A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Other Feminist Voices)

by Sharon D. Welch

Our moral and political imagination is shaped by an ethic of control, a construction of agency, responsibility, and goodness which assumes that it is possible to guarantee the efficacy of one's actions.

the goal of communicative ethics is community and solidarity, not justification and universal consensus.'

key elements of community and solidarity are accountability and respect.

Genuine i...

Genuine nonvolatile conf...

Genuine perse...

Critical engagement requires action and reflection, action on issues of justice with (not for) members of another community, and serious attention to the history, art, literatur...

The problem is that what counts as "responsible action" for the Euro-American middle class is predicated on an intrinsically immoral balance of power.

The purity and absoluteness of this guideline to "do no harm" is a recipe for illusion and paralysis. Doing nothing does harm: our neutrality helps the oppressors more than the victims of oppression.

It is difficult for us to imagine effective alternative responses to humanitarian crises because, as a culture, we are shaped by an ethic of control-the assumption that effective action is unambiguous, unilateral, and decisive.

We need a culture of diplomacy and institutions of nonviolent, diplomatic intervention.

all of the participants in a conflict are flawed. There is no simple division between good and evil.

Before we move too quickly and uncritically to embrace cultural and economic power, however, we must remember two caveats: such power can be used to sustain an unjust social structure, and such power has its own costs and risks.

The results of American cultural and economic power are intrinsically unpredictable and destabilizing: these are our problems now, just as fascism and tyranny were the challenges of earlier generations and other peoples.

nonmilitary expressions of power also have economic, ecological, and human costs.

Also, what is the human loss in cultu...

The fourth assumption is that change for the better, although not ...

If we wish to break out of our self-justifying moral worlds, we must relinquish the justification of "intent." For the ethical issue here is precisely the disparity between intent and effect: we may well intend the good and yet perpetuate systems of injustice.

Accountability requires action: the use of our power in concrete ways to implement the demands of jus- tice.Thinking

In trading an ethic of control for an ethic of risk, and in living out this ethos, we can neither undo the past nor control the future. But we can learn from the past, and we can live creatively, responsibly, and compassionately in the present.

the despair of the affluent, the despair of the middle class has a particular tone: it is a despair cushioned by privilege and grounded in privilege. It is easier to give up on long-term social change when one is comfortable in the present-when it is possible to have challenging work, excellent health care and housing, and access to the fine arts. When the good life is present or within reach, it is tempting to despair of its ever being in reach for others and resort merely to enjoying it for oneself and one's family.

Becoming so easily discouraged is the privilege of those accustomed to too much power, accustomed to having needs met without negotiation and work, accustomed to having a political and economic system that responds to their needs.

To the extent that we still cling to the ideal of omnipotence-of a sovereign god or an all-wise, always successful father-we are trapped in our own role as oppressors, expecting a level of ease in action impossible in an interdependent world.

Stories are important. They keep us alive. In the ships, in the camps, in the quarters, fields, prisons, on the road, on the run, underground, under siege, in the throes, on the verge-the storyteller snatches us back from the edge to hear the next chapter. In which we are the subjects. We, the hero of the tales. Our lives preserved. How it was, how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives."

Such a situation calls for an ethic of risk, an ethic that begins with the recognition that we cannot guarantee decisive changes in the near future or even in our lifetime. The ethic of risk is propelled by the equally vital recognition that to stop resisting, even when success is unimaginable, is to die. The death that accompanies acquiescence to overwhelming problems is multidimensional: the threat of physical death, the death of the imagination, the death of the ability to care.20

For if we cease resisting, we lose the ability to imagine a world that is any different than that of the present; we lose the ability to imagine strategies of resistance and ways of sustaining each other in the long struggle for justice. We lose the ability to care, to love life in all its forms.

The ethic of risk is characterized by three elements, each of which is essential to maintain resistance in the face of overwhelming odds: a redefinition of responsible action, grounding in community, and strategic risk-taking.

generations.Alicc Walker describes the power of such communities in her poem* In These Dissenting Times": To

Yet we who are middle class cannot easily move from an ethic of control to an ethic of risk. The transition from middle-class cultured despair and cynicism to joyful resistance requires painful lessons in memory and accountability,

These lessons, full of promise and uncompromising in their demands, pave the way into an ethic of risk.

Once a great wrong has been done, it never dies. People speak the words of peace, but their hearts do not forgive. Generations perform ceremonies of reconciliation but there is no end.3

She demonstrates three important aspects of the twist at the heart of Western concepts of virtue: the way too much power poisons virtue; the evil caused by whites refusing to see the consequences of their actions; and the passionate destruction by whites of anything that cannot be controlled.

We do have the power to act alone to repress, to exploit, to blow up the world. We do not, however, have the power to make the world peaceful and just. That is a qualitatively different task and requires a qualitatively different exercise of power.

Justice cannot be created for the poor by the rich, for it requires the transfer of power from the oppressors to the oppressed, the elimination of...

unless evil is acknowledged, unless the imbalance of power that causes exploitation is addressed, further change is impossible.

Marshall depicts in the character of Harriet one of the most effective defense mechanisms of the upper class and of all those in power: an inability to tolerate the rage of those they have oppressed and an inability to hear what is being expressed through that rage-the fact that they have violated something deep and valuable, the dignity of another human being.

Action begins in the face of overwhelming loss and the recognition of the irreparable damage of structural evil.

The fundamental risk constitutive of this ethic is the decision to care and to act although there are no guarantees of success.

The ethic of risk offers a model of maturity that challenges the equation of maturity with resignation, with an acceptance of the improbability of fundamental social change.

maturity means recognizing that ideals are far from realization and not easily won, that partial change occurs only through the hard work and persistent struggles of generations.

Maturity is the acceptance, not that life is unfair, but that the creation of fairness is the task of generations, that work for justice is not incidental to one's life but is an essential aspect...

Justice is not merely the province of professional activists, but a dimension of the lives of everyo...

If control is the norm, then responsible action for justice is a contradiction in terms. American culture relegates such concerns to the young and the terminally idealistic. Responsibility is equated with action that is more likely to succeed, thus identifying responsibility with action that is, by definition, supportive of the status quo.

The ethic of cultured despair is marked by two distinct features: (1) the despair is cultured in the sense of its erudite awareness of the extent and complexity of many forms of injustice; and (2) the knowledge of the extent of injustice is accompanied by despair, in the sense of being unable to act in defiance of that injustice.

The hallmark of liberal theology at its best is its intellectual honesty.

Liberal theologians are also responsive to human suffering.

Rather than assuming that it is possible to find a more secure foundation for theological work than the turn to experience, the turn to human experience can be radicalized, including a rigorous specification of the range of human experiences addressed and the particular social location within class, race, and gender divisions that shape both resources offered and problems investigated.