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103The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of PhilosophyLexington Books. 2010.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.
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42Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical ReflectionsRowman & 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
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27When the Heavens Fall: The Unintelligible and the UnthinkableThe 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
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57Moral 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
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71Sacrificing ValueInternational 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
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76When Doing the Right Thing is ImpossibleOxford 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?
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53Moral Luck in the Politics of Personal TransformationSocial Theory and Practice 26 (3): 375-395. 2000.
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771Idealizing MoralityHypatia 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
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29Reply to CriticsHypatia 23 (3): 205-216. 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
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16Having a People: Beyond Individualism and Essentialism in Resistance to Interlocked OppressionsDissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 1996.This dissertation draws on the Aristotelian and contemporary communitarian belief that humans are socially constituted, and analyzes the manifestations of this belief in contemporary identity politics and in the concept of 'culture' that often underlies identity politics. While I argue that it is important to maintain a communitarian conception of the self, I depart from Aristotle and the communitarian tradition by rejecting the assumption that a constitutive community is characterized by unity …Read more
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130Feminist Eudaimonism: Eudaimonism as Non-Ideal TheoryIn Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal, Springer. pp. 47--58. 2009.This paper considers whether eudaimonism is necessarily an idealizing approach to ethics. I argue, contrary to what is implied by Christine Swanton, that it is not, and I suggest that a non-ideal eudaimonistic virtue ethics can be useful for feminist and critical race theorists. For eudaimonist theorists in the Aristotelian tradition, the claim that one should aim to live virtuously assumes that there will typically be good enough background conditions so that an exercise of the virtues, in conj…Read more
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79On (Not) Living the Good Life: Reflections on Oppression, Virtue, and FlourishingCanadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (sup1): 2-32. 2002.In this article I attempt to untangle the purported connection between moral virtue and flourishing in the context of examining what looks like an unexpected effect of oppression: If moral virtue is necessary for flourishing—as Aristotle assumes that it is when he describes eudaimonia as an “activity of the soul in accordance with virtue” — then members of structurally privileged groups can only flourish if they are morally good. However, it is hard to conceive of the privileged as morally good,…Read more
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138Burdened virtues: virtue ethics for liberatory strugglesOxford University Press. 2005.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
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4Against the Whiteness of Ethics: Dilemmatizing as a Critical ApproachIn George Yancy (ed.), The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy, Lexington Books. 2010.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
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15Virtue and the Moral Life: Theological and Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)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.
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1The burdened virtues of political resistanceIn 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.
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497Moral Failure — Response to CriticsFeminist 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
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28Jewish 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
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60Value Pluralism, Intuitions, and Reflective EquilibriumPhilosophical 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
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67Dangerous Loyalties and Liberatory PoliticsHypatia 13 (4). 1998.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.
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12Critical Virtue Ethics: Understanding Oppression as Morally DamagingIn Peggy Desautels, Joanne Waugh, Margaret Urban Walker, Uma Narayan, Diana Tietjens Meyers & Hilde Lindemann Nelson (eds.), Feminists Doing Ethics, Feminist Constructions. 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."
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15Virtue and the Moral Life: Theological and Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)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
Vestal, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |