Abstract
This chapter argues that making good ethical decisions and taking appropriate ethical action are not solely dependent on engaging in rationally based deliberation grounded in an “objective” stance. Instead, bodily responses should also be included in ethical deliberation, both because they enable us to feel empathy for those whose lives will be affected by our decisions and because the body is the means through which ethical perception occurs in the first place. Embodied reactions should not be used in an unfettered way however. Aesthetic judgment needs to be engaged in order to bring distance to subjective feeling while examining the wisdom such emotional reactions and sense perception offer. The case is made that arriving at sound ethical decisions occurs through undertaking a deliberate dance between subjective reactions and attention to the external world. Philosophically, the chapter’s argument is underpinned by four thinkers: Maurice Merleau Ponty and his modern-day interpreter Maurice Hamington, Mary Midgley, and Immanuel Kant.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to point out that I am not including situations that are clearly illegal in this category!
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Ladkin, D. (2022). The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action. In: Neesham, C., Reihlen, M., Schoeneborn, D. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_28
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