Lisa Sowle Cahill and the Search for a “Functionalist” Paradigm of Feminist Global Ethics

Abstract This chapter presents an examination of the thoughts and writings of Lisa Sowle Cahill, a moral theologian at Boston College. Taking issue with both Germain Grisez and Jean Porter, Cahill seeks to construct a new paradigm of natural law that addresses feminist and poststructural scholars. Cahill believed that any paradigm of intercultural or interreligious ethics that purported to be describing moral duties in the real world must begin by exploring how ethical questions are intimately tied to the concrete experiences in specific (often religiously diverse) communities. Her paradigm addressed the concerns of feminist and postimperialist scholars in moving beyond the “false universalism” offered by paradigms like that of neo-scholasticism, while offering a “realist” understanding of social ethics that remained true to the realist impulses in Catholic moral theology.