Diversity Reading List

Introduction: The social sciences have long had an inferiority complex. Because the social sciences emerged as distinct disciplines after the natural sciences, comparisons between the mature and successful natural sciences and the fledgling social sciences were quickly made. One of the primary concerns that arose was over the role of values in the social sciences. There were several reasons for this. First, the social sciences did not have the clear empirical successes that the natural sciences did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to bolster confidence in their reliability. Some postulated that an undue influence of values on the social sciences contributed to this deficit of empirical success. Second, social sciences such as economics and psychology emerged from their philosophical precursors gradually and often carried with them the clear normative trappings of their disciplinary origins. Third, although formal rules on the treatment of human subjects would not emerge until the second half of the twentieth century, by the time the social sciences emerged, it was obvious there were both ethical and epistemic challenges to experimenting on human subjects and human communities. Controlled settings were (and are) often difficult to achieve (or are unethical to achieve), making clear empirical success even more elusive. Finally, there is the additional com-plication that social sciences invariably study and/or comment upon human values. All of these considerations lent credence to the view that social sciences were inevitably more value-laden, and as a result less reliable, than the natural sciences.

Abstract:
Although feminist authors and publications abound in other disciplines on the continent, professional African philosophy is overwhelmingly male dominated, with a conspicuous absence of feminist and gender themes. To redress the situation, du Toit and Coetzee consider the choice between applying globally dominant feminist frameworks to issues and debates in the African context or outright immersion in the masculine field of African philosophy in order to open up spaces for feminist questions in dialogue with indigenous worldviews and philosophical positions. In this chapter the authors focus on the second option, in line with recent calls to more authentically contextualize philosophical practice on the continent. The chapter examines the themes of sexual agency and motherhood. Grounded in this way, African feminist philosophy emerges as a potentially powerful source of critique and partner in dialogue with the more established strands of feminist thought.

Abstract:
This article represents a response to ‘the problem of women and African philosophy’, which refers mainly to the absence of strong women’s and feminist voices within the discipline of African philosophy. I investigate the possibility that African women are not so much excluded from the institutionalized discipline of philosophy, as preferring fiction as a genre for intellectual expression. This hypothesis can be supported by some feminists who read the absolute prioritisation of abstraction and generalization over the concrete and the particular as a masculine and western oppressive strategy. Attention to the concrete and the unique which is made possible by literature more readily than by philosophy, could thus operate as a form of political resistance in certain contexts. If fiction is currently the preferred form of intellectual expression of African women, it is crucial that the community of professional philosophers in a context like South Africa should come to terms with the relevance of such a preference for philosophy’s self-conception, and it should work to make these intellectual contributions philosophically fruitful. In the process, we may entertain the hope that philosophy itself will move closer to its root or source as ‘love of wisdom’.

Abstract: This article outlines the issues addressed by feminist philosophy of art, critically surveys major developments in the field, and concludes by considering directions in which the field is moving.

Abstract:
The points this chapter labors to make are straight and simple. First, the documented reflections of women in contemporary African philosophy, of individuals such as Sophie Oluwole, Anke Graness, Wangari Maathai, Nkiru Nzegwu, Ebunoluwa Oduwole, Betty Wambui, Gail Presbey, and Louise du Toit, are impossible to deny or to ignore; the heritage they (and other female thinkers on the African condition, too numerous to do justice to here) have bequeathed to African philosophy and the world deserves the recognition denied it for so long, and current African philosophical historiography must remediate this epistemic injustice. Furthermore, I maintain that concepts are crucial in philosophical discourse, and this work has thrown up fresh concepts and keywords such as ‘his-story’, ‘her-story’, ‘her-storycide’, ‘her-storicity’, and ‘Afro-herstoricism’. These concepts are pregnant with implications, consequences, and creative possibilities for African philosophy and her place in the philosophical world. These concepts encapsulate the idea that women’s lives, experiences, deeds, contributions, voices, perceptions, representations, struggles, problems, expectations and participation in human affairs have been too long neglected or undervalued in standard historical narratives, and that serious cognizance must be taken of the creative works that women have produced in the development of knowledge and how these have affected the philosophic temper. Contemporary African philosophy cannot run away from honoring its ‘debts and duties’ to women in African philosophy.

Introduction: The abortion debate rages on. Yet the two most popular positions seem to be clearly mistaken. Conservatives maintain that a human life begins at conception and that therefore abortion must be wrong because it is murder. But not all killings of humans are murders. Most notably, self defense may justify even the killing of an innocent per- son.

Liberals, on the other hand, are just as mistaken in their argument that since a fetus does not become a person until birth, a woman may do whatever she pleases in and to her own body. First, you cannot do as you please with your own body if it affects other people adversely. Second, if a fetus is not a person, that does not imply that you can do to it anything you wish. Animals, for example, are not persons, yet to kill or torture them for no reason at all is wrong.

At the center of the storm has been the issue of just when it is between ovulation and adulthood that a person appears on the scene. Conservatives draw the line at conception, liberals at birth. In this paper I first examine our concept of a person and conclude that no single criterion can capture the concept of a person and no sharp line can be drawn. Next I argue that if a fetus is a person, abortion is still justifiable in many cases; and if a fetus is not a person, killing it is still wrong in many cases. To a large extent, these two solutions are in agreement. I conclude that our concept of a person cannot and need not bear the weight that the abortion controversy has thrust upon it.

Abstract:
Amidst signs of declining social capital, the typical workplace is a hotbed of sociability and cooperation. And in a still-segregated society, the workplace is where adults are most likely to interact across color lines. The convergence of close interaction and some racial diversity makes the workplace a crucial institution within a diverse democratic society. Paradoxically, the involuntariness of workplace associations—the compulsion of economic necessity, of managerial authority, and of law—helps to facilitate constructive interaction among diverse co-workers. Where racial diversity is a fact of organizational life (and the law can help to make it so), then employers and workers have their own powerful reasons—psychological and economic—to make those relationships constructive, even amicable. I contend here that it is where we are compelled to get along, and not where we choose to do so, that we can best advance the project of racial integration.

Abstract: Patient competence is an essential element of every doctor-patient relationship. In this paper I provide a case report involving an older Korean man in a Hawaiian hospital who refused treatment on the basis of mistaken facts or beliefs about his doctors and treatment. I discuss the case as it relates to competency and extends it to informed consent, autonomy and paternalism. I suggest and argue firstly, that the older Korean man is not fully competent, and secondly, that if he is not fully competent, then soft and weak paternalism may be justified in his case and in cases similar to his.

Back matter: War is about individuals maiming and killing each other, and yet, it seems that it is also irreducibly collective, as it is fought by groups of people and more often than not for the sake of communal values such as territorial integrity and national self-determination. Cécile Fabre articulates and defends an ethical account of war in which the individual, as a moral and rational agent, is the fundamental focus for concern and respect--both as a combatant whose acts of killing need justifying and as a non-combatant whose suffering also needs justifying. She takes as her starting point a political morality to which the individual, rather than the nation-state, is central, namely cosmopolitanism. According to cosmopolitanism, individuals all matter equally, irrespective of their membership in this or that political community. Traditional war ethics already accepts this principle, since it holds that unarmed civilians are illegitimate targets even though they belong to the enemy community. However, although the traditional account of whom we may kill in wars is broadly faithful to that principle, the traditional account of why we may kill and of who may kill is not. Cosmopolitan theorists, for their part, do not address the ethical issues raised by war in any depth. Fabre's Cosmopolitan War seeks to fill this gap, and defends its account of just and unjust wars by addressing the ethics of different kinds of war: wars of national defence, wars over scarce resources, civil wars, humanitarian intervention, wars involving private military forces, and asymmetrical wars.

Abstract: The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been characterized by the deployment of large private military forces, under contract with the US administration. The use of so-called private military corporations (PMCs) and, more generally, of mercenaries, has long attracted criticisms. This article argues that under certain conditions (drawn from the Just War tradition), there is nothing inherently objectionable about mercenarism. It begins by exposing a weakness in the most obvious justification for mercenarism, to wit, the justification from freedom of occupational choice. It then deploys a less obvious, but stronger, argument – one that appeals to the importance of enabling just defensive killings. Finally, it rebuts five moral objections to mercenarism.