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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.

Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State is a critique of the state recognition of marriage and a proposal for an alternative form of regulation. Part One, ‘Against Marriage’, sets out the critique. State-recognized marriage is unjust as it violates two fundamental values: equality and freedom. Marriage has historically been an instrument for maintaining inequality between men and women both practically, through laws, and symbolically, through norms. Marriage also violates equality between same-sex and different-sex couples. Reform can remove some of these inequalities, but marriage inevitably involves inequality between married and unmarried people. Moreover, state-recognized marriage threatens liberty since it involves the state endorsing a particular way of life. Various arguments have been offered in favour of this state promotion, but none of them adequately support the state recognition of marriage as opposed to other, more inclusive measures. Part Two, ‘The Marriage-Free State’, sets out the alternative. Most feminist and egalitarian critics of state-recognized marriage advocate replacing it with either relationship contracts or alternative statuses such as civil or care-based unions. Neither option is ideal, particularly since both contracts and alternative statuses leave vulnerable people unprotected. Instead, the book proposes a piecemeal, practice-based model of regulation, applying to all people who are engaging in relationship practices that should justly be regulated. In this model, equality is secured by the regulations themselves and liberty is secured by opting out. Finally, the book considers how the state should act to ensure equality in private marriages, be they religious or secular.

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 collection of new essays examines philosophical issues at the intersection of feminism and autonomy studies. Are autonomy and independence useful goals for women and subordinate persons? Is autonomy possible in contexts of social subordination and oppression? Is the pursuit of desires that issue from patriarchal norms consistent with autonomous agency? How should we understand the concepts of relational autonomy and adaptive preferences? How do emotions and caring relate to autonomous deliberation? Contributors to this collection answer these and related questions, advancing central debates in autonomy theory by examining basic components, normative commitments, and applications of conceptions of autonomy. Several chapters look at the conditions necessary for autonomous agency and at the role that values and norms—such as independence, equality, inclusivity, self-respect, care, and femininity—play in feminist theories of autonomy. Whereas some contributing authors focus on dimensions of autonomy that are internal to the mind—such as deliberative reflection, desires, cares, emotions, self-identities, and feelings of self-worth—others address social conditions and practices that support or stifle autonomous agency, often answering questions of practical import. For example, what type of gender socialization best supports autonomous agency and feminist goals? When does adapting to severely oppressive circumstances, such as those in human trafficking, turn into a loss of autonomy? How are ideals of autonomy affected by capitalism and by different forms of working life? How do conceptions of autonomy inform issues in bioethics, such as end-of-life decisions or rights to bodily self-determination?

This book gives the first systematic philosophical account of how being born shapes our condition as human beings. Drawing on both feminist philosophy and the existentialist project of inquiring into the structure of meaningful human existence, the book explores how human existence is natal, that is, is shaped by the way that we are born. Taking natality into account transforms our view of human existence and illuminates how many of its aspects hang together and are connected with our birth. These aspects include dependency; the relationality of the self; vulnerability; reception and inheritance; embeddedness in social power; situatedness; and radical contingency. Considering natality also sheds new light on anxiety, mortality, and the temporality of human life. This book offers an original perspective on human existence which bears on many debates in feminist and continental philosophy and around death and the meaning of life.

This collection of eleven previously unpublished chapters contains the latest developments in analytic feminist philosophy on the topic of pornography. A rich feminist literature on pornography has emerged since the 1980s, and Rae Langton’s speech act theoretic analysis has dominated specifically Anglo-American feminist philosophy on pornography. Despite this literature, there are considerable disagreements and precious little agreement on many key issues, such as what pornography is, whether (following Langton) it subordinates and silences women, whether it objectifies women in harmful ways, and whether it is authoritative enough to enact women’s subordination. Given these deep disagreements, the first goal of this book is to take stock of extant debates to clarify some key feminist conceptual and political commitments when discussing pornography. However, in so doing, it aims to go beyond the prevalent speech act approach to pornography. Thus, its second goal is to highlight new issues in feminist pornography debates. The book examines newer lines of inquiry and investigates what they can tell us about still-unsettled conceptual and political questions. In doing so, it opens a space for themes and debates that have to date received surprisingly little attention (such as aesthetics and putatively feminist pornography). The book aims to make progress philosophically analyzing pornography without simply rehashing old debates while still acknowledging the value of earlier feminist work. Thus, the book’s leading idea is to go “beyond speech” but without changing the terms of the debate wholesale.

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.

The body is a rich object for aesthetic inquiry. We aesthetically assess our own bodies and those of others, and our felt bodily experiences—as we eat, have sex, and engage in other everyday activities—have aesthetic qualities. The body, whether depicted or actively performing, features in aesthetic experiences of visual art, theater, dance and sports. Body aesthetics can be a source of delight for both the subject and the object of the gaze. But aesthetic consideration of bodies also raises acute ethical questions: the body is intertwined with identity and sense of self, and aesthetic assessment of bodies can perpetuate oppression based on race, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, size, and disability. Artistic and media representations shape how we see and engage with bodies, with consequences both personal and political. This volume contains sixteen original essays by contributors in philosophy, sociology, dance, disability theory, critical race studies, feminist theory, medicine, and law. Contributors take on bodily beauty, sexual attractiveness, the role of images in power relations, the aesthetics of disabled bodies, the construction of national identity, the creation of compassion through bodily presence, the role of bodily style in moral comportment, and the somatic aesthetics of racialized police violence.

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.

As a venture in the emerging field of comparative feminist philosophy, this work goes against the current trend of considering ‘caring’ and ‘knowing’ as independent of each other. It argues for what can be called a care-based epistemology modelled on the now-familiar care ethics. Using critical insights from the Mahabharata, the book proposes that knowing and caring can be fruitfully theorized ‘together’, while keeping the argument firmly rooted in mainstream Anglo-Western virtue epistemology. What emerges is a feminist epistemology that uses the methods of creative comparative philosophy to come up with a concept of ‘relational humility’ as the fulcrum of a new theory of knowing. On the one hand, the epistemic and ethical paradigms given in the Mahābhārata are interrogated though the political lens of contemporary feminist theory. On the other, the scope of traditional care ethics and virtue epistemology is broadened through a dialogue with an epic’s narrative meditations on living well and knowing well in a very different context. Such a cross-cultural exploration gives us a robust conception of a ‘good knower’ who is both an ethical agent as well as ready to make interventions in various forms of epistemic injustices.

We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories that frame their action, self-understanding, and life options. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them? To answer these questions is to offer a metaphysics of social categories, and that is the project of Categories We Live By. The key component in the story offered is a theory of what it is for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful in a context. People have a myriad of features, but only some of them make a difference socially in the contexts people travel. The author gives an account of what it is for a feature of an individual to matter socially in a given context. This the author does by introducing a conferralist framework to carve out a theory of social meaning, and then uses the framework to offer a theory of social construction, and of the construction of sex, gender, race, disability, and other social categories. Accompanying is also a theory of social identity that brings out the role of individual agency in the formation and maintenance of social categories.

This edition of all of Catharine Macaulay’s known correspondence includes an introduction to the life, works, and influence of this celebrated, eighteenth-century, republican historian. Through her letters and those of her correspondents it offers a unique glimpse of the connections between radical republicanism and dissent in London, and throws light on the origins of parliamentary reform in Great Britain. Macaulay’s correspondents include many individuals who were active in the lead-up to the American and French Revolutions, others who became involved in the antislavery movement, and yet others who were central to the development of feminism. These letters demonstrate how Macaulay’s history of the seventeenth-century republican period in Great Britain, which she published between 1763 and 1783, encouraged her readers to represent themselves as the heirs of those earlier struggles and to lavish praise on the author as an important defender of their liberties and of the universal rights of mankind. It shows Macaulay and her friends to have been inspired by positive notions of liberty and by ideals of democratic republicanism, thought of as systems of equal government committed to universal benevolence, in which the common good would become the common care.

Debates about pornography have raged since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and the explosive spread in recent years of sexually explicit images across the Internet has only fueled the disagreements. Politicians, judges, clergy, citizen activists, and academics have weighed in on the issues. In this volume, two philosophers add their voices to the debate. Their views conflict in crucial ways. Altman argues that there is an individual right to create and view pornographic images, rooted in a basic right to sexual autonomy. Watson argues that pornography is a form of sex inequality that undermines women’s equal status as citizens. Central to their disagreement is whether there is sufficient evidence that pornography harms women to justify laws aimed at suppressing the production and circulation of such material.

In this “for and against” book Lori Watson argues for a sex equality approach to prostitution in which buyers are criminalized and sellers are decriminalized (the Nordic Model). Jessica Flanigan argues that sex work should be fully decriminalized. Watson defends the Nordic Model on the grounds that prostitution is an exploitative and unequal practice that entrenches existing patterns of gendered injustice. Watson also argues that full decriminalization of prostitution is incompatible with existing occupational health and safety standards and securing worker autonomy and equality. Watson further argues that sex trafficking and prostitution are functionally similar such that the distinction is irrelevant for public policy; attacking demand is necessary to address the inequalities that fuel both. Flanigan argues that sex work should be decriminalized because restrictions on the sale and purchase of sex violate the rights of sex workers and their clients. Flanigan also suggests that decriminalization would have better consequences than policies that expose sex workers and their clients to criminal penalties, and that once we consider that public officials can also stand in relations of subordination to citizens, decriminalization is a more egalitarian approach than alternative policies.

Decolonizing Universalism develops a way forward for genuinely anti-imperialist feminisms. Against ways of thinking that suggest feminists must either reject normativity altogether or bite the bullet and treat feminism as a product of Western chauvinism, the book offers a universalist conception of feminism that is not grounded in imperialism-causing values. Insisting that transnational, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms criticize imperialism rather than valorize of cultural diversity as such, Khader advocates shifting the terms of feminist debates about imperialism. Rather than asking whether feminists should embrace any universal values, as the popular relativism/universalism framing does, the book asks whether feminism requires embracing the specific values that have been thought to be vehicles for imperialism. Khader offers a nonideal universalist conception of transnational feminist praxis, that understands feminism as opposition to sexist oppression and transnational feminist praxis as a justice-enhancing project. Her nonideal universalist vision allows feminists remain feminists without committing to the values of what she calls “Enlightenment liberalism,” including controversial forms of autonomy, secularism, and individualism, as well as gender eliminativism. The result is a new vision of solidarity according to which it can be both possible and preferable for feminisms to be rooted in worldviews that are unfamiliar to, and stigmatized by, Westerners—and a call to attend more seriously to the moral and practical meanings of “other” women’s activism. The book draws heavily on examples from international development, postcolonial theory, and Southern women’s movements.

In spite of the affinities of work by Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, rarely are their projects productively put into dialogue. This groundbreaking volume is the first book-length work to attempt to do so. In so doing, it moves beyond the terms of a simple opposition: that Beauvoir advocates for a humanistic equality of subjects while Irigaray advocates for an exploration of the inherently sexuate specificity of bodies. Until now the strength of this oppositional reading has prevented scholars from asking what they have in common. To read Beauvoir and Irigaray together in a way that does justice to the work of both requires a continuation of efforts to read Beauvoir anew. This task of rereading Beauvoir thus constitutes the first section of the volume, essays that offer an unprecedented exploration of the place of the material and the corporeal in Beauvoir’s thought. These essays situate Beauvoir’s thought beyond the framework of a theory of gender and beyond the framework of humanism. The essays in the second section of the volume take up the challenge of articulating points of dialogue in logic, ethics, and politics. Rather than forming a consensus or polarization either between Beauvoir and Irigaray or among each other, these essays deepen our understanding of the most familiar aspects and renew critical investigation of underappreciated moments of the work of these thinkers.

This book argues for the moral and political promise of disorientations, challenging common philosophical understandings of the necessity of orientedness for responsible moral action. In the face of difficult life experiences like trauma, grief, illness, migration, education, queer identification, and consciousness-raising, individuals can be deeply disoriented, struggling to know how to go on. These and other disorientations are not rare. The book draws on first-person accounts, philosophical texts, and qualitative and quantitative research to show that in some cases of disorientation, individuals gain new forms of awareness of political complexity and social norms, and new habits of relating to others and an unpredictable moral landscape. It then argues for the moral and political promise of these gains. In philosophy, disorientations have been treated for the most part obliquely, as experiences avoidable and best avoided. It is not immediately clear how an experience that accentuates vulnerability and compromises capacities for decision-making and decisive action could improve moral and political agency. This book defends the view that experiences like disorientations can be morally productive, even when they fail to generate, or directly compromise, capacities for decisive moral judgment. It contributes to a tradition of feminist ethics and moral psychology that highlights the moral significance of everyday practices of embodiment, emotion, and relationality.

What is misogyny? And (why) is it still occurring? This book explores the logic of misogyny, conceived in terms of the hostilities women face because they are living in a man’s world, or one that has been until recently. It shows how misogyny may persist in cultures in which its existence is routinely denied—including the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, which are often alleged to be post-patriarchal. Not so, Down Girl argues. Misogyny has rather taken particular forms following the advent of legal equality, obligating women to be moral “givers,” and validating a sense of entitlement among her privileged male counterparts. Many of rape culture’s manifestations are canvassed—from the ubiquitous entreaty “Smile, sweetheart!” to Donald Trump’s boasts of grabbing women by the “pussy,” which came to light during his successful 2016 presidential campaign; from the Isla Vista killings in California to the police officer in Oklahoma who preyed on African American women with criminal records, sexually assaulting them in the knowledge they would have little legal recourse; from the conservative anti-abortion movement to online mobbings of women in public life, deterring the participation therein of all but the most privileged and well-protected. It is argued on this basis that misogyny often takes the form of taking from her what she is (falsely) held to owe him, and preventing her from competing for positions of masculine-coded power and authority. And he, in turn, may be held to owe her little.

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.

The polis, the philosophical concept according to which there is one complete human form, is to blame for political and ecological crises. The polis as a philosophical tradition shares the current complex shape of climate change. A certain perfect body figures the denial of matter of the polis. The book presents a philosophy of elemental difference, an affirmation of the singularities of location, movement, living, aging, dying, valuing, in which humans partake. Elemental difference in the polis can be appreciated in the fact that empirical bodily nonidentity can be called upon to elevate one group of bodies among the rest. Empirical bodily nonidentity is a feature of the original articulation of the polis as a philosophical concept in the work of Aristotle. Sylvia Wynter has argued that the very idea of empirical bodily nonidentity begins with the modern science of racial anatomy. She calls this biocentrism. This book argues that biocentrism is a feature of the polis, according to which the one complete body was defined by its capacity for disembodied thought. The sciences of racial anatomy are a more explicit commitment to biocentrism, but the ranking of matter with respect to one complete human, a body that is the site of supra-natural thinking, is a practice that has always characterized the polis. In this way, the polis is responsible for both political and ecological hierarchy. It is as responsible for what is euphemistically called climate change as it is for the political hierarchy that constitutes it.