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15Letters to the EditorProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 60 (1). 1986.
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33Social Connections, Social Contributions, and Why They Matter: Comments on Being Sure of Each OtherCriminal Law and Philosophy 17 (2): 453-462. 2023.
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127On Being Content with ImperfectionEthics 127 (2): 327-352. 2017.The aim of this essay is to work out an account of contentment as a response to imperfect conditions and to argue that a disposition to contentment, understood as a disposition to appreciate the goods in one's present condition and to use expectations that enable such appreciation, is a virtue. In the first half, I lay out an analysis of what contentment and discontentment are. In the second half, I argue that contentment is a virtue of appreciation and respond to skeptical concerns about recomm…Read more
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98XI—Responsibilities and Taking on ResponsibilityProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 119 (3): 231-251. 2019.There is a familiar, everyday notion of a responsibility. Much of daily life on and off the job is consumed by taking care of responsibilities in this sense. But what is a responsibility, and how are responsibilities related to obligations? Reflection on the phenomenon of taking on responsibilities suggests that the concept of ‘a responsibility’ is distinct from that of ‘an obligation’, and that not all responsibilities are also obligations, even though many are.
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5Review of: Concepts of Health and Disease: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (review)Theoretical Medicine: An International Journal for the Philosophy and Methodology of Medical Research and Practice 4 329-332. 1983.Last updated - 2020-01-06.
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44A Question of ObligationJournal of Applied Philosophy 37 (1): 44-50. 2020.This essay engages with Sarah Buss's 2019 annual lecture for the Society for Applied Philosophy: "Some Musings About the Limits of an Ethics That Can Be Applied – A Response to a Question About Courage and Convictions That Confronted the Author When She Woke Up on November 9, 2016." She reflects on whether one is obligated to take great risks in the face of grave injustice. I suggest shifting the normative question from “Am I obligated?” to “Is there something of moral importance that someone ne…Read more
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93The Undergraduate Pipeline ProblemHypatia 24 (2). 2009.The essay speculates that women's underrepresentation in the philosophy major (though not in lower division philosophy courses) is connected with the clash between the schema for philosophy and the schema for woman. The result is that female students have difficulty envisioning themselves as philosophers and thus have a weaker attachment to the discipline. I also suggest that this schema clash encourages female students to take isolated experiences of sexism or gender imbalance in the classro…Read more
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52Doing Valuable Time considers the interest--and disinterest--we take in our own lives. It explores the nature of meaningful living, the attraction to the future that is lost in depression, the motivating force of hope, the role of commitments, the inevitability of boredom, and the possibilities for contentment with imperfection.
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46Impossible Dreams: Rationality, Integrity, and Moral Imagination (review)Philosophical Review 107 (1): 125. 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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65Moral Repair (review)Dialogue 46 (4): 819-823. 2007.This is a review of Margaret Urban Walker's book, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
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1Civilized Oppression (review)Dialogue 40 (4): 845-847. 2001.Lynching, arbitrary imprisonment, and police brutality are uncivilized forms of oppression that cause obvious, measurable harms. Exercised through physical violence or unjust legal action, uncivilized oppression expresses ill will toward vulnerable individuals and blatantly misuses power. Civilized oppression, by contrast, takes place in routine, socially accepted institutional and intimate relationships between people. Civilized oppression may cause no obvious harms, may be motivated by good in…Read more
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57The Humean Moral Sentiment: A Unique FeelingSouthwestern Journal of Philosophy 11 (1): 69-78. 1980.
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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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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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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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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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287The 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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22Lesbian 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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83Feminism, 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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44Peggy DesAutels and Margaret urban Walker. Moral psychology: Feminist ethics and social theory (review)Hypatia 21 (3): 214-217. 2006.
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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 |