Relational Ethics

Relational ethics is a contemporary approach to ethics that situates ethical action explicitly in relationship. If ethics is about how we should live, then it is essentially about how we should live together. Acting ethically involves more than resolving ethical dilemmas through good moral reasoning; it demands attentiveness and responsiveness to our commitments to one another, to the earth, and to all living things. Ethics is about our interdependency as well as our freedom, our emotions as well as our reason, and our unique situation as well as our human commonalities. It involves finding the fitting responses to our ethical questions.

A fitting response is one that is suitable, balanced, and harmonious and that takes into account the immediacy and complexity of the particular situation and our moral responsibility within it. The answer to “How should I act?” is discovered not solely by oneself but rather in dialogue with others. We cannot know ahead of time, and with great certainty, how we should act. This does not mean that “everything is relative” or that “anything goes.” Rather, it is acknowledged that we need to be sensitive to the whole of a given situation, to be inclusive in our dialogue about it, and to be aware of the effect of our contributions on it.

Interpersonal and societal relationships are influenced by the dynamics of power. It must be recognized that persons marginalized and/or stigmatized due to factors such as poverty, gender, and illness can be disadvantaged in serious ways. They may, for instance, have less opportunity to give voice to their concerns, or they may find that their concerns are not given priority by others. A relational ethics approach to ethical action underscores the need to address issues of power and vulnerability.

Relational ethics is informed by the work of philosophers and scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman, Robin Dillon, Han-Georg Gadamer, Sally Gadow, Raimund Gaita, Emmanuel Lévinas, Knut L⊘gstrup, John Macmurray, H. Richard Niebuhr, Charles Taylor, and Arne Vetlesen. Ethics, as espoused in their works (among others), is not based in a disengaged process of moral reasoning conceived as objective and existing outside the situated reality of human existence. There is instead acknowledgment of the primacy and ethical significance of our relationships to one another and of the need to understand humans as embodied beings situated within families and communities.