Diversity Reading List

Abstract:

In this paper, I urge feminists to re-center fetal moral status in their theorizing about abortion. I argue that fundamental feminist normative commitments are at odds with efforts to de-emphasize fetal moral status: The feminist commitment to ensuring care for dependents supports surprising conclusions with regard to the ethics of abortion, and the feminist commitment to politicizing the personal has surprising conclusions regarding the politics of abortion. But these feminist insights also support the conclusion that, conditional on fetal moral status, care for unwanted fetuses would be a social obligation that only derivatively falls to women who are unwillingly pregnant.

Abstract: Liberal theorists of justice like John Rawls have long maintained that a theory of justice should apply primarily to the institutional mechanisms of society, and only derivatively to the behavior of individuals within institutions. Institutions of taxation, for example, may be just or unjust by the lights of a theory of justice, but such a theory should deem the behavior of individuals unjust only insofar as that behavior undermines just institutions. As Rawls puts it, 'we are to comply with and to do our share in just institutions when they exist and apply to us, [and] we are to assist in the establishment of just arrangements when they do not exist.'1 Critics of this restricted conception of justice (hereafter RCJ) argue that a theory of justice should judge individual behavior directly, even when that behavior complies with just institutions. These critics have tended to focus on two kinds of behavior that they argue should fall within the subject matter of a theory of justice: the 'market-maximizing' behavior of economic agents who demand incentives to exercise marketable talents in socially beneficial ways, and the 'housework-shirking' behavior of family members who distribute power and labor unequally according to gender. These critics argue that RCJ implausibly places these behaviors beyond the reach of justice. Call this the 'restrictiveness objection' to RCJ. A second objection to RCJ threatens to undermine RCJ from within: this criticism alleges that RCJ is arbitrary, because the theorists who embrace it lack a principled justification for restricting the subject matter of their theories to institutions while exempting the behavior of individuals within those institutions. Call this the 'arbitrariness objection' to RCJ. My project in this article is to defend RCJ against both objections. Along the way, I consider and reject an alternative strategy for defending RCJ, but I use insights gleaned from the inadequacies of this rival strategy to build my own defense against the two objections: working from within the framework of political liberalism, I demonstrate first that a theory of justice can nonarbitrarily be restricted to the basic structure, or the institutional structure by which 'the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation,' and second that such a restriction does not result in an implausibly narrow subject matter of justice. I conclude that neither objection undermines RCJ. I do not defend RCJ as it has typically been understood, however. A crucial premise in my argument is that the delineation of the basic structure is itself a substantive normative task, the performance of which must be responsive to relevant differences among enactments of political power. I argue for a more expansive notion of legitimate political power than either critics or defenders of RCJ have tended to adopt. My defense of RCJ thus occupies a conceptual middle ground within the debate about the subject matter of justice: With defenders of RCJ, I maintain that a theory of justice applies directly only to the basic structure of society, such that a society with just institutions may be fully just even though housework-shirking and market-maximizing occur within it. But I agree with critics of RCJ that market-maximizing and housework-shirking should not be beyond the reach of a theory of justice. I reconcile these convictions by defending a view of political legitimacy according to which housework-shirking and market-maximizing can be targets of legitimate political interventions. While a society is not made less just by the mere occurrence of housework-shirking and market-maximizing, it can be less just for having a basic structure that enables or encourages these behaviors.

Abstract: Contemporary analytic philosophers often employ thought experiments in arguing for or against a philosophical position. These abstract, counterfactual scenarios draw on our intuitions to illustrate the force of a particular argument or to demonstrate that a certain position is untenable. Political theorists, for instance, employ Rawls's “original position” to illustrate the power of “justice as fairness,” and epistemologists raise “Gettier cases” to problematize a standard definition of knowledge. Although not all philosophers proceed in this manner, such methods are common in many areas of contemporary analytic philosophy...

Abstract: The term "Sapphire" is frequently used to describe an age-old image of Black women. The caricature of the dominating, emasculating Black woman is one which historically has saturated both the popular and scholarly literature. The purpose of this paper is debunk the "Sapphire" caricature as it has been projected in American social science. By exposing the racist and sexist underpinnings of this stereotype, it is hoped that more students and scholars might be sensitized and encouraged to contribute to the development of a nonracist and non-sexist social science.

Abstract: Prenatal screening, consisting of maternal serum screening and nuchal translucency screening, is on the verge of expansion, both by being offered to more pregnant women and by screening for more conditions. The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have each recently recommended that screening be extended to all pregnant women regardless of age, disease history, or risk status. This screening is commonly justified by appeal to the value of autonomy, or women's choice. In this paper, I critically examine the value of autonomy in the context of prenatal screening to determine whether it justifies the routine offer of screening and the expansion of screening services. I argue that in the vast majority of cases the option of prenatal screening does not promote or protect women's autonomy. Both a narrow conception of choice as informed consent and a broad conception of choice as relational reveal difficulties in achieving adequate standards of free informed choice. While there are reasons to worry that women's autonomy is not being protected or promoted within the limited scope of current practice, we should hesitate before normalizing it as part of standard prenatal care for all.

Abstract: In their paper titled Gender and Philosophical Intuition, Wesley Buckwalter & Stephen Stich argue that the intuitions of women and men differ significantly on various types of philosophical questions. Furthermore, men’s intuitions, so the authors, are more in line with traditionally accepted solutions of classical problems. This inherent bias, so the argument, is one of the factors that leads more men than women to pursue degrees and careers in philosophy. These findings have received a considerable amount of attention and the paper is to appear in the second edition of Experiment Philosophy edited by Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols, which itself is an influential outlet. Given the exposure of these results, we attempted to replicate three of the classes of questions that Buckwalter & Stich review in their paper and for which they report significant differences. We failed to replicate the results using two different sources for data collection (one being identical to the original procedures). Given our results, we do not believe that the outcomes from Buckwalter & Stich (forthcoming) that we examined are robust. That is, men and women do not seem to differ significantly in their intuitive responses to these philosophical scenarios.

Introduction: The problems I will focus on lie in the domain of the theory of justice. Specifically, my concern is to determine what kinds of criticisms of the ghetto poor’s behavior and attitudes are or are not appropriate given that the social circumstances under which they make their life choices are, at least in part, the result of injustice. If the overall social arrangement in which the ghetto poor live is unjust, this requires that we think about what their obligations are quite differently than we should if the society were judged to be just. In particular, I will argue that it is necessary to distinguish the civic obligations citizens have to each other from the natural duties all persons have as moral agents, both of which are affected, though in different ways, by the justness of social arrangements. In addition, among the natural duties all persons possess is the duty to uphold, and to assist in bringing about, just institutions, a political duty that has important, though generally overlooked, consequences for the debate about ghetto poverty.

Abstract: In view of the explanatory significance of joblessness, some social scientists, policymakers, and commentators have advocated strong measures to ensure that the ghetto poor work, including mandating work as a condition of receiving welfare benefits. Indeed, across the ideological political spectrum, work is often seen as a moral or civic duty and as a necessary basis for personal dignity. And this normative stance is now instantiated in federal and state law, from the tax scheme to public benefits. This Article reflects critically on this new regime of work. I ask whether the normative principles to which its advocates typically appeal actually justify the regime. I conclude that the case for a pro tanto moral or civic duty to work is not as strong as many believe and that there are reasonable responses to joblessness that do not involve instituting a work regime. However, even if we grant that there is a duty to work, I maintain that the ghetto poor would not be wronging their fellow citizens were they to choose not to work and to rely on public funds for material support. In fact, I argue that many among the black urban poor have good reasons to refuse to work. Throughout, I emphasize what too few advocates of the new work regime do, namely, that whether work is an obligation depends crucially on whether background social conditions within the polity are just.

Abstract: Movies like American Sniper and The Hurt Locker hint at the inner scars our soldiers incur during service in a war zone. The moral dimensions of their psychological injuries--guilt, shame, feeling responsible for doing wrong or being wronged-elude conventional treatment. Georgetown philosophy professor Nancy Sherman turns her focus to these moral injuries in Afterwar. She argues that psychology and medicine alone are inadequate to help with many of the most painful questions veterans are bringing home from war. Trained in both ancient ethics and psychoanalysis, and with twenty years of experience working with the military, Sherman draws on in-depth interviews with servicemen and women to paint a richly textured and compassionate picture of the moral and psychological aftermath of America's longest wars. She explores how veterans can go about reawakening their feelings without becoming re-traumatized; how they can replace resentment with trust; and the changes that need to be made in order for this to happen-by military courts, VA hospitals, and the civilians who have been shielded from the heaviest burdens of war. 2.6 million soldiers are currently returning home from war, the greatest number since Vietnam. Facing an increase in suicides and post-traumatic stress, the military has embraced measures such as resilience training and positive psychology to heal mind as well as body. Sherman argues that some psychological wounds of war need a kind of healing through moral understanding that is the special province of philosophical engagement and listening.

Abstract: On October 25, 1946, three weeks after the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg entered its verdicts, the United States established Military Tribunal I for the trial of twenty-three Nazi physicians. The charges, delivered by Brigadier General Telford Taylor on December 9, 1946, form a seminal chapter in the history of medical ethics and, specifically, medical ethics in war. The list of noxious experiments conducted on civilians and prisons of war, and condemned by the Tribunal as war crimes and as crimes against humanity, is by now more or less familiar. That list included: high-altitude experiments; freezing experiments; malaria experiments; sulfanilamide experiments; bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone transplantation experiments; sea water experiments; jaundice and spotted fever experiments; sterilization experiments; experiments with poison and with incendiary bombs. What remains less familiar is the moral mindset of doctors and health care workers who plied their medical skill for morally questionable uses in war. In his 1981 work, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton took up that question, interviewing doctors, many of whom for forty years continued to distance themselves psychologically from their deeds. The questions about moral distancing Lifton raised (though not the questions about criminal experiments) have immediate urgency for us now. Military medical doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists serve in U.S. military prisons in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Kandahar, and, until very recently, in undisclosed CIA operated facilities around the world where medical ethics are again at issue. Moreover, they serve in top positions in the Pentagon, as civilian and military heads of command, who pass orders and regulations to military doctors in the field, and who are in charge of the health of enemy combatants, as well as U.S. soldiers. Because we recently marked the sixtieth anniversary of the judgment at Nuremberg, I want to awaken our collective memory to the ways in which doctors in war, even in a war very different from the one the Nazis fought, can insulate themselves from their moral and professional consciences.

Introduction: This book attempts to deepen common understandings of what considerations are relevant in discussions of bioethics. It is meant to offer a clearer picture of what morally acceptable health care might look like. I argue that a feminist understanding of the social realities of our world is necessary if we are to recognize and develop an adequate analysis of the ethical issues that arise in the context of health care.

Introduction: Mark Twain said that, for people whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In Thinking about Technology, Joe Pitt's main tools appear to be those of the philosopher of science, so it is not surprising that he claims most problems of philosophy of technology are epistemic problems. As he puts it: 'The strategy here is straightforward. Philosophers of science have examined in detail a number of concepts integral to our understanding of what makes science what it is. The bottom line is this: philosophical questions about technology are first and foremost questions about what we can know about a specific technology and its effects and in what that knowledge consists' . Although Pitt points out important disanalogies between scientific and technological knowledge, nevertheless he emphasizes that philosophy of technology is primarily epistemology. Pitt has stipulatively defined ethical and political analyses of technology as not part of philosophy and philosophy of technology. While claiming to assess the foundations of philosophy of technology, he has adopted a reductionist approach to his subject matter, one that ignores or denigrates the majority of work in philosophy of technology. Does Pitt's bold, reductionist move succeed?

Abstract: Lawyers often work pro bono to liberate death-row inmates from flawed legal verdicts that otherwise would kill them. This is the first book on practical philosophy of science, how to practically evaluate scientific findings with life-and-death consequences. Showing how to uncover scores of scientific flaws - typically used by special interests who try to justify their pollution - this book aims to liberate many potential victims of environmentally induced disease and death.It shows how citizens can help uncover flawed science and thus liberate people from science-related societal harms such as pesticides, waste dumps, and nuclear power. It shows how flawed biology, economics, hydrogeology, physics, statistics, and toxicology are misused in ways that make life-and-death differences for humans. It thus analyzes science at the heart of contemporary controversies - from cell phones, climate change, and contraceptives, to plastic food containers and radioactive waste facilities. It illustrates how to evaluate these scientific findings, instead of merely describing what they are. Practical evaluation of science is important because, at least in the United States, 75 percent of all science is funded by special interests, to achieve specific practical goals, such as developing pharmaceuticals or showing some pollutant causes no harm. Of the remaining 25 percent of US science funding, more than half addresses military goals. This means that less than one-eighth of US science funding is for basic science; roughly seven-eighths is done by special interests, for practical projects from which they hope to profit. The problem, however, is that often this flawed, special-interest science harms the public.

Abstract:

By looking at a canonical article representing academic philosophy’s orthodox view against cultural relativism, James Rachels’ “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism,” this paper argues that current mainstream western academic philosophy’s fear of cultural relativism is premised on a fear of the racial Other. The examples that Rachels marshals against cultural relativism default to the persistent, ubiquitous, and age-old stereotypes about the savage/barbarian Other that have dominated the history of western engagement with the non-western world. What academic philosophy fears about cultural relativism, it is argued, is the barbarians of the western imagination and not fellow human beings. The same structure that informs fears of cultural relativism, whereby people with different customs are reduced to the barbarian/savage of the western imagination, can be seen in the genesis of international law which arose as a justification for the domination of the Amerindian (parsed as “barbarians”). It is argued that implicit in arguments against cultural relativism is the preservation of the same right to dominate the Other. Finally, it is argued that the appeal of the fear of cultural relativism is that, in directing moral outrage at others, one can avoid reflecting on the failures of one’s own cultural tradition.

From the Introduction: "Modern mathematics is based on the axiomatic method. We choose axioms and a deductive system---rules for deducing theorems from the axioms. This methodology is designed to guarantee that we can proceed from "obviously" true premises to true conclusions, via inferences which are "obviously" truth-preserving. [...] New and interesting questions arise if we give up as myth the claim that our theorizing can ever be separated out from the complex dynamic of interwoven social/political/historical/cultural forces that shape our experiences and views. Considering mathematics as a set of stories produced according to strict rules one can read these stories for what they tell us about the very real human desires, ambitions, and values of the authors (who understands) and listen to the authors as spokespersons for their cultures (where and when). This paper is the self-respective and self-conscious attempt of a mathematician to retell a story of mathematics that attends to the relationships between who we are and what we know."