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33Taking Seriously Dual Systems and SexHypatia 13 (1). 1998.In response to Ann Ferguson and Claudia Card, I argue that Gayle Rubin's analysis of sex-gender systems supports the hypothesis that heterosexual domination is a distinctive axis of oppression. While gender domination places women in disadvantaged positions, heterosexual domination displaces lesbians and gay men from society. In response to Chris Cuomo, I argue that same-sex desire is part of lesbians' gender ambiguity; but I agree that my work has underemphasized sexual desire.
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453Standing for somethingJournal of Philosophy 92 (5): 235-260. 1995.Three pictures of integrity have gained philosophical currency. On the integrated self picture, integrity involves the integration of "parts" of oneself into a whole. On the identity picture, integrity means fidelity to projects and principles constitutive of one's core identity. On the clean hands picture, integrity means maintaining the purity of one's agency, especially in dirty hands situations. I sketch each picture and suggest two general criticisms. First, integrity is reduced to someth…Read more
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523Responsibility and reproachEthics 99 (2): 389-406. 1989.The wrongdoing that feminists critique often occurs at the level of social practice where social acceptance of oppressive practices and the absence of widespread moral critique impede the wrongdoer’s awareness of wrongdoing. This chapter argues that under these circumstances individuals are not blameworthy for participating in conventionalized wrongdoing. However, because social vulnerability to reproach is necessary to publicizing moral standards and conveying the obligatory force of moral requ…Read more
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10Losing One's SelfIn Catriona Mackenzie & Kim Atkins (eds.), Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, Routledge. 2008.What is it that enables agents to find the business of reflective endorsement, deliberation, and willing meaningful? I argue that our having motivating reasons to act-and thus reason to lead a life-depends on a set of background "frames" of agency being in place. These "frames" are attitudes toward and beliefs about our own agency that, under normal conditions, are simply taken for granted as we lead our lives as agents and that thus do not enter into our normative reflection, deliberation, plan…Read more
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99Family outlawsPhilosophical Studies 85 (2-3): 181-193. 1997.Lesbian-feminism typically rejects lesbian and gay family, marriage, and parenting, because these practices neither transform gender relations nor challenge the maternal imperative and women’s location in a depoliticized, domestic sphere. I argue that this lesbian-feminist view neglects the historical construction of lesbians and gay men as outlaws to the family. The 1880’s-1990s image of the mannish lesbian, the 1930s-1950s image of the homosexual child molester, and the 1980s-1990s image of l…Read more
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34Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics by Seyla Benhabib (review)Journal of Philosophy 91 (8): 426-429. 1994.
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6Artless Integrity (review)Dialogue 41 (2): 417-420. 2002.Feminist philosophy has often succeeded in breaking new philosophical ground because it takes its paradigm examples from the lives of marginalized people. It then seeks to construct philosophical views that are adequate to those lives. Artless Integrity is, in this sense, a work in feminist philosophy. Susan Babbitt focuses on the lives of those at "moral risk." A person is at moral risk if social expectations undermine her options for self-realization, and if her choice to redirect her life tow…Read more
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61Sex and Ethics: Essays on Sexuality, Virtue, and the Good Life (review)Social Theory and Practice 34 (4): 635-639. 2008.
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10Moral Aims brings together nine previously published essays that focus on the significance of the social practice of morality for what we say as moral theorists, the plurality of moral aims that agents are trying to realize and that sometimes come into tension, and the special difficulties that conventionalized wrongdoing poses.
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57Impossible Dreams (review)Philosophical Review 107 (1): 125-128. 1998.Systemic discrimination produces individuals with a degraded self-concept who therefore may not care about autonomy or set ends compatible with human flourishing. Under systemic discrimination, the dominant conceptual and evaluative framework does not enable the oppressed to articulate their humanity or the rationality of aspiring to full human flourishing. And the injustice of that system may be fully visible only from a perspective outside of that system.
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66Common decencyIn Setting the moral compass: essays by women philosophers, Oxford University Press. pp. 128--142. 2004.I suggest that the normative expectations connected with common decency do not derive from a conception of what we owe each other. Instead, they derive from a constructed concept of what can be expected of a minimally well formed moral agent.
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296The Virtue of CivilityPhilosophy and Public Affairs 29 (3): 251-275. 2000.I suggest that civility is the display of respect, tolerance, or considerateness. Social norms enable us to successfully display these basic moral attitudes, and social consensus sets the bounds of civility, i.e., what views and behaviors are not owed a civil response. Because tied to social norms, there is no guarantee that standards of civility will exempt us from civilly responding to what, from a socially critical moral point of view, is tolerable. I raise and addresses the question: How cou…Read more
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1Sexuality InjusticeNotre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy 9 (1): 241-274. 1995.Sexuality injustice differs significantly in form from racial and gender injustice. Because persons who are gay or lesbian can evade being publicly identified and treated as gays or lesbians, sexuality injustice does not consist, as racial and gender injustice does, in the disproportionate occupation of disadvantaging and highly exploitable places in the socio-economic structure. Instead, sexuality injustice consists in the displacement of homosexuality and lesbianism to the outside of society. …Read more
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37Review of Linda Radzik, Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (8). 2009.
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25Lesbian philosophyIn Kittay Eva Feder & Martín Alcoff Linda (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2006.This chapter contains section titled: Relation to Philosophy Lesbian Philosophies of Liberation Heterosexuality and Lesbianism. Ethics and Politics Essentialisms and Anti—Essentialisms The Future of Lesbian Philosophy Bibliography.
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86Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay DisplacementOxford University Press. 2000.How has feminism failed lesbianism? What issues belong at the top of a lesbian and gay political agenda? This book answers both questions by examining what lesbian and gay subordination really amounts to. Calhoun argues that lesbians and gays aren't just socially and politically disadvantaged. The closet displaces lesbians and gays from visible citizenship, and both law and cultural norms deny lesbians and gay men a private sphere of romance, marriage, and the family.
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45Peggy DesAutels and Margaret urban Walker. Moral psychology: Feminist ethics and social theory (review)Hypatia 21 (3): 214-217. 2006.
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170Thinking about the Plurality of GendersHypatia 16 (2): 67-74. 2001.Linda Nicholson argues that because gender is socially constructed, feminist theorizing must be about an expansive multiplicity of subjects called “woman” that bear a family resemblance to each other. But why did feminism expand its category of analysis to apply to all cultures and time periods when social constructionism led lesbian and gay studies to narrow the categories “homosexual” and “lesbian”? And given the multiplicity of genders, why insist that feminist subjects are different, resembl…Read more
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415Justice, care, gender biasJournal of Philosophy 85 (9): 451-463. 1988.I address the question of gender bias in ethical theorizing, in particular the claim that an "ethics of justice" is gender biased because it cannot logically accommodate an "ethics of care." I argue against the strong claim that an ethics of justice and an ethics of care are incompatible but suggest that theorizing that crystallizes into a tradition has non-logical as well as logical implications. In order to explain why ethical theorizing has focused on some content and neglected others, one wo…Read more
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236Changing one's heartEthics 103 (1): 76-96. 1992.Good reasons to forgive typically divorce act from agent so that there is nothing in the agent to be forgiven. Forgiving on the basis of good reasons that show the wrongdoer deserves forgiveness is thus minimalist because nonelective. Genuine, or aspirational, forgiveness requires forgiving agents for unexcused, unjustified, and unrepented wrongdoing. The primary obstacle to aspirational forgiveness is that we cannot make sense of persons choosing evil. This essay suggests a way of rendering the…Read more
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271What good is commitment?Ethics 119 (4): 613-641. 2009.Deeply embedded in popular cultural portrayals of admirable lives, in everyday conceptions of maturity, and in philosophical work in ethics and political philosophy is the idea that people not only will, but ought to, make commitments and that it is good for the individual herself to do so. In part one I briefly raise skeptical doubts about the defensibility of the normative pressure to commit, and suggest that commitment may only be one style of managing one’s diachronic existence. In part two …Read more
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92Reasons of Love: Response to WolfFoundations of Science 21 (2): 275-277. 2016.According to Wolf’s fitting fulfillment view, meaningfulness depends on the person’s subjective attraction to an activity being grounded in ‘reasons of love’ that concern the objective value of those activities. In this short comment, I argue that ‘reasons of love’—and thus reasons for regarding as meaningful—are not limited to those having to do with the objective value of activities and relationships, but include also what I call ‘reasons for the initiated’ and ‘reasons for me’.
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227Living with BoredomSophia 50 (2): 269-279. 2011.The aim of this essay is to argue that the human capacity for boredom is philosophically interesting because it illuminates the kinds of problems that evaluators face just in being evaluators. I aim to challenge the “boredom as problem” approach to understanding boredom that is pervasive throughout the multi-disciplinary literature on boredom. I examine five quite different contexts of boredom that illuminate five different reasons why evaluators sometimes find the world not worth their attent…Read more
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Arizona State UniversityPhilosophy - School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious StudiesRetired faculty
Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |