University of Texas at Austin
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1981
Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
  •  493
    Responsibility and reproach
    Ethics 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
  •  428
    Standing for something
    Journal 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
  •  395
    Justice, care, gender bias
    Journal of Philosophy 85 (9): 451-463. 1988.
    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 wo…Read more
  •  389
    An apology for moral shame
    Journal 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
  •  270
    The Virtue of Civility
    Philosophy 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
  •  259
    What good is commitment?
    Ethics 119 (4): 613-641. 2009.
    Deeply embedded in popular cultural portrayals of admirable lives, in everyday conceptions of maturity, and in philosophical work in ethics and political philosophy is the idea that people not only will, but ought to, make commitments and that it is good for the individual herself to do so. In part one I briefly raise skeptical doubts about the defensibility of the normative pressure to commit, and suggest that commitment may only be one style of managing one’s diachronic existence. In part two …Read more
  •  209
    Living with Boredom
    Sophia 50 (2): 269-279. 2011.
    The aim of this essay is to argue that the human capacity for boredom is philosophically interesting because it illuminates the kinds of problems that evaluators face just in being evaluators. I aim to challenge the “boredom as problem” approach to understanding boredom that is pervasive throughout the multi-disciplinary literature on boredom. I examine five quite different contexts of boredom that illuminate five different reasons why evaluators sometimes find the world not worth their attent…Read more
  •  204
    Changing one's heart
    Ethics 103 (1): 76-96. 1992.
    Good reasons to forgive typically divorce act from agent so that there is nothing in the agent to be forgiven. Forgiving on the basis of good reasons that show the wrongdoer deserves forgiveness is thus minimalist because nonelective. Genuine, or aspirational, forgiveness requires forgiving agents for unexcused, unjustified, and unrepented wrongdoing. The primary obstacle to aspirational forgiveness is that we cannot make sense of persons choosing evil. This essay suggests a way of rendering the…Read more
  •  158
    Thinking about the Plurality of Genders
    Hypatia 16 (2): 67-74. 2001.
    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, resembl…Read more
  •  119
    What is an emotion?: classic readings in philosophical psychology (edited book)
    with Robert C. Solomon
    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
  •  112
    On Being Content with Imperfection
    Ethics 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
  •  107
    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
  •  89
    XI—Responsibilities and Taking on Responsibility
    Proceedings 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.
  •  88
    Family outlaws
    Philosophical 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
  •  85
    The Undergraduate Pipeline Problem
    Hypatia 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
  •  84
    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
  •  81
    Reasons of Love: Response to Wolf
    Foundations of Science 21 (2): 275-277. 2016.
    According to Wolf’s fitting fulfillment view, meaningfulness depends on the person’s subjective attraction to an activity being grounded in ‘reasons of love’ that concern the objective value of those activities. In this short comment, I argue that ‘reasons of love’—and thus reasons for regarding as meaningful—are not limited to those having to do with the objective value of activities and relationships, but include also what I call ‘reasons for the initiated’ and ‘reasons for me’.
  •  74
    Kant and Compliance With Conventionalized Injustice
    Southern 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
  •  73
    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.
  •  71
    Geographies of Meaningful Living
    Journal 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
  •  63
    Common decency
    In 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.
  •  63
    Moral 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).
  •  52
    Sex and Ethics: Essays on Sexuality, Virtue, and the Good Life (review)
    Social Theory and Practice 34 (4): 635-639. 2008.
  •  51
    Impossible 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.
  •  47
    Doing 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.