Jamie Nelson

In her influential _Maternal Thinking_, Sara Ruddick (1989) suggested that a parent’s responsibilities are to preserve, nurture, and socialize the children in her or his care. This chapter uses Ruddick’s triad as a point of departure for considering whether using technological means to become a parent might generate responsibilities that are different, in intensity or content, from those that parents standardly incur. The goal is to argue that, at least in those cases where those who contribute their gametes to the enterprise but do not intend to rear the resulting children, as well as in cases where the use of assisted reproductive technologies make the risks of pregnancy graver for women and their foetuses, the answer is “yes”: preserving, nurturing, and socializing their children are at least likely to be tasks which are unusually complex and exacting.

Moral psychology studies the features of cognition, judgement, perception and emotion that make human beings capable of moral action. Perspectives from feminist and race theory immensely enrich moral psychology. Writers who take these perspectives ask questions about mind, feeling, and action in contexts of social difference and unequal power and opportunity. These essays by a distinguished international cast of philosophers explore moral psychology as it connects to social life, scientific studies, and literature.