ABSTRACT
Feminist attention to the permeability of certain categories, such as “personal” and “political,” or “private” and “public,” allows us to ask important questions about the relationships between them. When category boundaries cease to be rigid, the apparent distances among previously categorized entities diminish and the possible connections between them become important sites of inquiry. When members of the nonhuman world are not thought to be morally considerable, human relationships with them are typically constructed as either completely insignificant, or as unquestionably private, and therefore hardly ethically relevant. In the face of the ugliness of oppressive postindustrial, technocratic, media-driven cultures, the authors might be inclined to say that moral detachment can be a justified rational response. The problem of moral distance is particularly acute for environmental ethics. Feminist ecological consciousness calls for ways to give life to the links and resemblances within the variegated field of our moral imaginations.
