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Added by: Tomasz Zyglewicz, Shannon Brick, Michael GreerAbstract: A core insight of some important second wave feminist writings is that, in order to qualify as truly ‘feminist’, a movement has to be politically radical. For example, there is a powerful articulation of this theme, to mention one noteworthy site, in the work of bell hooks. A guiding preoccupation of hooks’ thought, as far back as the early eighties, is to underline the pernicious and intellectually flawed character of the supposedly ‘feminist’ postures of ‘bourgeois white women’ in the U.S. whose efforts are directed toward the politically superficial goal of claiming the social privileges of bourgeois white men. hooks shows that there is no way to ‘overcome barriers that separate women from one another’ without ‘confronting the reality of racism’. She describes how the forms of gender-based subordination experienced by privileged white women are inextricable from racist and classist social mechanisms that elevate these women above women who are non-white and poor, and how the sexist obstacles that poor and non-white women encounter are in turn permeated by racism and classism. hooks concludes that if ‘feminism’ is to be dedicated to identifying and resisting sexist oppression, it needs to – in her words – ‘direct our attention to systems of domination and the interrelatedness of sex, race and class oppression.
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Added by: Rossen VentzislavovSummary: The concept of intersectionality is Crenshaw's rich contribution to our embattled understanding of identity politics. To illustrate the danger of traditional identity groupings, Crenshaw turns our attention to the complexity of inhabiting two such distinct categories at the same time as a black woman. While it is true that a black woman can hardly be considered essentially black (on account of the primacy of men of color over women of color) or essentially a woman (on account of the primacy of white women over non-white ones), intersectionality does not aim to dismantle these general categories altogether. Instead, it seeks to introduce an ethical and political pragmatics of identity. The way Crenshaw proposes this should be done in the case of black women is by treating the two inherent identity categories - black and female - conjunctively rather than disjunctively as it has always been done. The resulting approach promises to improve our sense of the reality of "social location" and is thus of great value to all agents and processes of social health and justice.
Comment: Assigning this text is best in classes on women's rights and identity politics. It will be particularly useful in inspiring discussions on different types of discrimination affecting different groups, and the relations between them.
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordSummary: In this essay, Cudd argues that enforced pregnancy constitutes a group harm against women, harming even women who are not forced to carry a fetus to term against their will. In this essay, she develops a theoy of group harm, arguing that forced pregnancy constitutes a similar sort of group harm as rape. Ultimately, she claims that both rape and enforced pregnancy constitute a group harm via degredation of a class (women) and an individual harm via the individual negative effects caused by enforced pregnancy.
Comment: This text serves as a good introduction to the idea of a group harm. Further, it would fit well in a class that covers the ethics of sex, sexual violence, pregnancy, or abortion. If you plan to utilize this reading in the context of a biomedical ethics course covering abortion, it would be helpful to have first covered other classical readings on the topic (Marquis and Thomson, at least).
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordAbstract: Synopsis: This article examines metaphors that illuminate the competitive aspects of capitalism and its focus on winning but also metaphors that emphasize cooperation and ways that capitalism improves the lives not only of the winners but also of all who choose to play the game by its rules. Although sports metaphors invoked to describe capitalist competition may appear to cast an unflattering light on both capitalism and sport, on a deeper analysis those metaphors appeal to many of us because they reveal a closer resemblance to the Latin root of the word 'competition' and its cooperative, pareto-improving implications. Just as healthy competition in sports requires cooperation, healthy capitalism is also,ultimately, a cooperative endeavor. I will argue that metaphors imported from and expanded through our experiences of sport reveal many, while concealing other, aspects of capitalism.
Comment: This text would have a place within a course on business ethics that considers whether competition is good or bad within the context of the market. This would make it an interesting addition to a course that covered Satz's Why Some Things Should Not be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. It is also a good overview of some ideas that are central to the philosophy of sport, such as what constitutes a game, the idea of cooperation, and competitiveness (winning/non-winning).
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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Nathan NobisAbstract: In both academic and non-academic discussions of feminism, there is sometimes a lack of appreciation for the diversity among feminist positions. Two people may be called feminists while disagreeing about a range of theoretical and practical issues, like the nature of oppression, sex work, or abortion. In this and the next essay, I lay out two general feminist approaches to sexist oppression: the sameness approach, the difference approach, and the dominance approach. This first essay focuses on the sameness approach.
Comment: An introduction to 'the sameness approach' in feminism.
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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Nathan NobisAbstract: Different strands of thought that arise out of political movements are often difficult to categorize and also often answer to many names. The 'difference approach' to feminism is discussed here, following Haslanger and Hackett. This approach is sometimes also called radical, cultural, or gynocentric feminism.
Comment: An introduction to feminism, focusing on 'the Difference Approach' to feminism.
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordAbstract: The paper explores the ethics of post-menopausal motherhood by looking at the case of Adriana Iliescu, the oldest woman ever to have given birth (so far). To this end, I will approach the three most common objections brought against the mother and/or against the team of healthcare professionals who made it happen: the age of the mother, the fact that she is single, the appropriateness of her motivation and of that of the medical team.
Comment: This text presents a case study useful for a course on biomedical ethics, parenthood, or procreation. Further, the author considers a number of objections to postmenopausal motherhood and evaluates them for their ethical merit, providing a good introduction to questions of reproduction and parenting in non-traditional circumstances.
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Added by: Simon FoktAbstract: This paper argues that the concept of care is significant not only for ethics, but for epistemology as well. After elucidating caring as a five-step dyadic relation, I go on to show its epistemic significance within the general framework of virtue epistemology as developed by Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, and Linda Zagzebski. The notions of "care-knowing" and "care-based epistemology" emerge from construing caring (respectively) as a reliabilist and responsibilist virtue.
Comment: This text is best used in epistemology classes when discussing virtue reliablist and responsibilist approaches, and epistemic success in general. It will also be useful in philosophy of science classes: Dalmiya argues for radical changes in our approach to scientific research, including a redefinition of the epistemic and moral constraints which guide it.
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Added by: Franci MangravitiAbstract:
People often assume that everyone can be divided by sex/gender (that is, by physical and social characteristics having to do with maleness and femaleness) into two tidy categories: male and female. Careful thought, however, leads us to reject that simple ‘binary’ picture, since not all people fall precisely into one group or the other. But if we do not think of sex/gender in terms of those two categories, how else might we think of it? Here I consider four distinct models; each model correctly captures some features of sex/gender, and so each is appropriate in some contexts. But the first three models are inadequate when tough questions arise, like whether trans women should be admitted as students at a women’s college or when it is appropriate for intersex athletes to compete in women’s athletic events. (‘Trans’ refers to the wide range of people who have an atypical gender identity for someone of their birth-assigned sex, and ‘intersex’ refers to people whose bodies naturally develop with markedly different physical sex characteristics than are paradigmatic of either men or women.) Such questions of inclusion and exclusion matter enormously to the people whose lives are affected by them, but ordinary notions of sex/gender offer few answers. The fourth model I describe is especially designed to make those hard decisions easier by providing a process to clarify what matters.
Comment (from this Blueprint): Very accessible introduction to the problems with folk gender models. If one wants to emphasize the contrast between normative vs descriptive account of gender terms, the piece is naturally paired with Rory Collins' "Modeling gender as a multidimensional sorites paradox".
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordAbstract: A recent development in philosophical scholarship on reparations for black chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation is reliance upon social science in normative arguments for reparations. Although there are certainly positive things to be said in favor of an empirically informed normative argument for black reparations, given the depth of empirical disagreement about the causes of persistent racial inequalities, and the ethos of 'post-racial' America, the strongest normative argument for reparations may be one that goes through irrespective of how we ultimately explain the causes of racial inequalities. By illuminating the interplay between normative political philosophy and social scientific explanations of racial inequality in the prevailing corrective justice argument for black reparations, I shall explain why an alternative normative argument, which is not tethered to a particular empirical explanation of racial inequality, may be more appealing.
Comment: This text provides a clear overview and introduction to debates about reparations for decendents of African American slaves. It also surveys quite a bit of empirical data surrounding racial inequalities. It would fit well in a course that considered questions of social justice, racial inequality, or reparations.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Esther McIntoshPublisher's Note: A range of themes - race and gender, sexuality, otherness, sisterhood, and agency - run throughout this collection, and the chapters constitute a collective discourse at the intersection of Black feminist thought and continental philosophy, converging on a similar set of questions and concerns. These convergences are not random or forced, but are in many ways natural and necessary: the same issues of agency, identity, alienation, and power inevitably are addressed by both camps. Never before has a group of scholars worked together to examine the resources these two traditions can offer one another. By bringing the relationship between these two critical fields of thought to the forefront, the book will encourage scholars to engage in new dialogues about how each can inform the other. If contemporary philosophy is troubled by the fact that it can be too limited, too closed, too white, too male, then this groundbreaking book confronts and challenges these problems.
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Added by: Simon Fokt
Abstract: While Stephen Davies argues that a debate on cross-cultural aesthetics is possible if we adopt an attitude of mutual respect and forbearance, his fellow symposiasts shed light upon different aspects which merit a closer scrutiny in such a dialogue. Samer Akkach warns that an inclusivistic embrace of difference runs the risk of collapsing the very difference one sought to understand. Julie Nagam underscores that local knowledge carriers and/or the medium should be involved in such a cross-cultural exploration. Enrico Fongaro searches for a way of experiencing cross-cultural art such that it can lead to a transformative experience Relatedly, Meilin Chinn uses the analogy of friendship to explore the edifying dimension of experiencing an art form. Lastly, John Powell studies whether Dickie’s Institutional Theory can be meaningfully used to identify works of art in Western and non-Western traditions.
Comment: The selection of texts by Davies, Akkach, and Chinn, with a part of Davies’ reply in the end, are particularly interesting. These present an interesting tension, with Akkach and (somewhat less overtly) Chinn, criticising Davies for adopting a Western-centric attitude to studying and conceptualising art of other cultures. It can be useful to consider this in the context of Nikiru Ngzewu, ‘African Art in Deep Time: De-race-ing Aesthetics and De-racializing Visual Art’, asking to what extent the present discussion is similar to her criticism of Vogel and Danto. Given that Davies is offering a reply to the criticisms, this could offer an opportunity for a debate-style class design. The texts, and especially Davies’ reply, invite a further reflection: can one ever understand, conceptualise, or analyse the products (art?) of another culture, without doing so using the conceptual frameworks of one’s own culture in ways that are problematic? If yes, how could this be done? If not, should we just never attempt it? What role do power structures and imbalances play in such attempts?
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Simon FoktAbstract: This notion of non-personhood denies the right of handicapped people to be recognised as equal human beings in a caring society, and it makes a mockery of the goodwill which seemingly abounded in the International Year of Disabled People. Legislation of the type proposed could well also lead to the de facto decriminalisation of the act of killing a handicapped person of any age, just as it did in Hitler'sGermany.And if it does, woe betide any handicapped people who are too ill to defend their right to life by protesting that they are in fact happy. And woe betide us all, when we get too old to be considered 'useful' and all the friends who could have spoken in our defence have already been oh so lovingly 'allowed to die'.
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Added by: Tomasz Zyglewicz, Shannon Brick, Michael GreerIntroduction: The paucity of literature on the black woman is outrageous on its face. But we must also contend with the fact that too many of these rare studies must claim as their signal achievement the reinforcement of fictitious cliches. They have given credence to grossly distorted categories through which the black woman continues to be perceived.
Comment (from this Blueprint): Content warning: Details of cruelties of slavery, sexual assault. In this 1971 text written while incarcerated, Angela Davis makes an argument against the truth of a stereotype of the black enslaved woman. She argues that, contrary to popular belief, the stereotype of a black woman under slavery as the “matriarch” (i.e., dominating the men in their lives and colluding with the white slaver in black people’s oppression) is not true. Instead, she argues, appealing to empirical evidence and marxist theory, that black women’s position in the community of slaves uniquely positioned them to aid in liberation struggles. She argues it is empirically borne out that they in fact were crucial to both explicit and everyday resistance efforts.
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Added by: Anne-Marie McCallionPublisher's Note: A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis.
Comment: This text would be useful for courses which touch upon Black Feminism, intersectionality, Slavery or the history of feminism.
Comment (from this Blueprint): In this 2018 article Alice Crary launches a critique against analytic feminists for employing what she terms a "neutral conception of reason," which pretends that the best form of reason is one free from feelings, biases, and value, as if one may employ reason from a "view from nowhere." To the contrary, Crary thinks there is no view from nowhere, and that feminist philosophy's insistence on the important of lived experience is synonymous with it's recognition that reasoning is done from a particular social location and is always-already "ethically" valenced: one's lived experiences and affects saturate one's ethically-loaded point of view, and this is recruited for feminist ends! To illustrate this point, Crary considers Miranda Fricker's 2007 book Epistemic Injustice, which we see elsewhere on this reading list. According to Fricker's neutral conception of reason, testimonial epistemic injustice is remedied by neutralizing stereotypical prejudice in one's judgments of credibility. On Crary's reading, however, there is no neutral space of reason. Crary argues for a methodological radicalism (as opposed to what she terms Fricker's methodological conservativism) which begins with ethically-loaded perspectives on the world. Indeed, she thinks this is how we can make sense of the consciousness-raising Fricker is interested in: Crary points out that "in order to get the patterns of [problematic] behaviour constitutive of [...] abuse adequately into focus, we need to look upon the social world from a particular ethically-loaded perspective" (57).