Editor’s Introduction (excerpt)

By Jeanette Silveira, Lesbian Ethics Vol 1, No 1, 1984

Lesbian Ethics aims to be at once visionary and intensely practical. That is, LE aims to nourish the Lesbian spirit by envisioning the world we were all meant to live in, and to envision by looking at how we are now creating that world in our day to day interactions and in our larger projects and aspirations.

The idea for LE grew out of my own growing realization that Lesbians are creating a society, an economic and social and cultural network, intersticed with patriarchy, but nonetheless real.And out of the realization that this society is the first one in which ethics have been possible. While the oppression inherent in heterosexual relationships has prevented ethics from developing in the heterosexual world,Lesbians do not divide the people in our community into those one has sex with and exploits or is exploited by, on the one hand, and those one has meaningful work and social relations with, on the other hand. Almost any type of relationship is possible between any two or more of us. Lesbians are in our daily lives building the first true ethics, and I want Lesbian Ethics to contribute to and to name this pioneering work.

It is not always popular among Lesbians to say that ethics matter. (Is it politically correct to hold that political correctness is politically incorrect?) Perhaps some Lesbians are critical of "political correctness" because they object to trivial or rigid rules and harsh judgments, but ethics do not have to be trivial, rigid or harsh. And ethics are essential to politics, since politics is building the society one believes nurtures the spirit. I see ethics in two ways: as learning from experience, and as saying what we want.

Ethics is about learning what is good for us, that is, learning both what we value and how to get it. Ethics in this sense is always growing, is never rigid or lifeless. Suppose we form an ethical statement: Lying is wrong, because when I lie to another woman I make it impossible for her to choose to act in her own best interests (or whatever other reason we might have). Living is now a little simpler: The same decision does not have to be made over and over again, and new areas for ethical decisions can be contemplated. Since for us ethics is learning, however, we never forget why we have this rule. The rule is a hypothesis which needs to be tested against experience and undoubtedly modified. Sometimes lying is essential to accomplish other valuable goals. It is, in fact, the willingness to examine our lives, the process of hypothesis building and hypothesis testing, which is ethics.

Ethics is about saying what we want. In creating ethics, we must be willing to say, I want this, I don’t want that, I like this, I don’t like that. Only when we can openly and fully say what we want do we possess ourselves. It is hard to say what we want, even from other Lesbians and other women, because we don’t have it. When a situation is making us feel bad and the situation is hard to change, there is always a tension, a pull towards manipulating our feelings into feeling good about the crumby situation. This is why being revolutionary is so difficult: We have to keep hold of what we want and of how little of it we are going to get in our lifetime. And yet, for me at least, there is no joy to match that of returning once again to the knowledge of what I really want and thus of who I really am.