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I'm actually curious about this and I want it to exist so that it is not yet one more thing I should work on.

I've long had a belief that a lot of our ethical conundrums are difficult because they're all framed in terms of individuals: but we never act alone.

All our thought experiments are a lone actor encountering a trolley gone on the wrong rails, but nearly never a community acting, a family working together.

The individual still exists, but it's the wrong unit to think about things most of the time, at least as the only. We have to work at multiple levels.

Elinor Ostrom's work is tangential to this: it's a work of economics not ethics, but even so, much of her work is about the fact that as communities with interest in something, we manage it better.

I think a lot of our failures are because we philosophize about it badly, and we don't recognize community action very well except in trite admonition about failures: against “if we all just..." and “the tragedy of the commons", as if the group is a nebulous non-entity that acts but never takes action, never considers, never deliberates.

So much of systems study would be more obvious if we weren't always obsessed with breaking it down just a little too far for the same reasons: the whole works differently than the pieces. The communication cannot be separated from the action.

All this to say I'm tired of ethical reasoning that is all runaway trains and inductive expansion of scope into infinity.

@aredridel This is an interesting idea. I'm gonna assume you've heard about or read Gilligan's In a Different Voice? The focus is not "we", per se, but her observations that good moral reasoning can be based more in "relations" rather than individual actions ….seems relevant.

Unfortunately, her work gets characterized as as a "feminist critique" of ethics rather than a great NEEDED addition to ethical models. FWIW: The wikipedia page for her has been a mess for some times due to…egos.

@aredridel I read Daly's stuff -long- ago, and may misremember it, so it may not be as relevant.

In a Different Voice is really accessible and a decent read for lay people.

There's also a thing called relational therapy, that while not couched primarily in ethical terms, is focused on solving issues using relations as the primary base- it's been around for a while, but again, mostly found in feminist circles and so doesn't tend to make the top ten lists of therapy styles.

@cjpaloma Ooh yes, thank you!