Feminist Philosophy

This book defends an expressive-collaborative model of morality that challenges common assumptions in philosophical ethics. Morality is best revealed in practices of responsibility that express shared understandings about who we are, what we value, and to whom we are accountable for what we do. Morality is collaborative as we reproduce or shift our moral understandings together in many daily interactions of social life. For this reason, moral practices cannot be separated from other social practices, nor moral identities from social roles and institutions in particular ways of life; morality is not socially modular. But not everyone has the same power to set or change moral terms, and differently valued social-moral identities with different responsibilities and privileges are the rule in human societies. This book argues for empirically informed and politically critical ethics that aims for transparency about the moral significance of social differences including, but not only, gender differences. The book responds to the work of major philosophers of the 20th century, such as Bernard Williams, John Rawls, Robert Goodin, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre, while putting the tools of feminist epistemology and ethics to use. It also challenges uncritical assumptions in academic ethics about what we are in a position to know and for whom we are in a position to speak. This text is the second edition and contains an updated view of the state of moral philosophy, a new chapter on the moral and epistemological significance of public projects of truth-telling, and a concluding response to some common questions about the book.

Philosophy is by its very nature a critical discipline. Due to its critical nature, all philosophy is progressive, building on the lessons of the past, offering new ways of thinking about the present and the future. Recent debates within analytical philosophy have become very rigorous and fine-tuned, with great attention to detail, resulting in much progress. But social progress, the progress that feminists and other critical philosophers have made or are trying to make toward the goal of “better” knowledge, knowledge that is not only true but relevant for improving our lives, has been for the most part left out of traditional analytical philosophy. The effects of social progress can be tradition-changing at various levels, bringing traditional philosophy “out from the shadows.” The 18 papers (all but two previously unpublished) in this volume, spanning most areas of philosophy, address the social progress being made by analytical feminism in its attempt to bring traditional issues out from the shadows into the light of feminist critique. The volume represents current discussions on topics that have not been previously addressed by feminists, and further discussions on topics that feminists have already addressed but are here themselves critiqued.

The goal of Philosophy of Science after Feminism is not only a (descriptively and normatively) more adequate philosophy of science than what we have now, but also a more socially engaged and socially responsible philosophy of science, one that can help to promote a more socially engaged and socially responsible science. Its main message is that philosophy of science needs to locate science within its wider societal context, ceasing to analyze science as if it existed in a social/political/economic vacuum; and correlatively, that philosophy of science needs to aim for a more comprehensive understanding of scientific rationality, one that integrates the ethical with the epistemic. Since feminists—feminist scientists and historians of science as well as feminist philosophers of science—have been pursuing this kind of philosophy of science in gender-related areas for three decades now, two chapters reflect on their contributions and derive from these reflections an “ideal of socially responsible science” that is further developed and defended in other chapters. The articulation of this ideal, it is made clear, is a central project of socially responsible philosophy of science. Other projects are also spelled out.

Contemporary theorists use the term “social construction” with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly “natural” is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. The chapters in this book draw on insights from feminist and critical race theory to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. The central chapters of the book offer critical social realist accounts of gender and race. These accounts function as case studies for a broader approach that draws upon notions of ideology, practice, and social structure developed through interdisciplinary engagement with research in social science. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional chapters in the book situate a critical realist approach in relation to philosophical methodology, and to debates in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.

This book argues that we live in an age of somatic subjects, whose authentic identity must be represented through the body. When a perceived mismatch between inner self and outer form occurs, technologies can step in to change the flesh. Drawing on Wittgenstein's objections to the idea of a private language, and on Foucault's critical account of normalization, this book shows how we have been led to think of ourselves in this way, and suggests that breaking the hold of this picture of the self will be central to our freedom. How should we work on ourselves when so often the kind of self we are urged to be is itself a product of normalization? This question is answered through three case studies that analyze feminist interpretations of transgender politics, the allure of weight-loss dieting, and representations of cosmetic surgery patients. Mixing philosophical argument with personal narrative and analysis of popular culture, the book moves from engagement with Leslie Feinberg on trans liberation, to an auto-ethnography of Weight Watchers meetings, to a reading of Extreme Makeover, to the author's own practice of yoga. The book draws on philosophy, sociology, medicine, cultural studies, and psychology to suggest that these examples, in different ways, are connected to the picture of the somatic subject. Working on the self can both generate new skills and make us more docile; enhance our pleasures and narrow our possibilities; encourage us to take care of ourselves while increasing our dependence on experts. Self transformation through the body can limit us and liberate us at the same time. To move beyond this paradox, the book concludes by arguing that Foucault's last work on ethics provides untapped resources for understanding how we might use our embodied agency to change ourselves for the better.

This book collects together fifteen chapters on pornography and objectification. Arguments from uncontroversial liberal premises are shown to yield controversial feminist conclusions that pornography of a certain kind subordinates and silences women, and that women have rights against it. The arguments draw on speech act theory and pragmatics to show how such pornography may be speech that subordinates and silences. It subordinates if it is an illocution that ranks women, deprives women of powers, and legitimates violence and discrimination. It silences if it creates illocutionary disablement, preventing women's words having the intended illocutionary force. The chapters explore the idea that there is something solipsistic about pornography, in the way women are treated as things, and things are treated as women. They develop an understanding of the wider concept of objectification, which is itself shown to be solipsistic. Objectification is traditionally viewed in Kantian guise as the idea of treating someone as a thing, a mere instrument, and denying their autonomy. But it has unnoticed epistemological aspects. On a feminist conception of objectification, moral and epistemological features interact: for it is, partly, through a kind of self-fulfilling projection of beliefs and perceptions of women as subordinate that women are made subordinate and treated as things. Pornography can have an epistemological role here, shaping desires that guide wishful, oppressive belief, providing evidence confirming oppressive belief, suppressing counter-evidence, by silencing. Kant's moral philosophy threads through a number of chapters: his pessimism about some pathologies of sexual love; his optimism about love and friendship, which offer an escape route from solipsism.

Simone de Beauvoir is best known as the author of The Second Sex, but she was also the author of a vast array of other political and philosophical writings. Together, these provide a major contribution to political philosophy and theory that has so far been little explored. This book is a study of Beauvoir's political thinking. In addition to locating Beauvoir in her own intellectual and political context, it shows how Beauvoir's work still speaks to a host of issues that remain of concern today. She is an important interlocutor in debates about the values and dangers of humanism; about the strengths and limits of “ideal theory”; about how best to theorize power, identity, and oppression; about the limits to rationalism and the dangers of ethical purism; and about the place of emotions, such as the desire for revenge, in politics. In discussing her contributions to such debates, her work is put into conversation with many contemporary thinkers, including feminist and race theorists, and with historical figures in the liberal, Hegelian, and Marxist traditions. Beauvoir's political thinking emerges from her fundamental insights into the ambiguity of human existence. Combining phenomenological descriptions with structural analyses, she focuses on the tensions of human action as both free and materially constrained. To be human is to be an embodied subject, capable of free choice and yet contingent and physically vulnerable. It is also to be in the world among many other such existents, among whom interconnections may be both reciprocal and conflictual, involving both solidarity and oppression. Because such ambiguities are intrinsic to politics and are not subject to resolution, Beauvoir shows us that failure is a necessary part of political action and that we need to acknowledge this while also assuming responsibility for its outcomes.

Most liberal societies are deeply committed to a principle of free speech. At the same time, however, there is evidence that some kinds of speech are harmful in ways that are detrimental to important liberal values, such as social equality. Might a genuine commitment to free speech require that we legally permit speech even when it is harmful, and even when doing so is in conflict with our commitment to values like equality? Even if such speech is to be legally permitted, does our commitment to free speech allow us to provide material and institutional support to those who would contest such harmful speech? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, which kinds of speech are harmful in ways that merit response, either in the form of legal regulation or in some other form? This book explores these and related questions. Drawing on expertise in philosophy, sociology, political science, feminist theory, and legal theory, the chapters in this book investigate these themes and questions. By exploring various categories of speech (including pornography, hate speech, Holocaust denial literature, ‘Whites Only’ signs), and attending to the precise functioning of speech, the chapters shed light on these questions by clarifying the relationship between speech and harm. Understanding how speech functions can help us work out which kinds of speech are harmful, what those harms are, and how the speech in question brings them about. All of these issues are crucially important when it comes to deciding what ought to be done about allegedly harmful speech.

The late Susan Moller Okin was a leading political theorist whose scholarship integrated political philosophy and issues of gender, the family, and culture. This volume stems from a conference on Okin's work and contains chapters by some of the top feminist and political philosophers working today. They are organized around a set of themes central to Okin's work, namely liberal theory, gender and the family, feminist and cultural differences, and global justice. Their aim is not to celebrate Okin's work but to constructively engage with it and further its goals.

Can the government stick us with privacy we don't want? It can, it does, and according to this author, may need to do more of it. Privacy is a foundational good, she argues, a necessary tool in the liberty-lover’s kit for a successful life. A nation committed to personal freedom must be prepared to mandate inalienable, liberty-promoting privacies for its people, whether they eagerly embrace them or not. The eight chapters of this book are reflections on public regulation of privacy at home; isolation and confinement for punitive and health reasons; religious modesty attire; erotic nudity; workplace and professional confidentiality; racial privacy; online transactions; social networking; and the collection, use and storage of electronic data. Most books about privacy law focus on rules designed to protect popular forms of privacy. Popular privacy is the kind that people tend to want, believe they have a right to, and expect governments to secure. Typical North Americans and Europeans embrace privacy for home-life, telephone calls, e-mail, health records, and financial transactions. This unique book draws attention to unpopular privacy‐‐ privacies disvalued or disliked by their intended beneficiaries and targets—and the best reasons for imposing them. Examples of unwanted physical and informational privacies with which contemporary Americans have already lived? Start with laws designed to keep website operators from collecting personal information from children under 13 without parental consent; the anti-nudity laws that force strippers to wear pasties and thongs; the ‘Don't Ask Don't Tell’ rules that kept gays out of the US military; and the myriad employee and professional confidentiality rules‐‐ including insider trading laws-- that require strict silence about matters whose disclosure could earn us small fortunes. Conservative and progressive liberals agree that coercion and paternalism should be the exceptions rather than the rule. Better to educate, incentivize and nudge than to force. But what if people continue to make self-defeating bad choices? What are the exceptional circumstances that warrant coercion, and in particular, coercing privacy? When can government turn privacies into duties, especially duties of self-care? Early modern societies went wrong, imposing unequal conditions of forced modesty and confinement on women and others groups, giving privacy and imposed privacies a bad rap. But now may be a time for imposed privacies of another sort—imposed privacies that are liberating rather than dominating. A role for coercive and paternalistic regulation may be called for in view of the Great Privacy Give-Away. The public turns over vast amounts of personal information in exchange for the ease of online shopping, browsing and social networking, protected in some instances by little more than a pro forma privacy policy pasted on a home page. The public uploads and stores information ‘in the cloud,’ and have become more and more dependent upon electronic telecommunications and personal archiving exposed to public and private surveillance. Have they lost the taste for privacy? Do they fail to understand the implications of what is happening? This book offers insight into the ethical and political underpinnings of public policies mandating privacies that people may be indifferent to or despise. Privacy institutions and practices play a role in sustaining the capable free-agents presupposed by liberal democracy. Physical sanctuaries and data protection by law confers and preserve opportunities for making and acting on choices. Imposing privacy recognizes the extraordinary importance of dignity, reputation, confidential relationships, and preserving social, economic and political options throughout a lifetime.