saying "I forgive you" performs an act that sets something new in motion, and changes the relation between wrongdoer and victim. I argue for the logical possibility of third-party forgiveness , by which I mean the act of forgiving a wrongdoer for wrongs done to someone other than the forgiving agent. Although 3PF is not a substitute for the forgiveness of victims, it plays an important role in our relationships with the wrongdoers of those with whom we identify. I conclude that both third-party and group forgiveness, like the forgiveness of victims, can be ethically problematic but powerful moral acts

Early in _The Atrocity Paradigm_, Claudia Card briefly defends the idea that one can inflict evil on oneself. In this paper, I extend the work Card begins on self-inflicted evils, especially with attention to self-forgiveness. Following the work of philosophers of trauma, I argue that the fragmented nature of the self, especially the traumatized self, is one which supports and enables the possibilities of self-inflicted evil and self-forgiveness. The fragmented self is also the source of obstacles to self-forgiveness, which Card's considerations of interpersonal forgiveness are helpful in elucidating.