Cheshire Calhoun

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 recommending a disposition to contentment.

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 needs to do, and shall it be me who does it?”

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 classroom as representative of philosophy. At the end I suggest some possible strategies for de-gendering philosophy.

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 intentions, may be non-culpable, and may be invisible to both the agents of oppression and to witnesses. It is, nevertheless, a morally serious phenomenon. In Civilized Oppression, Jean Harvey aims to make civilized forms of oppression more visible by carefully describing the multiple factors that make wrongful exercises of power hard to detect. She also aims to shift the moral analysis of oppression from a preoccupation with tangible harms to the distorted nature of the moral relationship.

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 could civility be a moral virtue if it is so thoroughly governed by social norms?

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. I examine, in particular, (1) the production of society as heterosexual through the requirement that all citizens adopt a real or pseudonymous heterosexual identity as a condition of access to the public sphere; (2) the reproduction of heterosexual society through legal, psychiatric, educational, and familial practices whose aim is to prevent future generations of lesbian and gay people; and (3) the legitimation of heterosexual society through the construction of criminalizing stereotypes of gay and lesbian identity.

Linda Nicholson argues that because gender is socially constructed, feminist theorizing must be about an expansive multiplicity of subjects called “woman” that bear a family resemblance to each other. But why did feminism expand its category of analysis to apply to all cultures and time periods when social constructionism led lesbian and gay studies to narrow the categories “homosexual” and “lesbian”? And given the multiplicity of genders, why insist that feminist subjects are different, resembling women rather than a multiplicity including women as well as not-women and not-men?

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.