Philosophy Department
Fordham University
Collins Hall, Room 127
Phone: (718) 817-3284
FAX: (718) 817-3300
E-mail: mwalker@fordham.edu

Click here for Professor Walker's Curriculum Vitae

Margaret Urban Walker is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. She specializes in Anglo-American ethical theory and feminist critical theory, with additional research interests in Wittgenstein and Foucault. She has taught philosophy in undergraduate, doctoral, and adult education programs at several universities, and has offered courses in feminist philosophy since 1976. She is author of Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (Routledge, 1998), and of articles on moral agency, judgment, and responsibility, the feminist critique of ethics, and the role of the ethics consultant. Her articles and reviews have appeared in edited collections as well as professional journals such as Ethics, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, The Journal of Value Inquiry, and The Hastings Center Report. Walker recently edited Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999).

Margaret Urban Walker has been Guest Professor at the University of Louvain, Belgium (1981), Instructor of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Ethics and the Liberal Arts in Bethany, West Virginia (1991), Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis (1994), and Frances Elvidge Fellow (1996-97) and Visiting Senior Scholar (1997-98) at the Ethics Center of the University of South Florida. She is a long time member of the American Philosophical Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy.

Professor Walker's current research projects involve moral epistemology, moral psychology, and moral responsibility, with special emphasis on the significance for morality of power-laden social differences. She is currently interested in problems of "moral repair" -- emotional, practical, and political responses to wrongdoing, and in questions of moral understanding that require negotiating significant cultural differences.

Margaret Walker was recently the guest of the Research Concentration in Applied Ethics of Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, where she participated in a colloquium on “New Directions in Applying Ethics” with members of the program, and other scholars and practitioners. Pleasant meetings in Brisbane were not limited, however, to academic ones.

Margaret Walker's book Moral Understandings: Feminist Studies in Ethics (Routledge, 1998) provides a sustained critique of contemporary assumptions of Anglo-American moral theory, offers an alternative model for the analysis of morality as an actual phenomenon of human societies, and outlines a method for normative critique of moral practices. A central theme of Moral Understandings is that socially marked differences, such as gender, race, age, class, or ability, are unrepresented or misrepresented in standard ethical theory, with serious results for both morality and philosophical ethics. Ethical theories depict "the moral agent" or "the person," or valued ideals like "autonomy" or "integrity," in ways that mirror the social roles and character ideals for advantaged and able adult men in our society. Walker uses critical techniques feminist scholars have pioneered in the past twenty years, along with her own model of morality as practices of responsibility that coordinate understandings of identities, relationships, and values, to reveal the impact of gender and other bias in representations of morality in philosophical ethics. Her "expressive-collaborative" conception of morality offers both an analytical agenda for understanding the common and often questionable intermeshing of moral and social positions, and a clearer understanding of the stakes in moral criticism and pressures for change within and between moral communities.

Moral Understandings was the subject of a 3-hour 'Author Meets Critic' session at the December, 2000, meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in New York.   Professors Claudia Card of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Lorraine Code of York University, Ontario commented and Margaret Walker replied. Papers from the session will appear in a forthcoming issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Volume 17, 2002.

Fifteen original essays in Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics, edited and with an Introduction by Margaret Urban Walker (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999) explore assumptions, experiences, practices, and public policies that affect women’s well-being, self-respect, and dignity in later life. Topics include: older women’s responses to changes in appearance; their relationship to cultural norms of social acceptability and successful agency; their standing in the view of medical professionals and in the context of healthcare practices; their needs for autonomy, security, and dignity in daily living; and society’s demands that they provide care for others. The authors look for ways aging puts older women at risk of indignity, neglect, or harm, and ways women meet moral challenges, maintain cherished values, and define resilient moral and social identities throughout later life. By turns shrewd, sad, provocative, and wise, these authors create a sampler of thought about women’s aging in ethical perspective that invites further research and public discussion. Contributors: Sandra Lee Bartky, Daniel Callahan, Joan C. Callahan, Peggy DesAutels, Robin N. Fiore, Frida Kerner Furman, Martha Holstein, Diana Tietjens Meyers, Hilde Lindemann Nelson, James Lindemann Nelson, Sara Ruddick, Anita Silvers, Joan C. Tronto, Margaret Urban Walker, Susan Wendell.

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