•  23
    Can debate ever do harm?
    Eureka Street. 2024.
    How can we make progress on the question of whether debate can do harm, and if it can, whether that’s a sufficient reason to suppress particular debates, or to adopt a ‘no debate!’ approach to particular topics ourselves? Obviously we’ll need to get clear on the key ingredients of the claim, which are what we’re counting as debate, and what we’re willing to countenance as harm. But we’ll also need to think about what exactly the harms are thought to be, of debating any one of these controversial…Read more
  •  7
    Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Conversion Therapy: Or, Who Put The ‘GI’ in ‘SOGI’?
    Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences. forthcoming.
    In the last few years, many countries have introduced (or are proposing to introduce) legislation on ‘conversion therapy’, prohibiting attempts to change or suppress sexual orientation and/or gender identity. This legislation covers ‘aversion therapy’, a form of torture that has already been criminalized in most progressive countries, and also ‘talk therapy’, involving things like counselling, psychoanalysis, and prayer. Focusing on this latter category of practices, I explain what is at stake i…Read more
  •  137
    Feminist Separatism Revisited
    with Kate M. Phelan
    Journal of Controversial Ideas 3 (2): 1-18. 2023.
    Conflict over who belongs in women-only spaces is now part of mainstream political debate. Some think women-only spaces should exclude on the basis of sex, and others think they should exclude on the basis of a person’s self-determined gender identity. Many who take the latter view appear to believe that the only reason for taking the former view could be antipathy towards men who identify as women. In this paper, we’ll revisit the second-wave feminist literature on separatism, in order to uncov…Read more
  •  7
    What is an ally?
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. forthcoming.
    For all the recent talk of people failing or succeeding as allies to oppressed groups, a well worked out philosophical theory of what it is for someone to be an ally is conspicuously absent. This makes it difficult to evaluate the claims of people failing or succeeding as allies, and consequently diminishes the concept’s usefulness to disadvantaged groups by making it difficult to identify who will genuinely help to further their interests. We aim to rectify this absence by answering the followi…Read more
  •  61
    Who Is Feminism For?
    The Philosophers' Magazine 99 40-48. 2023.
  •  37
    Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    Sex Matters addresses a cluster of related questions that arise from the conflict of interests between rights based on sex and rights based on gender identity. Some of these questions are theoretical, including: who has the more ambitious vision for women's liberation, gender-critical feminists or proponents of gender identity? How does each understand what gender is? What are the arguments for the refrain that 'trans women are women!', and do they succeed? Other questions taken up in the book a…Read more
  • The transfer of duties: from individuals to states and back again
    with Stephanie Collins
    In Michael Brady & Miranda Fricker (eds.), The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives, Oxford University Press Uk. 2016.
  •  121
    Gender-Critical Feminism
    Oxford University Press. 2022.
    The expectation used to be that men would be masculine and women would be feminine, and this was assumed to come naturally to them in virtue of their biology. That orthodoxy persists today in many parts of society. On this view, sex is gender and gender is sex. A new view of gender has emerged in recent years, a view on which gender is an 'identity', a way that people feel about themselves in terms of masculinity or femininity, regardless of their sex. On this view, sex is dismissed as unimporta…Read more
  •  20
    Was Lockdown Life Worth Living?
    Monash Bioethics Review (1): 40-61. 2022.
    Lockdowns in Australia have been strict and lengthy. Policy-makers appear to have given the preservation of quantity of lives strong priority over the preservation of quality of lives. But thought-experiments in population ethics suggest that this is not always the right priority. In this paper, I'll discuss both negative impacts on quantity of lives caused by the lockdowns themselves, including an increase in domestic violence, and negative impacts on quality of lives caused by lockdowns, in or…Read more
  •  1557
    Trashing and Tribalism in the Gender Wars
    In Noell Birondo (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Hate, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 207-233. 2022.
    In 1976, Jo Freeman wrote an article for Ms. Magazine, entitled ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood’. It provoked an outpouring of letters from women relating their own experiences of trashing during the course of the second wave feminist movement—more letters than Ms. had received about any previous article. Since then, the technology has improved but the climate among feminists has not; trashing is now conducted on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, in front of ever-larger au…Read more
  •  2
    Cosmopolitan Global Justice: Brock v. The Feasibility Sceptic
    Global Justice : Theory Practice Rhetoric 4. 2014.
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  •  47
    Is There Collective Responsibility For Misogyny Perpetrated On Social Media?
    with Jessica Megarry
    In Carissa Véliz (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2023.
    Women, particularly those in public positions (e.g. journalists, politicians, celebrities, activists) are subject to disproportionate amounts of abuse on social media platforms like Twitter. This abuse occurs in a landscape that those platforms designed, and maintain. Focusing in particular on Twitter, as typical of the kind of platform we’re interested in, we argue that it is the platform not (usually) the individuals who use it, that bears collective responsibility as a corporate agent for mis…Read more
  •  1055
    The Metaphysics of Intersectionality Revisited
    with Kate Phelan
    Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (2): 166-187. 2021.
    ‘Intersectionality’ is one of the rare pieces of academic jargon to make it out of the university and into the mainstream. The message is clear and well-known: your feminism had better be intersectional. But what exactly does this mean? This paper is partly an exercise in conceptual clarification, distinguishing at least six distinct types of claim found across the literature on intersectionality, and digging further into the most philosophically complex of these claims—namely the metaphysical a…Read more
  •  4816
    The central question of the paper is: do women have the right to exclude transwomen from women-only spaces? First I argue that biological sex matters politically, and should be protected legally—at least until such a time as there is no longer sex discrimination. Then I turn to the rationales for women-only spaces, arguing that there are eight independent rationales that together overdetermine the moral justification for maintaining particular spaces as women-only. I address a package of spaces,…Read more
  •  411
    We the People: Is the Polity the State?
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (1): 78-97. 2021.
    When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for differen…Read more
  •  1693
    Ending Sex-Based Oppression: Transitional Pathways
    Philosophia 49 (3): 1021-1041. 2020.
    From a radical feminist perspective, gender is a cage. Or to be more precise, it’s two cages. If genders are cages, then surely we want to let people out. Being less constrained in our choices is something we all have reason to want: theorists in recent years have emphasized the importance of the capability to do and be many different things. At the very least, we should want an end to sex-based oppression. But what does this entail, when it comes to gender? In this paper, I’ll compare four ‘tra…Read more
  •  78
    Directed Reflective Equilibrium: Thought Experiments and How to Use Them
    with Adam Slavny, Kai Spiekermann, and David V. Axelsen
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 18 (1): 1-25. 2021.
    In this paper we develop a new methodology for normative theorising, which we call Directed Reflective Equilibrium. Directed Reflective Equilibrium is based on a taxonomy that distinguishes between a number of different functions of hypothetical cases, including two dimensions that we call representation and elicitation. Like its predecessor, Directed Reflective Equilibrium accepts that neither intuitions nor basic principles are immune to revision and that our commitments on various levels of p…Read more
  •  44
    Big Data Justice: A Case for Regulating The Global Information Commons
    with Kai Spiekermann, Adam Slavny, and David V. Axelsen
    Journal of Politics 83 (2): 577-588. 2021.
    The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) challenges political theorists to think about data ownership and policymakers to regulate the collection and use of public data. AI producers benefit from free public data for training their systems while retaining the profits. We argue against the view that the use of public data must be free. The proponents of unconstrained use point out that consuming data does not diminish its quality and that information is in ample supply. Therefore, they suggest,…Read more
  •  46
    There are many actions that we attribute, at least colloquially, to states. Given their size and influence, states are able to inflict harm far beyond the reach of a single individual. But there is a great deal of unclarity about exactly who is implicated in that kind of harm, and how we should think about responsibility for it. It is a commonplace assumption that democratic publics both authorize and have control over what their states do; that their states act in their name and on their behalf…Read more