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Added by: Tomasz Zyglewicz, Shannon Brick, Michael GreerAbstract:
Consent is a bedrock principle in democratic society and a primary means through which our law expresses its commitment to individual liberty. While there seems to be broad consensus that consent is important, little is known about what people think consent is. This article undertakes an empirical investigation of people’s ordinary intuitions about when consent has been granted. Using techniques from moral psychology and experimental philosophy, it advances the core claim that most laypeople think consent is compatible with fraud, contradicting prevailing normative theories of consent. This empirical phenomenon is observed across over two dozen scenarios spanning numerous contexts in which consent is legally salient, including sex, surgery, participation in medical research, warrantless searches by police, and contracts. Armed with this empirical finding, this Article revisits a longstanding legal puzzle about why the law refuses to treat fraudulently procured consent to sexual intercourse as rape. It exposes how prevailing explanations for this puzzle have focused too narrowly on sex. It suggests instead that the law may be influenced by the commonsense understanding of consent in all sorts of domains, including and beyond sexual consent. Meanwhile, the discovery of “commonsense consent” allows us to see that the problem is much deeper and more pervasive than previous commentators have realized. The findings expose a large—and largely unrecognized—disconnect between commonsense intuition and the dominant philosophical conception of consent. The Article thus grapples with the relationship between folk morality, normative theory, and the law.Song, Sarah. Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism2007, Cambridge University Press.-
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Sarah Song
Publisher's Note: Justice, Gender and the Politics of Multiculturalism explores the tensions that arise when culturally diverse democratic states pursue both justice for religious and cultural minorities and justice for women. Sarah Song provides a distinctive argument about the circumstances under which egalitarian justice requires special accommodations for cultural minorities while emphasizing the value of gender equality as an important limit on cultural accommodation. Drawing on detailed case studies of gendered cultural conflicts, including conflicts over the 'cultural defense' in criminal law, aboriginal membership rules and polygamy, Song offers a fresh perspective on multicultural politics by examining the role of intercultural interactions in shaping such conflicts. In particular, she demonstrates the different ways that majority institutions have reinforced gender inequality in minority communities and, in light of this, argues in favour of resolving gendered cultural dilemmas through intercultural democratic dialogue.Comment: The book combines political philosophy with case studies exploring conflicts between gender equality and multiculturalism. It could be used in graduate or undergraduate courses on the topic of gender and multiculturalism, paired with Susan Okin's 'Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?'
Song, Sarah. Multiculturalism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy-
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Sarah SongAbstract:
Article: The article examines the idea of multiculturalism in contemporary political philosophy. It considers the variety of justifications for multiculturalism, including communitarian, liberal egalitarian, anti-domination, and historical injustice arguments. It then surveys a number of critiques of multiculturalism. It concludes by discussing concerns about political backlash and retreat from multiculturalism in the Western liberal democratic countries.Comment: This Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy piece provides an accessible introduction to the idea of multiculturalism and its various justifications and critiques.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation2009, Penguin Modern Classics-
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Added by: Rossen Ventzislavov, Contributed by: Christy Mag Uidhir
Summary: Sontag mines the history of philosophical aesthetics and art criticism for the reasons why interpretation has held us under its spell for the last two millennia. One such reason is our insistence on the form/content dichotomy and the vestigial prioritizing of content in the way we talk about art. Another reason is the discursive, and thus political, control that interpretation enables. A third reason is our willingness to sacrifice our unmediated experience of an artwork, and our sensitivity to an artist's intentions, for the sake of interpretative success. To counter these "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling" tendencies, Sontag proposes an "erotics of art" - a new emphasis on transparence, which favors description and appreciation over interpretation. This critical ethos does not only change the terms of conceptual engagement; it also opens the gates for creative approaches to art which explicitly challenge vestigial modes of meaning-making and meaning extraction. Even though Sontag does not specifically single any of these approaches out, performance art is arguably the most extreme of the potential candidates.Comment: This text offers a seminal critique of art interpretation and should be included in any course discussing interpretation and criticism.
Sorge, Carmen. The Relationship Between Bonding with Nonhuman Animals and Students’ Attitude Towards Science2008, Society and Animals 16 (2): 171-184-
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Added by: Sara Peppe
Abstract: This paper examines the relationship of bonding with nonhuman animals during an interactive, animal-in-the-wild science program and the science attitudes of 358 young children between the ages of 8 and 14 Talking Talons utilizes typically wild animals such as raptors, reptiles, and bats in a school-based educational science curriculum. Qualitative data from interviews with students in the program indicated that 'bonding with animals' and the educators within the program were related to increased positive attitudes toward science. The program used quantitative methods to examine these dual relationships - with animals and with educators- on student attitude toward science. The program performed a step-wise multiple regression with 'Attitude toward Science' as the dependent variable and 'Gender,' 'Age,' and 'Bonding with Animals' as independent variables. Both 'Bonding with Animals' and 'Bonding with the Educator' contributed significantly to prediction of the participants' science attitudes. Altogether 28% of the variance in 'Science Attitude' was predicted by both 'Gender' and 'Age' , 'Bonding with Animals' and 'Bonding with Educator'. Bonding with the animals had a large quantifiable relationship with student attitudes toward science.Comment: This article is about the theme of 'bonding with animals' during a science programme. It is highly recommended for intermediate readers who have some knowledge about the main topic of the article.
Spaulding, Shannon. Mirror Neurons and Social Cognition2013, Mind and Language 28 (2):233-257-
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Added by: Andrea Blomqvist
Abstract: Mirror neurons are widely regarded as an important key to social cognition. Despite such wide agreement, there is very little consensus on how or why they are important. The goal of this paper is to clearly explicate the exact role mirror neurons play in social cognition. I aim to answer two questions about the relationship between mirroring and social cognition: What kind of social understanding is involved with mirroring? How is mirroring related to that understanding? I argue that philosophical and empirical considerations lead us to accord a fairly minimal role for mirror neurons in social cognition.Comment: What processes enable mindreading is a prominent debate in social cognition. A view that has been proposed in recent years is that mirror neurons play a role in mindreading (for example suggested by Goldman, 2006). However, exactly which conclusions mirror neuron research allows us to draw is controversial, and here Spaulding provides interesting objections to a prominent mirror neuron study. This paper is particularly suitable in a social cognition module.
Spencer, Quayshawn. A radical solution to the Race problem2014, Philosophy of Science 81 (5):1025-1038-
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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Anonymous
Abstract: It has become customary among philosophers and biologists to claim that folk racial classification has no biological basis. This paper attempts to debunk that view. In this paper, I show that ‘race’, as used in current U.S. race talk, picks out a biologically real entity. I do this by, first, showing that ‘race’, in this use, is not a kind term, but a proper name for a set of human population groups. Next, using recent human genetic clustering results, I show that this set of human population groups is a partition of human populations that I call ‘the Blumenbach partition’.
Comment: This is a great paper to use for teaching metaphysics of race
Srinivasan, Amia. Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?2018, London Review of Books, 40 (6): 5-10.-
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Added by: Andrea Blomqvist, Contributed by: Nadia MehdiAbstract:
Srinivasan attempts to address the question of how we are able to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.Comment: This text is an insightful call to bring discussions of sexual consent back to a politics of desire. It would make a great addition to syllabi covering the philosophy of sex.
Srinivasan, Amia. Sex as a Pedagogical Failure2020, Yale Law Journal 129 (4)-
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Abstract:
In the early 1980s, U.S. universities began regulating sexual relationships between professors and students. Such regulations are routinely justified by a rationale drawn from sexual-harassment law in the employment context: the power differential between professor and student precludes the possibility of genuine consent on the student’s part. This rationale is problematic, as feminists in the 1980s first observed, for its protectionist and infantilizing attitude toward (generally) women students. But it is also problematic in that it fails to register what is truly ethically troubling about consensual professor-student sex. A professor’s having sex with his student constitutes a pedagogical failure: that is, a failure to satisfy the duties that arise from the practice of teaching. What is more, much consensual professor-student sex constitutes a patriarchal failure: such relationships often feed on, and reinforce, women’s second-class standing in higher education. As such, these relationships can thwart the legal right of women students, under Title IX, to exist in the university on equal terms with their male counterparts. Whether or not we should ultimately favor such an interpretation of Title IX—whether or not, that is, it would render campuses ultimately more equal for women and other marginalized people—it is clear that university professors need to attend more carefully to the sexual ethics of their own practice.
Comment: Srinivasan made international headlines in 2021 with her book, The Right to Sex (2021), which includes an adapted version of this essay. In the midst of the #MeToo movement and global reckoning with cultures of sexual harrassment, she turned a sharp, philosophical lens towards many of the topics regarding power, sexuality, and feminism that not only had been brushed under the rug in popular media, but had also been largely considered irrelevant for philosophical investigation. This essay would make for fruitful discussion in courses or reading groups specifically focused on feminist themes, or could be used in more interdisciplinary contexts to study the #MeToo movement and the current state of modern feminist thought (other essays on similar topics can also be found in the book). For the purposes of offering the version of the essay in its most academic form, this entry cites the earlier version which was published in the Yale Law Review in 2020.
Srinivasan, Amia. Feminism and Metaethics2016, in Mcpherson, Tristram and Plunkett, David (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge 2016-
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Added by: Giada Fratantonio
Abstract: Feminism is first and foremost a political project: a project aimed at the liberation of women and the destruction of patriarchy. This project does not have a particular metaethics; there is no feminist consensus, for example, on the epistemology of moral belief or the metaphysics of moral truth. But the work of feminist philosophers - that is, philosophers who identify with the political project of feminism, and moreover see that political project as informing their philosophical work - raises significant metaethical questions: about the need to rehabilitate traditional moral philosophy, about the extent to which political and moral considerations can play a role in philosophical theorizing, and about the importance of rival metaethical conceptions for first-order political practice. I discuss some of the contributions that feminist philosophy makes to each of these questions in turn. I hope to call attention to the way in which feminist thought bears on traditional topics in metaethics (particularly moral epistemology and ethical methodology) but also to how feminist thought might inform metaethical practice itself.Comment: The author discusses some contributions that feminist philosophy can make to some questions on metaethics. Can be used for a course on feminism.
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Sommers, Roseanna. Commonsense Consent
2020, Yale Law Journal, 2232
Comment (from this Blueprint): Content warning: details of rape. This article presents a series of experimental studies that have an important result for understanding a legal puzzle that has plagued many feminist theorists. Sommers argues that the dominant explanation of the puzzle has been wrongly diagnosed by feminist theorists, and that attention to folk intuitions about the nature of consent can explain the law's inconsistent treatment of consent that is procured by deception.