About this item

Suppose that in an emergency evacuation of a hospital after a flood, not all of the patients can make it out alive. You are the doctor faced with the choice between abandoning these patients to die alone and in pain, or injecting them with a lethal dose of drugs, without consent, so that they die peacefully. Perhaps no one will be able to blame you whatever you decide, but, whichever action you choose, you will remain burdened by guilt. What happens, in cases like this, when, no matter what you do, you are destined for moral failure? What happens when there is no available means of doing the right thing? Human life is filled with such impossible moral decisions. These choices and case studies that demonstrate them form the focus of Lisa Tessman's arresting and provocative work.



About the Author

Lisa Tessman

Visit Lisa Tessman's personal website: http://lisatessman.weebly.com/

Interview with Lisa Tessman, author of Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality. Listen to or download a podcast of the interview on New Books in Philosophy.

http://newbooksinphilosophy.com/2015/11/01/lisa-tessman-moral-failure-on-the-impossible-demands-of-morality-oxford-up-2015/


SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

MONOGRAPHS

Tessman, Lisa. 2015. _Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality_. Oxford University Press.

Tessman, Lisa. 2005. _Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles_. Oxford University Press.

EDITED VOLUMES

2009. _Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal_. Springer. Edited and with an introduction by Lisa Tessman.

2001. _Jewish Locations: Traversing Racialized Landscapes_. Rowman and Littlefield. Co-edited and with an introduction by Lisa Tessman and Bat-Ami Bar On.

ARTICLES / BOOK CHAPTERS

Tessman, Lisa. 2014. "Making More Space for Moral Failure." In _Virtue and the Moral Life: Theological and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. William Werpehowski and Kathryn Getek-
Soltis. Lexington Books: 133-152.

Tessman, Lisa. 2013 (appeared in print 2015) . "Value Pluralism, Intuitions, and Reflective Equilibrium." _Philosophical Topics_ 41(2) :175-201.

Tessman, Lisa. 2013. "Virtue Ethics and Moral Failure: Lessons from Neuroscientific Moral Psychology." _Virtues in Action: New Essays in Applied Virtue Ethics_, ed. Michael Austin. Palgrave Macmillan: 171-189.

Tessman, Lisa. 2010. "Idealizing Morality." _Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy_. 25 (4) : 797-824.

Tessman, Lisa. 2010. "Against the Whiteness of Ethics: Dilemmatizing as a Critical Approach." In _The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy_, ed. George Yancy. Lexington Books: 193-209.

Tessman, Lisa. 2009. "Feminist Eudaimonism: Eudaimonism as Non-Ideal Theory." In _Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal_, ed. Lisa Tessman. Springer: 47-58.

Tessman, Lisa. 2009. "Expecting Bad Luck." _Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy_. 24 (1) : 9-28.

2008. "Reply to Critics." _Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy_. 23 (3) : 205-216. This article is part of the "Tessman Symposium" on _Burdened Virtues_, including the work of three critics (Cheshire Calhoun, Marilyn Friedman, and Christine Koggel) and Tessman's response.

Tessman, Lisa. 2005. "The Burdened Virtues of Political Resistance." In _Feminist Interventions in Ethics and Politics_, eds. Barbara S. Andrew, Jean Keller and Lisa H. Schwartzman. Rowman and Littlefield: 77-96.


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