Diversity Reading List

Comment:

Comment: The paper would offer a good overview of the current state of the moral testimony literature, specifically focusing on moral arguments against moral testimony. The paper moves through the literature quickly and breezily, explaining the key positions then offering a counterargument. It requires minimal knowledge of the literature, although it does presuppose some familiarity with what testimony is meant to be.

Comment: This paper explores questions as the intersection of feminism and the basic income literature, offering one of the central cases made in support of basic income by feminists: that a basic income, especially with compared with other forms of stakeholding, has the potential to advance democratization more generally, and women's freedom specifically, by breaking the "long-standing link between income and employment, and end(ing) the mutual reinforcement of the institutions of marriage, employment, and citizenship." The author shows why basic income is preferrable to stakeholding with these goals in mind. The paper would therefore be interesting to discuss in relation to feminist politics or a survey of the basic income literature, especially assigned in tandem with some of the literature treated as UBI canon or core, such as Phillipe Van Parijs' work.

Comment: This text explores existing conceptions of citizenship as identity and the challenges these pose for the ideal liberal state. In addition, the author proposes a previous unrecognised conception of citizenship as shared fate. In doing so, the paper touches on a variety of topics in contemporary political philosophy and theory, such as multiculturalism and globalization, the boundaries of political identity, the grounding of liberal democracy, and the project of civic education. As such, it would be most useful as a supplemental reading in undergraduate level political philosophy courses discussing any of the aforementioned topics, or in more specific contexts to explore questions about citizenship and what it means to share an idenitity with a group of others, with whom we may never meet face-to-face or have direct interpersonal dealings. The article itself has interesting implications for questions of social cohesion and group identity.

Comment: This article examines the relationship between political and comprehensive liberalism with an eye towards evaluating whether the former encourages a greater degree of social diversity when it comes to models of civic education. Utimately, Gutmann argues that the difference between political and comprehensive liberalism is exaggerated: what matters more, in determining which approaches to civic education facilitate greater degrees of social and individual diversity, is 'a substantive understanding of what good citizenship entails' and what the aims of civic education are. In it's method, this paper is located at the intersection of political philosophy and political theory. For this reason, it might be useful in an intermediate undergraduate or master's level political philosophy course with significant crossover in the political theory / political science discipline. Gutmann focuses heavily on the work of historic and contemporary liberals, including Mill, Rawls, Raz, Galston, and Macedo, so the article may be useful as further reading in courses which examine these authors approaches to civic education, or contemporary approaches to civic education in general.

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.

Comment (from this Blueprint): Willis describes the double binds women are in: between being too good – boring, frigid, a sexual failure, a cold bitch – and being bad – easy, insatiable, demanding. Willis argues that the only way to solve this is to end the association between sex and badness. This presents an answer to Bartky's dilemma: we should choose to eradicate sexual shame, rather than our desires.

Comment (from this Blueprint): Zheng argues that some sexual desires are morally problematic - namely, racial fetishes. Some people defend racial fetishes by claiming they are mere aesthetic preferences, lacking racist content or origins. Zheng responds that they are objectionable regardless because of their role in the sexual objectification of certain racial groups. This is useful as a case study of a "bad" desire: is it really bad? What is bad about it? Can someone change it?

Comment (from this Blueprint): Chapter 4 is about what a feminist should do when they have a sexual desire which is in tension with their feminist beliefs in a way that makes them feel ashamed. There are two natural choices: to give up the shame and continue to have the desire, or to give up the desire. Bartky examines both of these choices and finds us in a tricky situation: it is sometimes apt and understandable to feel shame about a sexual desire (when it really is in tension with your principles), but she is sceptical about the view that we can change our desires at will or with therapy.

Comment (from this Blueprint): Tilton and Ichikawa attempt to work out what goes wrong in certain deception cases but not in others. This is useful as a reply to Dougherty's argument that sex from deception is always morally serious and it engages with the issues Fischel raises around gender deception.