Laura W. Kane

The question of whether or not one should procreate is rarely cast as a personal choice in philosophical discourse; rather, it is presented as an ethical choice made against a backdrop of aggregate concerns. But justifications concerning procreation in popular culture regularly engage with the role that identity plays in making procreative decisions; specifically, how one’s decision will affect who they are and who they might be in the future. Women in particular cite the personally transformative aspects of becoming a parent — personal circumstances, including socioeconomic status, age, health, and relationship status — as the most important considerations for the decision they make regarding possible parenthood, and not the more aggregate concerns that an ethics of procreation prioritizes. I highlight women because when women undergo a transformative experience related to parenthood, they do so in contexts where the social, economic, and emotional effects related to pregnancy and motherhood are extensive and impose greater effects on women than men. These harmful material effects threaten a woman’s economic stability, career development, social relationships, and emotional health. Because of this, I argue that an ethics of procreation must engage with the ways in which women’s identities are transformed through procreative decisions.

In this essay, we explore how digital publishing can intervene in these processes and serve as a form of feminist activism. We take as our focus the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP), founded in 2011 to expand the perspectives and standpoints that count as scholarly knowledge production and provide graduate students with editorial experience. As three long-standing members of the journal’s editorial collective, we have firsthand knowledge of how JITP’s publishing methods were developed through debate, struggle, and dialogue, including many missteps and failures along the way. We argue that JITP's collaborative knowledge practices of inclusive editorial governance, open access, and open peer review are fundamentally feminist, as they diversify scholarly voices and increase access to the material channels in and through which knowledge circulates. At stake in our reflective analysis is a broader claim that extends beyond the parameters of our work with one particular journal: that feminist digital publishing methods can expand what counts as knowledge production.

Prominent accounts of collective intentional activity explain the nature of social groups by virtue of a specific criterion: goal-directedness. In doing so, these accounts offer little in the way of determining whether there are any differences among social groups. In this paper, I propose a refined framework of collective intentional activity that can distinguish among social groups better than alternative accounts, and which has revisionary but nevertheless plausible implications for the nature of the family: specifically, that certain friendship relationships may count as genuinely familial, and that we ought to count them as such. I argue that social groups are distinguished by what we can expect from one another within different kinds of social groups; specifically, that there is an important difference between reciprocity that is equivalent in performance and reciprocity that is equivalent in intention; familial groups are specifically guided by this latter kind of reciprocity. This more inclusive definition of familial groups may have important implications for how such groups are supported within a given society – for instance, by recognizing certain caring relations as essential for well-being and supporting them accordingly.

In this paper I demonstrate how Focused Reading Responses motivate students to 1) critically engage with reading assignments, and 2) write more substantive reading responses. A focused reading response asks students to reflect upon several aspects of a reading assignment by responding, in writing, to a number of prompts that serve to engage students in critical thinking while also limiting the overall length of the response. Each prompt can be adjusted to accommodate the instructor’s subject matter and teaching modality. Additionally, focused reading response assignments are adaptable to a variety of teaching modalities, including face-to-face and remote learning environments. Focused reading responses communicate specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and length-bound goals to student, giving students the resources they need to produce meaningful and valuable work.

In this article, I analyze norm enforcement on social media, specifically cases where an agent has committed a moral transgression online and is brought to account by an Internet mob with incongruously injurious results in their offline life. I argue that users problematically imagine that they are members of a particular kind of moral community where shaming behaviors are not only acceptable, but morally required to ‘take down’ those who appear to violate community norms. I then demonstrate the costs that are associated with this strategy; the most worrisome being those that distort the nature of moral dialog and the purpose and effectiveness of accountability practices online, creating a vitriolic and polarising online environment. Because of these negative consequences, I suggest that we ought to hold others accountable for restorative ends. I argue that restorative accountability practices can help us cultivate new norms online that rely less for their enforcement upon negative acts such as shame, and more upon positive acts that focus upon the most appropriate way to make amends to the victim(s) and the community. In this sense, restorative accountability incorporates important elements from the ethics of care, a relational ethics that values creating, promoting, and restoring good social and personal relationships. I conclude by arguing that accountability practices premised on the ethics of care produce better outcomes for the victim (s) of a moral violation, the transgressor, and the community.

There are many different interpretations of what the family should be – its desired member composition, its primary purpose, and its cultural significance – and many different examples of what families actually look like across the globe. I examine the most paradigmatic conceptions of the family that are based upon the supposed primary purpose that the family serves for its members and for the state. I then suggest that we ought to reconceptualize how we understand and define the family in an effort to move away from these paradigmatic conceptions. This approach requires that we examine the way(s) in which the family has been defined descriptively – that is, how families have been defined historically – in an effort to determine what a normative theory of the family might look like. The goal of this inquiry is to define a family in terms of what it ought to be – a goal that moves our understanding of the family to a new conceptual landscape. I then present my own account of familial relations that aims to capture a normative understanding of the unique primary purpose that the family serves for its members.

The family presents an interesting challenge to many conceptions of collective activity and the makeup of social groups. Social philosophers define social groups as being comprised of individuals who knowingly consent to their group membership or voluntarily act to continue their group membership. This notion of voluntarism that is built into the concept of a social group rests upon a narrow conception of agency that is difficult to extend beyond able-minded autonomous adults. Families, however, are often comprised of members who supposedly lack this developed sense of agency and are therefore considered incapable of consenting to join or remain in a group: infants and small children. So, the family seems to be an odd fit for the designation of social group, even though it is often heralded as a paradigm example of one. In this paper I argue that children and infants are in fact agents who are capable of collective intentionality, especially in the context of the family where they act cooperatively and reciprocally with their caretakers. In doing so, I present an understanding of the family as a social group that has degrees of voluntarism for all members in the forms of joint readiness and joint commitment. I argue for this in three steps. First, I employ Margaret Gilbert’s concepts of joint commitment and joint readiness as a framework for collective intentionality. Second, echoing Carol Gould, I argue that we ought to expand our understanding of agency beyond the ideal case. Third, I draw upon recent research from Michael Tomasello that demonstrate a child’s ability to act cooperatively and reciprocally. Together these steps provide a strong foundation for the claim that children and infants are agents capable of collective intentionality within families.

Political philosophy presents a static conception of childhood as a state of lack, a condition where intellectual, physical, and moral capacities are undeveloped. This view, referred to by David Kennedy as the deficit view of childhood, is problematic because it systematically disparages certain universal features of humanity—dependency and growth—and incorrectly characterizes them as features of childhood only. Thus there is a strict separation between childhood and adulthood because adults are characterized as fully autonomous agents who have reached the end of their moral and cognitive development. I argue that this view is mistaken, and limits both the developmental abilities of adults and ongoing moral development within an organized state. I propose that we view dependency as a human condition. By doing so, children and adults form the kind of relationship with one another that encourages the growth and development of our moral sense in both childhood and adulthood

Feminist philosophers are right to criticize Hegel’s prejudices against women. In many of his works, Hegel reduces women to their physiology as means of explaining why they occupy a subordinate role in nature and in society. Such treatment seems arbitrary at best, for the gendering of roles disrupts Hegel’s dialectical approach to spirit without any meaningful gain. Despite this defect in Hegel’s work, what is positive in Hegelian social and political philosophy remains intact. In this paper I argue that the sexist claims that Hegel makes about women are irrelevant to his theory of the family in the Philosophy of Right. Therein, Hegel outlines three components that are necessary for the completion of the family: marriage, property and assets, and the raising of children. Hegel also includes a description of the different roles occupied by family members and divides these roles along gender lines. Given the three components that are essential to the family, I argue that there is no necessary basis for familial roles to be divided by gender.