Carol Hay

I argue that attempts to integrate marginalized epistemic standpoints into dominant frameworks risk treating them as resources for mainstream appropriation. Using a queer activist slogan from the AIDS crisis as a representative example, I warn that because knowledge forged in resistance is often oppositional and always situated, incorporating it into dominant frameworks can dilute its meaning or harm its creators. This points to a deeper tension within standpoint theory: emancipatory projects that seek to engage marginalized imaginaries can reproduce the very hierarchies they aim to dismantle when they fail to recognize these standpoints’ own priorities, limits, and forms of gatekeeping.

This chapter argues that intrinsic value is necessarily connected to the rational ability people have to value things. Because animals do not have this ability, they cannot have intrinsic value. This means that if animals are to have any value at all, their value must be non-intrinsic. I argue that, despite their seemingly second-rate moral status, we can construct a surprisingly robust Kantian account of what we owe to animals. Kant is usually interpreted as arguing that the only reason we have to avoid cruelty to animals is that such behaviour is likely to harden our characters, making us more likely to behave cruelly towards people. I argue here that we can affirm the basic Kantian story about the loci and sources of both intrinsic and non-intrinsic value without being committed to a variety of morally problematic conclusions about animals. On this picture, we can still say that animals matter morally, that their interests must be taken into account, that they are moral patients or subjects, and that they deserve genuine moral consideration or regard.

Coming more than a decade after I first argued that people who are oppressed have an obligation to resist their oppression, this paper expands the implications of the original account and connects it up to some of the important contemporary work published in oppression studies in the interim. I then move on to respond to two critical objections to my view. The first objection charges that the typical severity of oppressive harms is not sufficiently great to ground a general obligation of resistance. The second objection charges that this project would do better to conceive of resistance in political, rather than moral, terms.

A common early narrative that arose as people struggled to cope with their new lives under COVID-19 centered on a platitude about the pandemic being “the great leveler.” But the pretense that we are equally vulnerable—or that we’re “alone together” across lines of race, gender, and class—was a comforting lie. Chronicling the timeline of media talking points seen over the past few months, I argue that social privilege continues to structure the narratives many people use to process life under the pandemic, even while material conditions are much worse for those not in charge of these narratives. At the same time, however, I argue that the pandemic might be setting the stage for genuinely new collective responses to social inequalities, including the long-overdue uprisings inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.

With Kant, I argue that intrinsic value is necessarily connected to the rational ability people have to value things. Because animals do not have this ability they cannot have intrinsic value. This means that if animals are to have any value at all, their value must be non-intrinsic. But, I argue, we can affirm the basic Kantian story about the loci and sources of both intrinsic and non-intrinsic value and still say that animals matter morally, that their interests must be taken into account, that they are moral patients or subjects, and that they deserve genuine moral consideration or regard.