Warren, Mary Anne. On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion
1973, The Monist, 57 (4): 43-61.
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordSummary: This paper is a response to Thomson's influential defense of abortion. Warren argues that Thomson is mistaken that if a fetus has full moral rights, then abortion is still morally permissible. Warren, instead, argues that while fetuses participate in genetic humanity, they do not participate in the category of personhood (the category which defines the moral community). For this reason, abortion is always morally permissible and thus ought to be legally permissible.Comment: This reading is a good response to Thomson's influential violinist case. The text is a bit complex, and would be better suited for a course that considered issues of abortion and infanticide in an in depth way.
Whiteley, Ella Kate. Attentional discrimination and victim testimony
2024, Philosophical Psychology, 37:6, 1407-1431
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Added by: Heng Ying, Contributed by: Heng YingAbstract:
Sometimes, a form of discrimination is hard to register, understand, and articulate. A rich precedent demonstrates how victim testimonies have been key in uncovering such “hidden” forms of discrimination, from sexual harassment to microaggressions. I reflect on how this plausibly goes too for “attentional discrimination”, referring to cases where the more meaningful attributes of one social group are made salient in attention in contrast to the less meaningful attributes of another. Victim testimonies understandably dominate the “context-of-discovery” stage of research into these initially opaque forms of discrimination; a victim’s encounter with the gap between their experience and dominant conceptual frameworks for understanding it is what provides an initial foothold for analysis to begin. Some object, however, to this methodology continuing to dominate the later “context-of-justification” stage, where the hypothesis is rigorously challenged. I argue that this objection underestimates not just how other methodologies are more likely to inherit the various mechanisms of invisibility hiding the discrimination in question, but also how victim testimonies are distinctively well-suited to recognize and challenge those mechanisms. Victim testimonies, then, ought to continue playing a dominant role into these later stages of research regarding hidden forms of discrimination.Comment: 1) Whiteley discusses an issue arising in interpersonal interactions, how individuals' preferred traits are ignored and how people often look at others through their preferred lens. This identifies a form of discrimination not fully articulated in the previous work. It could be used for discussions of ideas such as respect of personhood. 2) This paper also introduces testimonies of victims of this form of discrimination as a useful tool for identifying new social issues and justifying new moral claims. It motivates methodological reflection on how we bring lived experiences into discussions of morality.
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