Departmental Research Seminar with Dr Sarah Drews Lucas

Title: Attention without Consolation: Iris Murdoch and Feminist Ethics

Abstract: Recent work in feminist ethics has reinforced the deep ambivalence, in much of contemporary critical feminism, toward the ethics of care (Ferrarese 2020, Gary 2022). Feminists remain concerned that work on the moral value of care undermines the political power of critical accounts of care’s paternalism (Hunter 2021), its systematic exploitation of poor and working-class people of colour and global majority people (Prattes 2023), and its imbrication with sentimentalised ideals of femininity and of binary sex and gender (Weeks 2022). In this chapter, I turn to Iris Murdoch to develop a concept of care as attention without consolation that stands up to these critiques. Murdoch has long been considered an important thinker for feminist care ethics (from Noddings 1984 and Ruddick 1989 to Laugier 2022)because of her emphasis on the moral value of paying attention to ordinary life. Taking into account this tradition, I work toward a more critically robust account of Murdochian care ethics. I first consider Murdoch’s rejection of consolation through fantasy and sketch an account of her acknowledgment that we can and should welcome the consolation of tragedy (Cooper 2016, Lindbäck 2024). I then identify three temptations toward consolation that we should reject within a feminist ethics of care: institutionalisation, theoretical abstraction, and sentimentalisation. Identifying the tendency toward these consolatory narratives within care ethics allows us to retain a radical and troublesome ethics of care. Finally (and perhaps counter-intuitively), I turn to the work of Andrea Dworkin to illustrate a feminist commitment to attention without consolation.