ABSTRACT
A moral philosophy can be seen as a stylized and intellectualized response to a cluster of worries, wishes, and hopes about lives to lead, things to seek and avoid, and people, including ourselves, to care for and to answer to. All moral philosophies have views about right or value. Not all respond equally or in the same ways to worries about the overall shape and content of lives, or to hopes that they might be personally worthwhile as well as interpersonally defensible. This chapter explores how a kind of responsibility ethics clarifies the structure of the moral accounts people actually tend to keep and give. Many feminists favor an "ethics of responsibility" that allows for fine grained judgments and discretionary responses to particular persons in actual situations with distinctive histories. Morally guiding narratives are very coarse grids over the complexity of lives.
