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- Title
Interpersonal Ethics in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed.
- Authors
Jaeckle, Daniel P.
- Abstract
In The Dispossessed Ursula K. Le Guin layers three ethical values in order to create an interpersonal ethics designed to meet the needs of an anarchist society. Le Guin borrows the foundational layer of mutual aid, with interesting adaptations, from the work of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The second layer includes both the recognition that mutual aid cannot always be rendered and the resultant creation of a community based on shared suffering. Although it is tempting to see this layer as the high point of the ethical thought in the novel, Le Guin adds one more by imagining a type of life-long partnering bond in a society in which legalised marriage does not exist. The loyalty and sense of home that such a bond provides are crucial to the idea of the happy life as constructed in this fiction. Although this interpersonal ethics is open to charges of idealism in over-emphasising human cooperation, passivity in accepting suffering, and commitment to traditional heterosexual monogamy as essential for the full enjoyment of life, nevertheless Le Guin's thought-experiment makes a strong case for an anarchist ethics that improves upon the views of Kropotkin.
- Subjects
INTERPERSONAL relations; DISPOSSESSED: An Ambiguous Utopia, The (Book); LE Guin, Ursula K., 1929-2018; ANARCHISTS; ETHICS; KROPOTKIN, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz, 1842-1921
- Publication
Anarchist Studies, 2012, Vol 20, Issue 1, p61
- ISSN
0967-3393
- Publication type
Article