action would bring pleasure to a great many
people. Thus, a deontological theorist might
encourage me to give preference to the care of
my own sick child over the care of otherchil-
drenelsewhere, even if those resources might
go further in another part of the world.
Geographers’ concern with ethics andval-
uesis long-standing (Kropotkin, 1885; Sauer,
1956). To a degree, the fit betweengeog-
raphyand ethics is an intuitive one, without
necessarily saying anything about what kind of
norms have emerged or in whose favour they
work. The field’s attention to cultural differ-
ences between places and peoples attunes it to
the fact of differing systems of values in those
places, but also to the prospects forcosmo-
politanism (see Popke, 2007). Likewise,
geographers’ interest in interactions andflows
(of people, commodities, ideas, capital)
between places has made the issue offairinter-
actions and distributions a natural one to think
about. The same could be said regarding the
discipline’s focus onnature–societyrelation-
ships: debates over the proper stance towards
the environment, towards access to land,
water and other natural resources, and
towards the distribution of environmental
risksandhazardsare central to contempor-
aryenvironmentalism. Also, the propensity
of places, regions, states and other territorial
arenas to be marked off from one another by
boundaries– material, symbolic or both – has
led to questions of who is included and who is
excluded, and to what extent these determin-
ations are ethically justifiable (Sibley, 1995;
Creswell, 1996). Geography, as Sack (1997)
has argued, would seem to be intrinsically
morally significant and so one need not
look far to see that geographers have thought
so, for better and worse, for centuries (e.g.
Livingstone, 1992).
What makes recent work in human geog-
raphy significant is the willingness to tap moral
and political thought more directly and exten-
sively than in the past. This willingness is of a
piece with the emergence of alternative –rad-
ical,feminist,queerandcritical human–
geographiesin the past 30 years. Two reasons
for greater attention to moral and political
thought may be ventured. First, the social
revolutions of the post-Second World War
period (e.g. movements for political independ-
ence, civil rights, gender parity, peace and
security, sexual liberation) came to have an
enormous impact on geography, eventually
leading to disciplinary moves against a geog-
raphy in service to the status quo. One could
say, as Harvey (1972) did, that real-world
social revolutions extended into the academy,
where the struggle for disciplinary space
ensued (cf. Blunt and Wills, 2000). The strug-
gle for new disciplinary spaces within geog-
raphy involved delving into literatures on
politics and ethics (e.g. Harvey, 1973).
Second, debatesamongthese alternative geog-
raphies have been fuelled by a similar sort of
exploration, as proponents of various persua-
sions (saymarxismorfeminism) have sought
to make their cases to each other, or despite
each other (cf. Harvey, 1992). In any event,
the past thirty years has seen something of a
‘moral turn’ in the geographical literature. A
particularly strong indication of this turn is the
publication of surveys of moral philosophy
written specifically for geographical audiences
(e.g. Smith, D.M., 1994a; cf. Low and
Gleeson, 1998). Smith’s efforts in particular
may be viewed as a search for common ground
in the struggle for greaterequalityglobally
and locally. Although his contributions are to
all three fields of ethics (descriptive, normative
and meta-ethics), the main thrust of his work
is to see through the many differences in moral
theory towards an argument (deontological)
for ‘the more equal the better’ at every geo-
graphicalscale.Another indicationof the
moral turn is the elaboration of moral argu-
ments and concepts for purposes of advancing
specific issues of concern to geographers.
Examples include arguments for why the wel-
fare of distant strangers should matter
(Corbridge, 1993b; but cf. Barnett and Land,
2007); ‘care’ as a ethical–political practice,
and the notion of ‘responsibility’ within a
globalizing world (Brown, 2004; Massey
2004; Lawson, 2007; Popke, 2007); the appli-
cation of theories of ethics to a wide range of
geographical topics from place and self, to
development practice and climate change
(Whatmore, 1997; Proctor and Smith, 1999a;
Smith, 2000a); and a burgeoning interest in
the ethics ofactivismand research practices
(Lynn and Pulido, 2003).
The moral turn in geography has been
strengthened by a continuing effort to reach
into new literatures. The adoption of feminist
ethics and geographical reworkings of the
ethical positions taken by a number of post-
structuralist thinkers are good examples.
Although hardly new, feminist ethics shapes
the uptake of ethics in geography in important
ways. Standpointepistemologies, which are
embraced by a number of strands offemi-
nism, emphasize the embodied and therefore
partial quality of knowledge (as against disem-
bodied universal ‘truths’), including partialityGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 212 1.4.2009 3:17pmETHICS