Mari Mikkola

This introduction to the book provides an overview of past feminist debates in analytic philosophy on the topic of pornography, focusing on the aspects of subordination and silencing. It presents some critical questions of the current debate, such as whether the subordination claim stands up to scrutiny, whether the silencing claim is plausible, whether pornography objectifies, and whether it serves as subordinating speech. The chapter outlines various directions that the debate could take in the future (and does so in this volume). These are structured along the following topics: harm, epistemology, and aesthetics. The chapter highlights questions that were underrepresented in past debates and issues that deserve more attention. Finally, this introduction offers a guide through the rest of the chapters in the volume.

In considering what makes epistemic injustice and epistemologies of ignorance wrongful, Matthew Congdon has recently argued that they involve forms of epistemic misrecognition in involving epistemic disrespect, disesteem, and neglect. Following Congdon’s remarks that both epistemic injustice and epistemologies of ignorance involve such misrecognition, this chapter considers whether and how ignorance may not involve the same types of misrecognition as epistemic injustice. In fact, there may be, as of yet, unexplored and surprising ways in which ignorance and recognition work in concert. In this chapter, I contend that some cases of genuine ignorance do not involve misrecognition, but a kind of recognition: sometimes ignorance is not about being insufficiently responsive to some normatively relevant features in another, but being too responsive to them. I then argue that we can see this sort of ‘paradox of ignorance’ in Charles Mills’s discussion of white ignorance and ideal theory.

This paper discusses potential responses to harmful prejudicial speech. More specifically, it considers how different types of prejudicial speech merit different responses. The paper distinguishes hate speech, discriminatory speech, and toxic speech as different types of speech that are prejudicial or oppressive – they are not of the same kind diverging only in their severity and explicitness. As these sorts of problematic speech are categorially distinct, the paper holds, they also demand differential remedies. The task of this paper is to consider such remedies, their potential effectiveness, and compatibility with the liberal value of free speech.

This paper considers Tirrell’s analysis of toxic speech using examples epitomising speech that are misleading, outright false, and without compelling justification. They are toxic in polluting and eroding democratic functioning. However, I argue that Tirrell’s two epidemiological models (the common source model exemplified by poisons, and the propagated transmission model that viruses exemplify) fail to make good sense of my examples, which are deeply insidious without being overtly invidious. The limitations of the epidemiological models suggest that toxicity is part of our default form of thinking and talking, rather than being an ‘outside’ pathology like a poison or a virus.

Rae Langton famously argues that pornographic speech illocutionarily subordinates and silences women. Making good this view hinges on identifying the context relevant for fixing such force. To do so, a parallel is typically drawn between pornographic recordings and multipurpose signs involved in delayed communication, but the parallel generates a dispute about the right illocutionary force-fixing context. Jennifer Saul and myself argue that if pornographic speech is akin to multipurpose signs, its illocutionary force is fixed by the actual decoding context: of using/viewing pornographic recordings. By contrast, Claudia Bianchi argues that the relevant context is intended/expected decoding. Here I take issue with Bianchi’s view. Her intentionalist account faces two serious objections. First, the collapse objection: Bianchi’s intentionalist view is so formulated that it collapses into that endorsed by Saul and me. This undermines Bianchi’s case against us. Second, the dissonance objection: looking at a different aspect of Bianchi’s view, and one that does depart from the positions of Saul and myself, shows that her analysis is too intentionalist and cannot be used to elucidate pornography’s illocutionary force. Bianchi’s view should hence be rejected. This nevertheless leaves open further theoretical avenues of research, which I briefly discuss at the end of the paper.

Brian Epstein’s The Ant Trap is a praiseworthy addition to literature on social ontology and the philosophy of social sciences. Its central aim is to challenge received views about the social world – views with which social scientists and philosophers have aimed to answer questions about the nature of social science and about those things that social sciences aim to model and explain, like social facts, objects and phenomena. The received views that Epstein critiques deal with these issues in an overly people-centered manner. After all, even though social facts and phenomena clearly involve individual people arranged in certain ways, we must still spell out how people are involved in social facts and phenomena. There are many metaphysical questions about social properties, relations, dependence, constitution, causation, and facts that cannot be answered (for instance) just be looking at individual people alone. In order to answer questions about (e.g.) how one social entity depends for its existence on another, we need different metaphysical tools. Epstein thus holds that social ontological explanations would greatly benefit from making use of the theoretical toolkit that contemporary analytical metaphysics has to offer. He focuses specifically on two metaphysical instruments: grounding and anchoring. This paper examines Epstein’s understanding and use of these tools. I contend that Epstein is exactly right to say that contemporary metaphysics contains many theoretical instruments that can be fruitfully applied to social ontological analyses. However, I am unconvinced that Epstein’s tools achieve what they set out to do. In particular, I will address two issues: (1) How is grounding for Epstein meant to work? (2) Is anchoring distinct from grounding, and a relation that we need in social ontology?

This collection of eleven new essays contains the latest developments in analytic feminist philosophy on the topic of pornography. While honoring early feminist work on the subject, it aims to go beyond speech act analyses of pornography and to reshape the philosophical discourse that surrounds pornography. A rich feminist literature on pornography has emerged since the 1980s, with Rae Langton's speech act theoretic analysis dominating specifically Anglo-American feminist philosophy on pornography. Despite the predominance of this literature, there remain considerable disagreements and precious little agreement on many key issues: What is pornography? Does pornography constitute women's subordination and silencing? Does it objectify women in harmful ways? Is pornography authoritative enough to enact women's subordination? Is speech act theory the best way to approach pornography? Given the deep divergences over these questions, the first goal of this collection is to take stock of extant debates in order to clarify key feminist conceptual and political commitments regarding pornography. This volume further aims to go beyond the prevalent speech-acts approach to pornography, and to highlight novel issues in feminist pornography-debates, including the aesthetics of pornography, trans* identities and racialization in pornography, and putatively feminist pornography.

The relationship between feminism and metaphysics has historically been strained. Metaphysics has until recently remained dismissive of feminist insights, and many feminist philosophers have been deeply skeptical about any value that metaphysics might have when thinking about advancing gender justice. Nevertheless, feminist philosophers have in recent years increasingly taken up explicitly metaphysical investigations. Such feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics in holding that metaphysical tools can help advance debates on topics outside of traditional metaphysical inquiry. Moreover, feminist philosophers typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy. Feminist metaphysicians have also recently begun interrogating the methods of metaphysics and they have raised questions about what metaphysics as a discipline is in the business of doing. In discussing such methodological issues, Elizabeth Barnes has recently argued that some prevalent conceptions of metaphysics rule out feminist metaphysics from the start and render it impossible. This is bad news for self-proclaimed feminist metaphysicians in suggesting that they are mistaken about the metaphysical status of their work. With this worry in mind, the paper asks: how does feminist metaphysics fare relative to ‘mainstream’ metaphysics? More specifically, it explores how feminist and ‘mainstream’ debates intersect, on what grounds do they come apart, and whether feminist metaphysics qualifies as metaphysics ‘proper’.

Childfree females encounter greater obstacles in obtaining voluntary sterilizations than childfree males. This paper discusses what might explain this and it proposes that female patients encounter particular credibility deficits that undermine their ability to grant informed consent. In particular, the paper explores Miranda Fricker’s recent suggestion that members of structurally disadvantaged groups encounter a particular sort of injustice that harms them in their capacity as knowers: they sustain testimonial injustice. The task of the paper is to investigate whether and in what sense this holds.

This book examines contemporary structural social injustices from a feminist perspective. It asks: what makes oppression, discrimination, and domination wrongful? Is there a single wrongness-making feature of various social injustices that are due to social kind membership? Why is sexist oppression of women wrongful? What does the wrongfulness of patriarchal damage done to women consist in? In thinking about what normatively grounds social injustice, the book puts forward two related views. First, it argues for a paradigm shift in focus away from feminist philosophy that is organized around the gender concept woman, and towards feminist philosophy that is humanist. This is against the following theoretical backdrop: Politically effective feminism requires ways to elucidate how and why patriarchy damages women, and to articulate and defend feminism's critical claims. In order to meet these normative demands an influential theoretical outlook has emerged: for emancipatory purposes feminist philosophers should articulate a thick conception of the gender concept woman around which feminist philosophical work is organized. However, Part I of the book argues that we should resist this move, and that feminist philosophers should reframe their analyses of injustice in humanist terms. Second, the book spells out a humanist alternative to the more prevalent gender-focus in feminist philosophy. This hinges on a notion of dehumanization, which Part II of the book develops. The argued for understanding of dehumanization is used to explicate the wrongness-making feature of social injustices, both in general and of those due to patriarchy. Dehumanization is not another form of injustice-rather, it is that which makes forms of social injustice unjust. The book's second part then provides a regimentation of social injustice from a feminist perspective in order to spell out the specifics of the proposed humanist feminism, and to demonstrate how it improves some non-feminist analyses of injustice too.

The gender concept woman is central to feminism but has proven to be notoriously difficult to define. Some feminist philosophers, most notably Sally Haslanger, have recently argued for revisionary analyses of the concept where it is defined pragmatically for feminist political purposes. I argue against such analyses: pragmatically revising woman may not best serve feminist goals and doing so is unnecessary. Instead, focusing on certain intuitive uses of the term ‘woman’ enables feminist philosophers to make sense of it.

This paper develops an alternative for (what feminists call) ‘the sex/gender distinction’. I do so in order to avoid certain problematic implications that the distinction underpins. First, the sex/gender distinction paradigmatically holds that some social conditions determine one’s gender (whether one is a woman or a man), and that some biological conditions determine one’s sex (whether one is female or male). Further, sex and gender come apart. Since gender is socially constructed, this implies that women exist mind-dependently, or due to productive human social activities; thus, it should be possible to do away with them just by altering the social conditions on which gender depends. In addition, some feminists take gender to depend on oppressive social conditions. Changing our social environments, then, would not only unwittingly eradicate women; doing away with women should be feminism’s political goal. I argue that both implications are unacceptable. In response, I argue for a view that has ontological commitments which are more congenial to ordinary thinking, and that doesn’t have the goal of eradicating women.

The relationship between feminism and metaphysics has historically been strained. Metaphysics has until recently remained dismissive of feminist insights, and many feminist philosophers have been deeply skeptical about any value that metaphysics might have when thinking about advancing gender justice. Nevertheless, feminist philosophers have in recent years increasingly taken up explicitly metaphysical investigations. Such feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics in holding that metaphysical tools can help advance debates on topics outside of traditional metaphysical inquiry. Moreover, feminist philosophers typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy. Feminist metaphysicians have also recently begun interrogating the methods of metaphysics and they have raised questions about what metaphysics as a discipline is in the business of doing. In discussing such methodological issues, Elizabeth Barnes has recently argued that some prevalent conceptions of metaphysics rule out feminist metaphysics from the start and render it impossible. This is bad news for self-proclaimed feminist metaphysicians in suggesting that they are mistaken about the metaphysical status of their work. With this worry in mind, the paper asks: how does feminist metaphysics fare relative to ‘mainstream’ metaphysics? More specifically, it explores how feminist and ‘mainstream’ debates intersect, on what grounds do they come apart, and whether feminist metaphysics qualifies as metaphysics ‘proper’.

Philosophers involved in the ‘porn-or-art’ debates standardly assume that pornography is centrally about sexual arousal, while art is about something else. I argue against this assumption and for the view that there is no single thing that pornography (or art) ‘is about’. This suggests that there is no prima facie reason for claiming that some x cannot be both pornography and art. I further go on to develop an understanding of (what I call) ‘porno-art’ - a wholly new kind of thing developing from the extant categories of pornography and art, but still distinct and separate from them.

Over the past few decades, feminist philosophy has become recognised as a philosophical sub-discipline in its own right. Among the ‘core’ areas of philosophy, metaphysics has nonetheless until relatively recently remained largely dismissive of it. Metaphysics typically investigates the basic structure of reality and its nature. It examines reality's putative building blocks and inherent structure supposedly ‘out there’ with the view to uncovering and elucidating that structure. For this task, feminist insights appear simply irrelevant. Moreover, the value-neutrality of metaphysics seems prima facie incompatible with feminism's explicitly normative stance in that feminist philosophy involves advocacy: speaking on behalf of some group on political grounds. The prospects of feminist metaphysics thus look grim. Nonetheless, feminist philosophers have in recent years increasingly taken up explicitly metaphysical investigations. The basic ideas behind such investigations can be summed up as follows: feminist metaphysics is about negotiating the natural and going beyond the fundamental. In so doing, feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics. Further, feminist philosophers typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy. With this in mind, the article considers the following questions: when thinking about philosophical methodology, how does feminist metaphysics fare relative to ‘mainstream’ metaphysics? More specifically, is feminism's political advocacy inconsistent with apparent objectivity that some prominent contemporary versions of metaphysics are committed to?

This paper takes issue with anti-realist views that eschew objectivity. Minimally, objectivity maintains that an objective gap between what is the case and what we take to be the case exists. Some prominent feminist philosophers and theorists endorse anti-realism that rejects such a gap. My contention is that this is bad news for political movements like feminism since this sort of anti-realism fosters radical relativism; feminists, then, must retain a commitment to objectivity. However, some anti-realist feminists, who take truth to be a social construct that depends on one’s perspective or conceptual scheme (like Catherine MacKinnon), don’t intend to argue for relativism. This being so, the paper will explore whether there is something to be said for feminist anti-realism. In particular, I will explore whether Hilary Putnam’s ‘internal realism’ can help block relativism that anti-realist feminism appears to generate. Nonetheless, I will conclude that ‘internal realism’ cannot undercut relativism that threatens anti-realist feminism.

Some feminist gender sceptics hold that the conditions for satisfying the concept woman cannot be discerned. This has been taken to suggest that (i) the efforts to fix feminism’s scope are undermined because of confusion about the extension of the term ‘woman’, and (ii) this confusion suggests that feminism cannot be organised around women because it is unclear who satisfies woman. Further, this supposedly threatens the effectiveness of feminist politics: feminist goals are said to become unachievable, if feminist politics lacks a clear subject matter. In this paper, I argue that such serious consequences do not follow from the gender sceptic position.