Feminist Philosophy

Women and other oppressed and deprived people sometimes collude with the forces that perpetuate injustice against them. Women’s acceptance of their lesser claim on household resources like food, their positive attitudes toward clitoridectemy and infibulation, their acquiescence to violence at the hands of their husbands, and their sometimes fatalistic attitudes toward their own poverty or suffering are all examples of “adaptive preferences,” wherein women participate in their own deprivation. This book offers a definition of adaptive preference and a moral framework for responding to adaptive preferences in development practice. The book defines adaptive preferences as deficits in the capacity to lead a flourishing human life that are causally related to deprivation and argues that public institutions should conduct deliberative interventions to transform the adaptive preferences of deprived people. It insists that people with adaptive preferences can experience value distortion, but it explains how this fact does not undermine those people’s claim to participate in designing development interventions that determine the course of their lives. The book claims that adaptive preference identification requires a commitment to moral universalism, but this commitment need not be incompatible with a respect for culturally variant conceptions of the good. She illustrates her arguments with examples from real-world development practice. Its deliberative perfectionist approach moves us beyond apparent impasses in the debates about internalized oppression and autonomous agency, relativism and universalism, and feminism and multiculturalism.

Women have historically been prevented from living autonomously by systematic injustice, subordination, and oppression. The lingering effects of these practices have prompted many feminists to view autonomy with suspicion. This book defends the ideal of feminist autonomy. The book proposes that behavior is autonomous if it accords with the wants, cares, values, or commitments that the actor has reaffirmed and is able to sustain in the face of opposition. By this account, autonomy is socially grounded yet also individualizing and sometimes socially disruptive, qualities that can be ultimately advantageous for women. The book applies the concept of autonomy to domains of special interest to women. It defends the importance of autonomy in romantic love, considers how social institutions should respond to women who choose to remain in abusive relationships, and argues that liberal societies should tolerate minority cultural practices that violate women's rights so long as the women in question have chosen autonomously to live according to those practices.

This book deals with bioethical issues relevant to women across the life span. “Gender justice” is the starting point and the end point of the author’s approach to the issues addressed. The first section offers an overview of bioethics, critiques prevalent approaches to bioethics and models of the physician-patient relationship, and sketches distinguishing aspects of women’s health care. Classical pragmatists and feminist standpoint theorists are enlisted in support of “an egalitarian perspective”, and positions on the moral status of fetuses and those already born are examined. The second section identifies topics that are directly or indirectly related to women’s health; these include prenatal testing, childbirth and newborn decisions, treatment of minors and the elderly, assisted reproduction, abortion, eating disorders, domestic violence, breast and gynecological cancer, end of life care, and research on women. Brief cases illustrate variables related to each topic. Empirical and theoretical considerations follow each set of cases; these are intended to precipitate more expansive and critical examination of the questions raised. The book concludes with discussion of an egalitarian ideal to be pursued through an ethic of virtue or supererogation rather than obligation. By embracing this ideal, according to the author, moral agents support a more demanding level of morality than guidelines or laws require.

Lisa Tessman’s Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, the book addresses the ways in which the devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities for flourishing. The book describes two different forms of “moral trouble” prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them, and that are referred to as “burdened virtues.” These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer’s own well being. It is suggested that eudaimonistic theories should be able to account for virtues of this sort.

Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson’s scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on ecological theory and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text’s larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation.

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways—from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other’s perspectives. Medina’s epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism.

This book is about gender essentialism: what it is and why it might be true. It opens with the question: What is gender essentialism? After distinguishing between essentialism about gender viewed as a kind and essentialism about gender in relation to individuals and their lived experiences, successive chapters introduce the ingredients for a theory of gender essentialism about individuals, called uniessentialism. Gender uniessentialism claims that a social individual's gender is uniessential to that individual. It is modeled on Aristotle's essentialism in which the form or essence of an individual is the principle of unity of that individual. For example, the form or essence of an artifact, like a house, is what unifies the material parts of the house into a new individual (over and above a sum of parts). Since an individual's gender is a social role (or set of social norms) the kind of unity in question is not the unity of material parts, as it is in the artifact example. Instead, the central claim of gender uniessentialism is that an individual's gender provides that individual with a principle of normative unity—a principle that orders and organizes all of that individual's other social roles. An important ingredient in gender uniessentialism concerns exactly which individuals are at issue—human organisms, persons, or social individuals? Given the view of gender as a social role the claim of gender essentialism can only be coherently expressed of social individuals. The book argues that a social individual's gender is uniessential to it.

Even in secular contexts, marriage retains sacramental connotations. Yet what is its moral significance? This book examines its morally salient features – promise, commitment, care, and contract – with surprising results. In Part One, “De-Moralizing Marriage,” essays on promise and commitment argue that we cannot promise to love and so wedding vows are (mostly) failed promises, and that marriage may be a poor commitment strategy. The book contends with philosophical defenses of marriage to argue that marriage has no inherent moral significance. Further, privileging marriage sustains amatonormative discrimination – discrimination against non-amorous or non-exclusive caring relationships such as friendships, adult care networks, or polyamorous groups. The discussion raises issues of independent interest for the moral philosopher such as the limits of promising and nature of commitment. The central argument of Part Two, “Democratizing Marriage,” is that liberal reasons for recognizing same-sex marriage also require recognition of polyamorists, polygamists, friends, urban tribes, and adult care networks. Political liberalism requires the disestablishment of monogamous amatonormative marriage. Under public reason, a liberal state must refrain from basing law solely on moral or religious doctrines; but only such doctrines could furnish reason for restricting marriage to male-female couples or romantic dyads. Restrictions on marriage should be minimized. But there is a strong rationale for minimal marriage: social supports for care are a matter of fundamental justice. Part Two responds to challenges posed by property division, polygyny, and parenting, builds on feminist, queer, and anti-racist critiques of marriage, and argues for the compatibility of liberalism and feminism.

This book challenges the traditional picture of the skeptic who asks, “Why be moral?” and demands a demonstration that acting in morally required ways is rationally required. It argues that we defeat the action skeptic, as well as the disposition skeptic, who denies that being morally disposed is rationally required, and the motive skeptic, who believes that merely going through the motions in acting morally is rationally permissible. It argues, against internalism, that we address the amoralist, who is not moved by moral reasons he recognizes. It argues for expanding the skeptic's position from self-interest to privilege, to include morally unjustified behavior typically directed against disenfranchised social groups. It argues for revising the traditional expected utility model of rationality to exclude desires deformed by patriarchy as ones it is not irrational to have. It defends the Interdependency Thesis, which assesses the rationality of moral dispositions and of actions interdependently, and allows us to fine tune the demands of the skeptic by not focusing on acts and dispositions in themselves, but on their interconnection. It defends the view that our rational assessments of agents should reflect the complex connection between the agent's reasons for adopting a moral disposition, and for having and acting from it, whether these cohere with her reasons for acting and for wanting to be a morally good person, and the justification for the moral theory or principles she endorses. Acts come in degrees of rationality, as measured by how they contribute to the agent's consistent life plan.