ABSTRACT
The modernist ideals of universal democracy and justice realized through legislative régimes centered on individual rights have been the subject of sustained feminist and environmentalist critiques, reinvigorating political and philosophical interest in the question of ethics. Feminist writing has focused on deconstructing the discourse of rights, highlighting the gendered (and racialized) character of the autonomous self configured as rights-bearing citizen of a sovereign state (Cornell, 1985). By contrast, environmentalist work has centered on extending the political and discursive economy of rights to nonhuman beings; challenging established concepts of personhood and subject status (Callicott, 1979). These efforts share parallel concerns to establish relational, as opposed to individual, understandings of ethical agency and to recognize the significance of embodied, as against abstract, capacities in shaping ethical competence and considerability. Such concerns highlight the power of the geographical imaginaries of traditional ethical discourses and the difficulties of disrupting the entrenched cartographies of the nation, the neighborhood, and the individual in fashioning new possibilities for ethical community.
