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Added by: Björn FreterPublisher’s Note: Zoopolis offers a new agenda for the theory and practice of animal rights. Most animal rights theory focuses on the intrinsic capacities or interests of animals, and the moral status and moral rights that these intrinsic characteristics give rise to. Zoopolis shifts the debate from the realm of moral theory and applied ethics to the realm of political theory, focusing on the relational obligations that arise from the varied ways that animals relate to human societies and institutions. Building on recent developments in the political theory of group-differentiated citizenship, Zoopolis introduces us to the genuine "political animal". It argues that different types of animals stand in different relationships to human political communities. Domesticated animals should be seen as full members of human-animal mixed communities, participating in the cooperative project of shared citizenship. Wilderness animals, by contrast, form their own sovereign communities entitled to protection against colonization, invasion, domination and other threats to self-determination. `Liminal' animals who are wild but live in the midst of human settlement (such as crows or raccoons) should be seen as "denizens", resident of our societies, but not fully included in rights and responsibilities of citizenship. To all of these animals we owe respect for their basic inviolable rights. But we inevitably and appropriately have very different relations with them, with different types of obligations. Humans and animals are inextricably bound in a complex web of relationships, and Zoopolis offers an original and profoundly affirmative vision of how to ground this complex web of relations on principles of justice and compassion.
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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Naomi Beecroft, Emily DysonAbstract: Too often, identifying practices of silencing is a seemingly impossible exercise. Here I claim that attempting to give a conceptual reading of the epistemic violence present when silencing occurs can help distinguish the different ways members of oppressed groups are silenced with respect to testimony. I offer an account of epistemic violence as the failure, owing to pernicious ignorance, of hearers to meet the vulnerabilities of speakers in linguistic exchanges. Ultimately, I illustrate that by focusing on the ways in which hearers fail to meet speaker dependency in a linguistic exchange, efforts can be made to demarcate the different types of silencing people face when attempting to testify from oppressed positions in society.
Comment: This text provides an alternative framework to epistemic injustice and focuses on the positionality of black women. It encourages thought about (certain kinds of) ignorance as specific harms to others. This would suit an undergraduate class who were looking at race, gender, and/or applied epistemologies.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Corbin CovingtonIntroduction: The noticeable uptake of the paper 'How Is This Paper Philosophy?' (Dotson 2012a) within professional philosophy has given me the occasion to reflect about the uptake of philosophy papers. This may shed light on producing socially relevant philosophy articles and their costs. The relative success of that paper is a huge surprise to me. What I mean by success is pretty straightforward and not particularly ambitious. I am counting success as whether one regularly runs into people who have read one's paper and cite it as having had an impact on their considered or ambient positions on the paper's content. That is, it has received some uptake in a populated domain of activity. What I take to be central to ques-tions of how an article becomes socially relevant are questions of uptake. Uptake, here, is understood broadly to refer to readership that takes one's stated positions seriously enough to adopt (or be influenced by) them in part or in whole. What I have found is that many people in academic philosophy, for example, have read 'How Is This Paper Philosophy?' Some folks pay serious attention to it.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Corbin CovingtonAbstract: In this paper, first and foremost, I aim to issue a caution. Specifically, I caution that when addressing and identifying forms of epistemic oppression one needs to endeavor not to perpetuate epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression, here, refers to epistemic exclusions afforded positions and communities that produce de? ciencies in social knowledge. An epistemic exclusion, in this analysis, is an infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers that reduces her or his ability to participate in a given epistemic community.2 Epistemic agency will concern the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources.3 A compromise to epistemic agency, when unwarranted, damages not only individual knowers but also the state of social knowledge and shared epistemic resources.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Corbin CovingtonAbstract: On December 3, 2014, in a piece entitled 'White America's Scary Delusion: Why Its Sense of Black Humanity Is So Skewed,' Brittney Cooper criticizes attempts to deem Black rage at state-sanctioned violence against Black people 'unreasonable.' In this paper, I outline a problem with epistemology that Cooper highlights in order to explore whether beliefs can wrong. My overall claim is there are difficult-to-defeat arguments concerning the 'legitimacy' of police slayings against Black people that are indicative of problems with epistemology because of the epistemic power they accumulate toward resilient oblivion, which can have the effect of normalizing oppressive conditions. That is to say, if one takes the value of lessening oppression as a key feature of normative, epistemological conduct, then it can generate demands on epistemological orientations that, in turn, generate wrongs for beliefs and, more specifically, beliefs as wrongs.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Corbin CovingtonAbstract: Epistemic oppression refers to persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one's contribution to knowledge production. The tendency to shy away from using the term 'epistemic oppression' may follow from an assumption that epistemic forms of oppression are generally reducible to social and political forms of oppression. While I agree that many exclusions that compromise one's ability to contribute to the production of knowledge can be reducible to social and political forms of oppression, there still exists distinctly irreducible forms of epistemic oppression. In this paper, I claim that a major point of distinction between reducible and irreducible epistemic oppression is the major source of difficulty one faces in addressing each kind of oppression, i.e. epistemic power or features of epistemological systems. Distinguishing between reducible and irreducible forms of epistemic oppression can offer a better understanding of what is at stake in deploying the term and when such deployment is apt.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Corbin CovingtonAbstract: This paper answers a call made by Anita Allen to genuinely assess whether the field of philosophy has the capacity to sustain the work of diverse peoples. By identifying a pervasive culture of justification within professional philosophy, I gesture to the ways professional philosophy is not an attractive working environment for many diverse practitioners. As a result of the downsides of the culture of justification that pervades professional philosophy, I advocate that the discipline of professional philosophy be cast according to a culture of praxis. Finally, I provide a comparative exercise using Graham Priest's definition of philosophy and Audre Lorde's observations of the limitations of philosophical theorizing to show how these two disparate accounts can be understood as philosophical engagement with a shift to a culture of praxis perspective.
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Added by: Emma Holmes, David MacDonald, Yichi Zhang, and Samuel Dando-MooreAbstract: How wrong is it to deceive someone into sex by lying, say, about one’s profession? The answer is seriously wrong when the liar’s actual profession would be a deal breaker for the victim of the deception: this deception vitiates the victim’s sexual consent, and it is seriously wrong to have sex with someone while lacking his or her consent.
Comment (from this Blueprint): Dougherty argues that if something is a ‘deal-breaker’ for someone’s sexual consent - for example, they will only have sex if their partner is not a soldier - and their partner lies about it, then the sex they have is seriously wrong, because it is non-consensual. The argument goes like this: 1. It is seriously wrong to have non-consensual sex with someone because of their right to bodily autonomy - they should be able to decide when they want to have sex for any reason they choose. 2. When someone is deceived about one of their deal-breakers, they would not have consented to having sex if they had known the truth, so they haven’t really been able to make the decision for themselves about the sex they would actually be having. Therefore, sex when someone is deceived about a deal-breaker is seriously wrong. Dougherty spends the most time arguing for 2 - that deceit about deal-breakers renders sex non-consensual. Dougherty argues that if something is a ‘deal-breaker’ for someone’s sexual consent - for example, they will only have sex if their partner is not a soldier - and their partner lies about it, then the sex they have is seriously wrong, because it is non-consensual. The argument goes like this: 1. It is seriously wrong to have non-consensual sex with someone because of their right to bodily autonomy - they should be able to decide when they want to have sex for any reason they choose. 2. When someone is deceived about one of their deal-breakers, they would not have consented to having sex if they had known the truth, so they haven’t really been able to make the decision for themselves about the sex they would actually be having. Therefore, sex when someone is deceived about a deal-breaker is seriously wrong. Dougherty spends the most time arguing for 2 - that deceit about deal-breakers renders sex non-consensual.
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Added by: Emma Holmes, David MacDonald, Yichi Zhang, and Samuel Dando-MooreSummary: This paper tries to answer the problem of the moral luck of sex. It uses examples of conduct where the responsible agent fails to check properly for consent, and asks how much of a difference it makes whether their partner considers themselves to have consented or not. It concludes that there are two different obligations: one to conduct due dilligence to ascertain the prescence of valid consent and other to refrian from non-consensual sex.
Comment (from this Blueprint): This paper provides an alternative answer to how to determine individual responsibility to Kukla, Quill R. (2018) 'A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent'.
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Added by: Nick NovelliAbstract: Although epistemic values have become widely accepted as part of scientific reasoning, non-epistemic values have been largely relegated to the "external" parts of science (the selection of hypotheses, restrictions on methodologies, and the use of scientific technologies). I argue that because of inductive risk, or the risk of error, non-epistemic values are required in science wherever non-epistemic consequences of error should be considered. I use examples from dioxin studies to illustrate how non-epistemic consequences of error can and should be considered in the internal stages of science: choice of methodology, characterization of data, and interpretation of results.
Comment: A good challenge to the "value-free" status of science, interrogating some of the assumptions about scientific methodology. Uses real-world examples effectively. Suitable for undergraduate teaching.
Comment (from this Blueprint): An introduction to the groundbreaking theory of Zoopolis focussing on developing a political vision of human aninmals and non-human animals living together.