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398Obscene division: Feminist liberal assessments of prostitution versus feminist liberal defenses of pornographyIn Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate About the Sex Industry, Stanford University Press. pp. 419-444. 2006.In assessing ethical issues concerning the sex-industry, feminist liberalism ought to combine the concern for the worker that is central to its treatment of prostitution, with sensitivity to the social and cultural embeddedness of self that is central to its treatment of pornography. That would enable us to then look at live-actor pornography as a form of prostitution that raises additional questions about third party consumption — and analysis both more theoretically coherent and practically us…Read more
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95Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate About the Sex Industry (edited book)Stanford University Press. 2006._Prostitution and Pornography_ examines debates about the sex industry and the adequacy of the liberal response to critiques of the sex industry. The anthology focuses particularly on the very different ways prostitution and pornography are treated. Unlike other books that deal with the sex industry, this volume brings together academics and industry veterans and survivors to discuss the ways prostitution, pornography, and other forms of commercial sex are treated, and to ask questions about the…Read more
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149The Grounds of Moral Agency: Locke's Account of Personal IdentityJournal of Moral Philosophy 5 (2): 256-281. 2008.For Locke, the personal identity problem was a moral problem from the beginning, an attempt to pin down the conditions for responsibility and accountability. This article discusses the implications of Locke's consciousness theory of personal identity for thought about the continuity of moral agency, arguing that Locke's treatment of personal identity is best understood in connection with his expanded discussion of liberty in the Essay and with his interest in the proper grounds for assessing res…Read more
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Looking Through the Mind's I: Empiricism, Moral Psychology, and Hume's Trouble with the SelfDissertation, The University of Chicago. 1998.The treatment of personal identity in Hume's Treatise displays a shift that is both interesting as an object lesson in the weakness of a particular sort of empirical project, and important for what it teaches about investigating moral life. By examining Hume's change in method and project, I show that theoretical epistemology and practical moral philosophy come together in Hume's account of the passions, and that out of this convergence arises an account of the way interpersonal relations struct…Read more
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75Value in Fact: Naturalism and Normativity in Hume's Moral PsychologyJournal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2): 145-163. 2003.Since it is Hume who famously asked how an "ought" can ever possibly be deduced from an "is," it is Hume who is typically cast as the representative of empiricism's inadequacy for doing the work of ethics. Yet, as I will show, in his description of the proper functioning of the passions that necessarily involve other persons and their evaluations of us, Hume provides a naturalistic description that is not reductive of value, but rather incorporates values into the very ground of empirical descri…Read more
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