Cheshire Calhoun

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 something else with which it is not equivalent--to the conditions of unified agency, to the conditions for continuing as the same self, and to the conditions for having reason to refuse cooperating with evil. Second, integrity is understood as a personal, but not also a social virtue; this limits the analysis of what integrity is and why it is a virtue. In the last section, I suggest a way of understanding integrity as the social virtue of standing before others for what, in one's best judgment, is worth persons' doing.

This essay contributes to the explanatory hypotheses for why women persistently make up a third or fewer of all undergraduate philosophy majors in the United States. Following a suggestion of Tom Dougherty, Samuel Baron, and Kristie Miller, the essay first examines what women undergraduates do major in, why they might prefer these subjects to philosophy, and how departments might make philosophy more attractive. Second, the essay explores the relevance to philosophy of Sapna Cheryan’s work on the connection between women’s disinterest in majoring in computer science and their feelings of dissimilarity to the stereotype of the computer science major.

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 would have to suppose tacit general acceptance of a set of beliefs. It is in considering those beliefs that the charge of gender bias in ethical theorizing might be made to stick.

One of Lisa Tessman's central claims in Burdened Virtue: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (OUP, 2005) is that virtue is much less reliably connected to flourishing than Aristotle imagined and might in fact impede flourishing under nonideal conditions. The central burdened virtue is the meta-virtue of sensitivity to others’ suffering. I raise two critical questions about this meta-virtue. First, does this meta-virtue of sensitivity to others’ suffering, as Tessman understands this virtue, have sufficient liberatory scope? Second, is the virtue of sensitivity to others’ suffering burdensome because of the psychological pain and guilt that attends it, as Tessman claims, or are there other reasonable accounts of the burden of this particular virtue?

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 attention and address a set of puzzles about boredom, e.g., why meaningless diversions are an especially attractive method of escaping boredom and why both regimented work time and unregimented leisure time might be primary occasions for boredom.