Mutuality Matters

Edward B. Foley

ISBN 10: 0742531554 / ISBN 13: 9780742531550

Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 7ba4568a2cf26a97d8dfbe80fb72366d

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Mutuality Matters
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0742531554
• ISBN 13: 9780742531550
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: new
• Weight: 0.36 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

Married and family life around the world has undergone a revolution in the last several decades: the radical democratization of intimacy in spousal and parent-child relationships. Previous principles of hierarchy, inequality, and duty that defined the relationships between husband, wife, and children have been challenged and often replaced by more fluid bonds of equality, intimacy, emotional self-disclosure, communication, and mutual trust. The key question that has emerged for our times, then, is how exactly do families sustain genuine mutuality, democracy, and strong relationships?

Figuring out good answers to this question is the major theme of this book and the origin of the title Mutuality Matters. Three common strategies for creating just marriages have arisen: political and legal reform, smarter negotiating by women, and new cultural perceptions of marriage. While the authors in this book attend to all three strategies to different degrees, the primary focus is the third strategy: changing our cultural understanding of women and men in marriage. Moreover, to effect genuine cultural change, the authors recognize the need to enlist the help of religion as a key culture-forming element. Mutuality has become a common way for theologians from a variety of perspectives to talk about a more just love, a love that combines affection and justice. But many questions have been left unanswered: What exactly do people believe they have promised when they align themselves with Christian claims about love in their rituals of marriage and partnership? Do Christian views of love include the ideal of justice in marriage? Because accommodation or sacrifice is inevitable in any intimate human community, how can families insure that it will be mutual and just? How is marriage strengthened if justice is added to love at the core of mutuality? What does mutuality mean across time and distance, when participants are parents and children, when fathers are absent, when parents should be honored, or within a violent c

About the Authors

Joel Anderson is Moral Psychology & Social Philosophy Chair at the Ethics Institute in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. In his work, he develops a relational and intersubjectivist conception of autonomy, a recognitional account of critical social theory, an "extended" approach to self-regulation and disability studies, and a social ethics of technology. He is currently working on a book on "Autonomy Gaps" and editing a collection about how technology is "Disrupting the Human." He is also a principal investigator in the research consortium Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (ESDiT.nl).

Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She is the author of Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (2012) and Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (1995).