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46Precluded InterestsHypatia 30 (2): 475-485. 2015.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 t…Read more
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82Kant and Compliance With Conventionalized InjusticeSouthern Journal of Philosophy 32 (2): 135-159. 1994.Kant's Categorical Imperative reveals the injustice of excepting ourselves from conventional social practices like promise keeping. But can it equally reveal the injustice of complying with societally entrenched unjust maxims, e.g., slave-holding maxims in colonial America? Standard Kantian arguments against slavery depend on overly narrow definitions of slavery and an implausible requirement that we universalization across all rational beings. This essay reconstructs the CI-procedure so that it…Read more
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129What is an emotion?: classic readings in philosophical psychology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1984.This volume draws together important selections from the rich history of theories and debates about emotion. Utilizing sources from a variety of subject areas including philosophy, psychology, and biology, the editors provide an illuminating look at the "affective" side of psychology and philosophy from the perspective of the world's great thinkers. Part One features classic readings from Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume. Part Two, entitled "The Meeting of Philosophy and Psychology," samp…Read more
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24Civilized Oppression Jean Harvey Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, ix + 155 pp., $59.50, $18.95 paper (review)Dialogue 40 (4): 845-. 2001.
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113Setting the moral compass: essays by women philosophersOxford University Press. 2004.Setting the Moral Compass brings together the (largely unpublished) work of nineteen women moral philosophers whose powerful and innovative work has contributed to the "re-setting of the compass" of moral philosophy over the past two decades. The contributors, who include many of the top names in this field, tackle several wide-ranging projects: they develop an ethics for ordinary life and vulnerable persons; they examine the question of what we ought to do for each other; they highlight the mor…Read more
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395An apology for moral shameJournal of Political Philosophy 12 (2). 2004.Making a place for shame in the mature moral agent’s psychology would seem to depend on reconciling the agent’s vulnerability to shame with her capacity for autonomous judgment. The standard strategy is to argue that mature agents are only shamed before themselves or before those whose evaluative judgments mirror their own. Because this strategy forces us to discount as irrational or immature many everyday experiences of shame, including the shame felt by members of subordinate groups, this chap…Read more
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100Reflections on the Metavirtue of Sensitivity to SufferingHypatia 23 (3): 182-188. 2008.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, h…Read more
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12Moral 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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77Geographies of Meaningful LivingJournal of Applied Philosophy 32 (1): 15-34. 2014.Because it is significantly unclear what ‘meaningful’ does or should pick out when applied to a life, any account of meaningful living will be constructive and not merely clarificatory. Where in our conceptual geography is ‘meaningful’ best located? What conceptual work do we want the concept to do? What I call agent-independent and agent-independent-plus conceptions of meaningfulness locate ‘meaningful’ within the conceptual geography of agent-independent evaluative standards and assign ‘meanin…Read more
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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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445Standing 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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513Responsibility 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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98Family 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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32Situating 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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5Artless 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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59Sex 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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56Impossible 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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285The 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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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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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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21Lesbian 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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44Peggy DesAutels and Margaret urban Walker. Moral psychology: Feminist ethics and social theory (review)Hypatia 21 (3): 214-217. 2006.
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82Feminism, 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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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 |