Ashley Lindsley-Kim

Many people – including many feminists – believe both of the following: (i) abortion is morally permissible regardless of the moral status of the fetus (at least for most of a pregnancy) and (ii) members of society have a shared, moral obligation to provide care for dependents. Yet it has been argued that the shared, moral obligation of members of society to care for dependents entails that women may be morally obligated to gestate unwanted fetuses. Central to this argument is that fetal dependency is relevantly similar to (other) persons' dependency on care and that pregnancy itself is a kind of caregiving. We think this argument is erroneous and politically dangerous. To expose its faults, we engage in a philosophical analysis of pregnancy: how to understand it, how it differs from caregiving, how it is inherently risky, how fetal development is by its nature invasive, and why all this matters for the ethics and politics of abortion.

In this thesis, I argue the Model Minority Stereotype (MMS) of Asian Americans is a systematic hermeneutical injustice, and I justify a previously unrecognized distinction within the literature: positive and negative hermeneutical injustices. To show that the MMS is a systematic hermeneutical injustice, I argue that: (1) the MMS renders a significant area of one’s interests difficult to interpret by collective understanding (the hermeneutical disadvantage); (2) this hermeneutical disadvantage excludes Asian American’s from equal hermeneutical participation (the hermeneutical marginalization and injustice); and (3) the resultant hermeneutical injustice contributes to continuing structural prejudice against Asian Americans and is part of a larger pattern of social powerlessness (the ‘systematic’ part of a systematic hermeneutical injustice). The distinction between a positive and negative systematic hermeneutical injustice is whether the hermeneutical disadvantage occurs because of the imposition of a hermeneutical resource or the lack of a hermeneutical resource.