•  84
    In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.
  •  39
    Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections
    with Alison Bailey, Bat Ami Bar-On, Linda Lopez-McAlister, Judy Scales-Trent, and Naomi Zack
    Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1999.
    Written in an engaging narrative style these philosophical investigations undermine racist hierarchies along with false natualistic conceptions of the meanings of race and universalistic understandings of gender, by considering whiteness as it shapes and is infused by gender, class, sexuality, and culture. Central to this project are questions about how it is that culture and the state create such a wide range of different people who understand themselves as white. The essays collected here disc…Read more
  •  16
    When the Heavens Fall: The Unintelligible and the Unthinkable
    The Journal of Ethics 27 (4): 495-514. 2023.
    Moral dilemmas are a feature of moral life that make us vulnerable to tragic failures. But while all moral dilemmas involve unavoidable moral failure and leave a moral remainder, they do not all involve dirty hands. Recognizing that Thomas Nagel’s ideas about the availability of both agent-relative and agent-neutral perspectives from which to ask moral questions formed the backdrop to Michael Walzer’s work on dirty hands fifty years ago, this paper tries to explain why, when we must take both pe…Read more
  •  18
    Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (review)
    Philosophical Review 114 (3): 414-416. 2005.
  •  25
    Moral distress in health care: when is it fitting?
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 23 (2): 165-177. 2020.
    Nurses and other medical practitioners often experience moral distress: they feel an anguished sense of responsibility for what they take to be their own moral failures, even when those failures were unavoidable. However, in such cases other people do not tend to think it is right to hold them responsible. This is an interesting mismatch of reactions. It might seem that the mismatch should be remedied by assuring the practitioner that they are not responsible, but I argue that this denies someth…Read more
  •  13
    Solace for Unwitting and Unwilling Wrongdoers
    The Philosophers' Magazine 83 23-29. 2018.
  •  44
    Sacrificing Value
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (3): 376-398. 2018.
    ABSTRACTWhen is sacrifice – and particularly self-sacrifice – called for? This question turns out to be difficult to answer, for it tends to arise when values conflict, and hence the answer to it depends on how conflicts of values are to be resolved. If values are constructed, and if there is no single right way to construct them or prioritize them when they conflict, though there are identifiable ways in which the construction of values can go wrong, we may be left in a position of ambivalence …Read more
  •  67
    When Doing the Right Thing is Impossible
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    In this accessible yet throught-provoking work, Lisa Tessman takes us through gripping examples of the impossible demands of morality -- some epic, and others quotidian -- whose central predicament is: How do we make decisions when morality demands we do something that we cannot?
  •  124
    Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. T…Read more
  •  4
    Charles Mills has critiqued of the whiteness of the discipline of Philosophy by showing how ideal theorizing dominates Anglo-American philosophy and functions there as ideology, while it is non-ideal theorizing that can better attend to the realities of racialized lives. This paper investigates how idealization within the subfield of ethics leads mainstream ethical theorizing to fail to reflect moral life under racial and other forms of domination and oppression. The paper proposes recognizing t…Read more
  •  9
    Virtue and the Moral Life: Theological and Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)
    with Mark A. Wilson, Julie Hanlon Rubio, Mary M. Doyle Roche, James F. Keenan, Margaret Urban Walker, Jamie Schillinger, Jean Porter, Jennifer A. Herdt, and Edmund N. Santurri
    Lexington Books. 2014.
    Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.
  •  1
    The burdened virtues of political resistance
    In Barbara S. Andrew, Jean Clare Keller & Lisa H. Schwartzman (eds.), Feminist Interventions in Ethics and Politics: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2005.
  •  441
    Moral Failure — Response to Critics
    Feminist Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1): 1-18. 2016.
    I briefly introduce Moral Failure as a book that brings together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology to examine moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that “ought implies can.” I respond to Rivera by arguing that the process of construction that imbues normative requirements with authority need not systematize or eliminate conflicts between normative requirements. My response to Schwartzman clarifies what is problematic about nonideal theori…Read more
  •  21
    Jewish Locations: Traversing Racialized Landscapes (edited book)
    Rowman & Littlefield. 2001.
    This volume brings together essays that reflect on ontological and moral dilemmas regarding Jewish identity and race. The reflections offered here take place in the context of post-Holocaust transformations and pay special attention to the double processes of the deracialization of Jews qua Jews and the recasting of Jews both in reracialized and in other terms. As a result, the essays bring together and create intersections between Jewish studies and critical theories of race and help stretch th…Read more
  •  46
    Value Pluralism, Intuitions, and Reflective Equilibrium
    Philosophical Topics 41 (2): 175-201. 2013.
    A constructivist approach to ethics must include some process—such as Rawls’ (1971) reflective equilibrium—for moving from initial evaluative judgments to those that one can affirm. Walker’s (1998; 2003) feminist version of reflective equilibrium incorporates what she calls “transparency testing” to weed out pernicious, ideologically shaped intuitions. However, in light of empirical work on the plurality of values and on the cognitive processes through which people arrive at moral judgments (i.e…Read more
  •  45
    On (Not) Living the Good Life
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (sup1): 3-32. 2002.
  •  57
    While communities engaged in liberatory struggles have valued group loyalty and condemned betrayal, loyalty itself may be problematic, because remaining loyal to a community may require that one refrain from deconstructing the group identity on which the community is based. This essay investigates what loyalty is and whether loyalty is a virtue, and considers why, if loyalty is indeed a virtue, it may be one that is difficult to maintain in a context of oppression.
  •  12
    Critical Virtue Ethics: Understanding Oppression as Morally Damaging
    In Peggy DesAutels & Joanne Waugh (eds.), Feminists Doing Ethics, Rowman & Littlefield. 2001.
    A critically revised Aristotelian-based virtue ethics has something potentially useful to offer to those engaged in analyzing oppression and creating liberatory projects. A critical virtue ethics can help clarify one of the ways in which oppression interferes with flourishing; specifically, it helps clarify an aspect of oppression that can be called "moral damage."
  •  10
    Virtue and the Moral Life: Theological and Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)
    with Mark A. Wilson, Julie Hanlon Rubio, Mary M. Doyle Roche, S. J. Keenan, Margaret Urban Walker, Jamie Schillinger, Jean Porter, Jennifer A. Herdt, and Edmund N. Santurri
    Lexington Books. 2014.
    Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society
  •  174
    Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality asks what happens when the sense that "I must" collides with the realization that "I can't." Bringing together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology, Lisa Tessman here examines moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that "ought implies can."
  •  22
    Who Are My People?
    International Studies in Philosophy 27 (1): 105-117. 1995.
  •  283
    Reply to critics
    Hypatia 23 (3). 2008.
    Tessman responds to her three critics’ comments on Burdened Virtues, focusing on their concerns with her stipulation of an “inclusivity requirement,” according to which one cannot be said to flourish without contributing to the flourishing of an inclusive collectivity. Tessman identifies a naturalized approach to ethics—which she distinguishes from the naturalism she implicitly endorsed in Burdened Virtues—that illuminates how a conception of flourishing that meets the inclusivity requirement co…Read more
  •  536
    Expecting Bad Luck
    Hypatia 24 (1): 9-28. 2009.
    This paper draws on Claudia Card’s discussions of moral luck to consider the complicated moral life of people—described as pessimists—who accept the heavy knowledge of the predictability of the bad moral luck of oppression. The potential threat to ethics posed by this knowledge can be overcome by the pessimist whose resistance to oppression, even in the absence of hope, expresses a sense of still having a ‘‘claim’’ on flourishing despite its unattainability under oppression.
  •  81
    The racial politics of mixed race
    Journal of Social Philosophy 30 (2). 1999.
  •  51
    Moral Luck in the Politics of Personal Transformation
    Social Theory and Practice 26 (3): 375-395. 2000.
  •  699
    Idealizing Morality
    Hypatia 25 (4). 2010.
    Implicit in feminist and other critiques of ideal theorizing is a particular view of what normative theory should be like. Although I agree with the rejection of ideal theorizing that oppression theorists (and other theorists of justice) have advocated, the proposed alternative of nonideal theorizing is also problematic. Nonideal theorizing permits one to address oppression by first describing (nonideal) oppressive conditions, and then prescribing the best action that is possible or feasible giv…Read more