Lisa Tessman

Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them--traits that Tessman refers to as "burdened virtues." These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer's own well being. Tessman's work focuses on issues that have been missed by many feminist moral theories, and her use of the virtue ethics framework brings feminist concerns more closely into contact with mainstream ethical theory. This book will appeal to feminist theorists in philosophy and women's studies, but also more broadly, ethicists and social theorists

Charles Mills has critiqued of the whiteness of the discipline of Philosophy by showing how ideal theorizing dominates Anglo-American philosophy and functions there as ideology, while it is non-ideal theorizing that can better attend to the realities of racialized lives. This paper investigates how idealization within the subfield of ethics leads mainstream ethical theorizing to fail to reflect moral life under racial and other forms of domination and oppression. The paper proposes recognizing the dilemmaticity that moral life tends to exhibit under certain non-ideal conditions.

I briefly introduce Moral Failure as a book that brings together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology to examine moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that “ought implies can.” I respond to Rivera by arguing that the process of construction that imbues normative requirements with authority need not systematize or eliminate conflicts between normative requirements. My response to Schwartzman clarifies what is problematic about nonideal theorizing that limits itself to offering action-guidance. In response to Kittay, I defend my rejection of “ought implies can,” and consider the implications of the concept of unfair moral requirements.

This volume brings together essays that reflect on ontological and moral dilemmas regarding Jewish identity and race. The reflections offered here take place in the context of post-Holocaust transformations and pay special attention to the double processes of the deracialization of Jews qua Jews and the recasting of Jews both in reracialized and in other terms. As a result, the essays bring together and create intersections between Jewish studies and critical theories of race and help stretch the limits of as well as fill in some of the gaps in each.