Diversity Reading List

Do Lucretius’ vivid evocations of pain and suffering render impotent his therapy for fear of death? Lucretius’ readers have long noted the discord between his avowed aim to provide a rational foundation for cool detachment from death and his impassioned and acute attention to nature’s often cruel brutality. I argue that Lucretius does have a viable remedy for death anxiety but that this remedy significantly departs from Epicurus’ original counsel. Lucretius’ remedy confesses its origins in a heightened, rather than benumbed, sensitivity to the affective and somatic features of human experience, culminating in “the feel of not to feel it.”

The Zhuangzi offers two apparently incompatible models of bereavement. Zhuangzi sometimes suggests that the sage will greet loss with unfractured equanimity and even aplomb. However, upon the death of his own wife, Zhuangzi evinces a sorrow that, albeit brief, fits ill with this suggestion. In this essay, I contend that the grief that Zhuangzi displays at his wife’s death better honors wider values averred elsewhere in the text and, more generally, that a sage who retains a capacity for sorrow will be better positioned for the robust joy so often identified as central to the Zhuangzi’s vision of flourishing. The sagely figures who entirely forego sorrow, I argue, achieve equanimity only through a sacrifice of the emotional range and responsiveness necessary not only for grief but also for the delight Zhuangzi recommends.

This paper uses logic - a formal language with models and a consequence relation - to think about the social and political topics of subordination and subordinative speech. I take subordination to be a matter of three things: i) ranking one person or a group of people below others, ii) depriving the lower-ranked of rights, and iii) permitting others to discriminate against them. Subordinative speech is speech - utterances in contexts - which subordinates. Section 1 introduces the topic of subordination using examples from the 1979 novel Kindred by Octavia Butler. Section 2 uses these examples to clarify and illustrate the definitions of subordination and subordinative speech. Sections 3 and 4 then develop a way of modeling subordination using a system of social spheres, an adaptation of (Lewis, 1973)'s approach to modeling the relation of comparative similarity on worlds for counterfactuals. Section 4 looks at three possible applications for this work: giving truth-conditions for social quantifiers, identifying fallacies involving such expressions, and explaining the pragmatics of subordinative speech. The last section anticipates objections and raises further questions.

This chapter explores a so-far neglected way of avoiding the bads of loneliness: by learning to value solitude, where that is understood as a state of ‘keeping oneself company’, as J. David Velleman puts it. Unlike loneliness, solitude need not involve any deprivation, whether subjective or objective. This chapter considers the various goods to which solitude is constitutive or instrumental, with a focus on the promise that proper valuing of solitude holds for combating loneliness. The overall argument is this: If loneliness significantly detracts from individual wellbeing, and if the ability to value solitude protects against loneliness, then such an ability is obviously valuable to human flourishing. If, further, loneliness raises concerns of justice, then supporting people’s ability to value solitude is a way to implement a desideratum of justice. Individuals can cultivate their ability to value solitude, an ability that others can promote or hinder.

This article shows that associative freedom is not what we tend to thinkit is. Contrary to standard liberal thinking, it is neither a general moral permissionto choose the society most acceptable to us nor a content-insensitive claim-rightakin to the other personal freedoms with which it is usually lumped such asfreedom of expression and freedom of religion. It is at most (i) a highly restrictedmoral permission to associate subject to constraints of consent, necessity andburdensomeness; (ii) a conditional moral permission not to associate provided ourassociative contributions are not required; and (iii) a highly constrained, contentsensitive moral claim-right that protects only those wrongful associations thathonour other legitimate concerns such as consent, need, harm and respect. Thisarticle also shows that associative freedom is not as valuable as we tend to think itis. It is secondary to positive associative claim-rights that protect our fundamentalsocial needs and are pre-conditions for any associative control worth the name.

Common sense morality and legislations around the world ascribe normative relevance to biological connections between parents and children. Procreators who meet a modest standard of parental competence are believed to have a right to rear the children they brought into the world. I explore various attempts to justify this belief and find most of these attempts lacking. I distinguish between two kinds of biological connections between parents and children: the genetic link and the gestational link. I argue that the second can better justify a right to rear.

This paper provides an answer to the question why birth parents have a moral right to keep and raise their biological babies. I start with a critical discussion of the parent-centred model of justifying parents’ rights, recently proposed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift. Their account successfully defends a fundamental moral right to parent in general but, because it does not provide an account of how individuals acquire the right to parent a particular baby, it is insufficient for addressing the question whether and why there is a right to parent one’s biological child. Such a right is important because, in its absence, fairness towards adequate prospective parents who are involuntarily childless would demand a ‘babies redistribution’; moreover, in societies with entrenched histories of injustice there may be reasons of fairness for shuffling babies amongst all recent parents. I supplement the Brighouse-Swift account of fundamental parental rights by an account of how adequate parents acquire the right to parent their biological babies. I advance two arguments to this conclusion: by the time of birth, the birth parents will have already shouldered various burdens in order to bring children into existence, and are likely to have formed an intimate relationship with the future baby. Denying birth parents who would make at least adequate parents the right to keep their baby would be unfair to them and would destroy already formed parent-baby relationships which, I assume, are intrinsically valuable.

There is a broad philosophical consensus that both children’s and prospective parents’ interests are relevant to the justification of a right to parent. Against this view, I argue that it is impermissible to sacrifice children’s interests for the sake of advancing adults’ interest in childrearing. Therefore, the allocation of the moral right to parent should track the child’s, and not the potential parent’s, interest. This revisionary thesis is moderated by two additional qualifications. First, parents lack the moral right to exclude others from associating with the child. Second, children usually come into the world as part of a relationship with their gestational mother; often, this relationship deserves protection.

This is the second of the four essays in Part II of the book on liberalism and traditionalist education; all four are by authors who would like to find ways for the liberal state to honour the self-definitions of traditional cultures and to find ways of avoiding a confrontation with differences. Melissa Williams examines citizenship as identity in relation to the project of nation-building, the shifting boundaries of citizenship in relation to globalization, citizenship as shared fate, and the role of multicultural education within the view of citizenship-as-shared-fate. She argues the other side of the same coin to that presented by Shelley Burtt in the previous chapter: according to Williams, the liberal state often demands too much in the way of loyalty from traditional groups, and when it does, it runs a strong risk of becoming oppressive and illiberal. Moreover, she holds that there is no need for a single shared identity among citizens of the liberal state. Her conception of people tied together by a shared fate is to this extent compatible with Burtt’s attempt to make liberalism’s commitment to autonomy more hospitable to groups of individuals encumbered by unchosen attachments, but her notion of citizenship as shared fate also goes further than that, and possibly stands in some tension with, Burtt’s view, since it allows and even encourages people to develop primary affiliation to all kind of groups – traditional as well as global.