• The justice position and the care perspective
    In Eva Feder Kittay & Diana T. Meyers (eds.), Women and Moral Theory, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 4--10. 1987.
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    Part I. The book begins with literary, cinematic, and historical scenarios that exemplify personal autonomy. Meyers uses these vignettes to distinguish personal autonomy from other, variously related types of autonomy and to show that other kinds of autonomy cannot adequately address the concern people have with their own personal decisions. Noting how profoundly social experience impinges on self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction, Meyers characterizes autonomous individuals as pers…Read more
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    No Title available: Reviews
    Economics and Philosophy 3 (2): 351-361. 1987.
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    Jenny Saville Remakes the Female Nude – Feminist Reflections on the State of the Art
    In Peg Brand (ed.), Beauty Unlimited, Indiana University Press. pp. 137-162. 2012.
    Jenny Saville is a leading contemporary painter of female nudes. This paper explores her work in light of theories of gender and embodied agency. Recent work on the phenomenology of embodiment draws a distinction between the body image and the body schema. The body image is your representation of your own body, including your visual image of it and your emotional attitudes towards it. The body schema is comprised of your proprioceptive knowledge, your corporeally encoded memories, and your c…Read more
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    Recovering the Human in Human Rights
    Law, Culture, and Humanities 1-30. 2014.
    It is often said that human rights are the rights that people possess simply in virtue of being human – that is, in virtue of their intrinsic, dignity-defining common humanity. Yet, on closer inspection the human rights landscape doesn’t look so even. Once we bring perpetrators of human rights abuse and their victims into the picture, attributions of humanity to persons become unstable. In this essay, I trace the ways in which rights discourse ascribes variable humanity to certain categories of …Read more
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    J. David Velleman develops a canny, albeit mentalistic, theory of selfhood that furnishes some insights feminist philosophers should heed but that does not adequately heed some of the insights feminist philosophers have developed about the embodiment and relationality of the self. In my view, reflenvity cannot do the whole job of accounting for selfhood, for it rests on an unduly sharp distinction between reflexive loci of understanding and value, on the one hand, and embodiment and relationalit…Read more
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    Feminists rethink the self (edited book)
    Westview Press. 1997.
    How is women’s conception of self affected by the caregiving responsibilities traditionally assigned to them and by the personal vulnerabilities imposed on them? If institutions of male dominance profoundly influence women’s lives and minds, how can women form judgments about their own best interests and overcome oppression? Can feminist politics survive in face of the diversity of women’s experience, which is shaped by race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, as well as by gender? Explor…Read more
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    The value of autonomy - even personal autonomy - cannot be confined to the private sphere. Because autonomy bears a reciprocal relation to equal opportunity, it must be counted among the cardinal political values.
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    Philosophers have had surprisingly little to say about the concept of a victim although it is presupposed by the extensive philosophical literature on rights. Proceeding in four stages, I seek to remedy this deficiency and to offer an alternative to the two current paradigms that eliminates the Othering of victims. First, I analyze two victim paradigms that emerged in the late 20th century along with the initial iteration of the international human rights regime – the pathetic victim paradigm…Read more
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    A collection of some of my previously published papers with an introduction and a new chapter.
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    A response to Susan Hekman's article "Reconstituting the Subject: Feminism, Modernism, and Postmodernism" and to her review of Diana T. Meyers' book Self, Society, and Personal Choice both of which appeared in Hypatia 6
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    Part III. Section 5. Autonomy-Enhancing Socialization: Meyers seeks a remedy for gendered inequality with respect to autonomy in processes of socialization. After critically examining proposals offered by Beauvoir, Chodorow, and Radcliffe Richards, Meyers describes a pedagogical model that fosters assertiveness and intimacy while avoiding the inculcation of aggression and that actively nurtures the development of autonomy skills.
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    Feminists Rethink the Self
    Philosophical Review 108 (1): 110. 1999.
    The idea that the self is in need of rethinking, as the title to this collection of essays suggests, presupposes that the self has already been “thought.” And indeed it has—both explicitly, by philosophers, and implicitly, in the practices of everyday life. For philosophers, this thinking about the self has taken place largely in abstract terms; persons have been treated as metaphysical-cum-moral subjects, disembodied minds that could plausibly be split from or melded with other such minds, or a…Read more
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    Reading with Feeling (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 52 (1): 143-144. 1998.
    Susan Feagin positions Reading with Feeling at the crossroads of aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and moral philosophy. Her principal concern is the activity of appreciating fiction. However, she relies on work in philosophical psychology regarding emotion to develop her views about appreciation, and her aesthetic account of the role of emotion in appreciation has significant implications for ethical theory, which she adumbrates at the end of her book.
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    Introduction
    Hypatia 25 (1): 1-10. 2010.
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    Because it is characteristic of competencies that they have overarching functions, Meyers considers what the overarching function of autonomy competency might be. She defends a view of personal integration that does not entail counterproductive consistency or unity. She rejects several other solutions to this problem, including compartmentalization, sanity, happiness, and eccentric nonconformity.
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    Feminism and Sex Trafficking: Rethinking Some Aspects of Autonomy and Paternalism
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (3): 427-441. 2014.
    This paper argues that potential cases of oppression, such as sex trafficking, can sometimes comprise autonomous choices by the trafficked individuals. This issue still divides radical from liberal feminists, with the former wanting to ‘rescue’ the ‘victims’ and the latter insisting that there might be good reasons for ‘hiding from the rescuers.’ This article presents new arguments for the liberal approach and raises two demands: first, help organizations should be run by affected women and be o…Read more
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    Part III. Section 2. Feminine and Masculine Socialization: Two main problems are explored: 1) How are girls and boys socialized in contemporary western societies? and 2) What are adult women and men like? Meyers appropriates the main outlines of Simone de Beauvoir's account of feminine socialization in The Second Sex, but she also discusses more recent research.
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    On War and Morality
    Philosophical Review 101 (2): 481. 1992.