This paper explores the issue whether feminism needs a metaphysical grounding, and if so, what form that might take to effectively take account of and support the socio-political demands of feminism; addressing these demands I further propose will also contribute to the resolution of other social concerns. Social constructionism is regularly invoked by feminists and other political activists who argue that social injustices are justified and sustained through hidden structures which oppress some while privileging others. Some feminists (Haslanger and Sveinsdóttir, Feminist metaphysics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University, 2011) argue that the constructs appealed to in social constructivism are real but not metaphysically fundamental because they are contingent. And this is exactly the crux of the problem—is it possible to sustain an engaged feminist socio-political critique for which contingency is central (i.e., that things could be otherwise) and at the same time retain some kind of metaphysical grounding. Without metaphysical grounding it has been argued, the feminist project may be rendered nonsubstantive (Sider, Substantivity in feminist metaphysics. Philosophical Studies, 174(2017), 2467–2478, 2017). There has been much debate around this issue and Sider (as an exemplar of the points under contention) nuances the claims expressed in his earlier writings (Sider, Writing the book of the world. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011) and later presents a more qualified account (Sider, Substantivity in feminist metaphysics. Philosophical Studies, 174(2017), 2467–2478, 2017). Nonetheless, I propose the critiques and defences offered by the various parties continue to depend on certain erroneous assumptions and frameworks that are challengeable. I argue that fundamentality as presented in many of these current accounts, which are underpinned by the explicit or implicit ontologies of monism and dualism and argued for in purely rationalist terms which conceive of subjects as primarily reason-responding agents, reveal basic irresolvable problems. I propose that addressing these concerns will be possible through an enactivist account which, following phenomenology, advances an ontology of interdependence and reconceives the subject as first and foremost an organism immersed in a meaningful world as opposed to a primarily reason-responding agent. Enactivism is thus, I will argue, able to legitimize feminist socio-political critiques by offering a non-reductive grounding in which not only are contingency and fundamentality reconciled, but in which fundamentality is in fact defined by radical contingency. My paper proceeds in dialogue with feminists generally addressing this ‘metaphysical turn’ in feminism and specifically with Sally Haslanger and Mari Mikkola.
Etiquette: A Confucian Contribution to Moral Philosophy
The early Confucians recognize that the exchanges and experiences of quotidian life profoundly shape moral attitudes, moral self-understanding, and our prospects for robust moral community. Confucian etiquette aims to provide a form of moral training that can render learners equal to the moral work of ordinary life, inculcating appropriate cognitive-emotional dispositions, as well as honing social perception and bodily expression. In both their astute attention to prosaic behavior and the techniques they suggest for managing it, I argue, the Confucians afford a model useful for appropriation in contemporary efforts to address small but potent moral harms such as microinequities
Subclinical Bias, Manners, and Moral Harm.
Mundane and often subtle forms of bias generate harms that can be fruitfully understood as akin to the harms evident in rudeness. Although subclinical expressions of bias are not mere rudeness, like rudeness they often manifest through the breach of mannerly norms for social cooperation and collaboration. At a basic level, the perceived harm of mundane forms of bias often has much to do with feeling oneself unjustly or arbitrarily cut out of a group, a group that cooperates and collaborates but does not do so with me. Appealing to the subtle but familiar choreography of mannered social interaction, I argue, makes it easier to recognize how exclusion can be accomplished through slight but symbolically significant gestures and styles of interaction, where bias manifests not in announced hostility but in an absence of the cooperation and collaboration upon which we rely socially.
Community Practices and Getting Good at Bad Emotions
Early Confucian philosophy is remarkable in its attention to everyday social interactions and their power to steer our emotional lives. Their work on the social dimensions of our moral-emotional lives is enormously promising for thinking through our own context and struggles, particularly, I argue, the ways that public rhetoric and practices may steer us away from some emotions it can be important to have, especially negative emotions. Some of our emotions are bad – unpleasant to experience, reflective of dissatisfactions or even heartbreak – but nonetheless quite important to express and, more basically, to feel. Grief is like this, for example. So, too, is disappointment. In this essay, I explore how our current social practices may fail to support expressions of disappointment and thus suppress our ability to feel it well.
The Role of Solitude in the Politics of Sociability
This chapter explores a so-far neglected way of avoiding the bads of loneliness: by learning to value solitude, where that is understood as a state of ‘keeping oneself company’, as J. David Velleman puts it. Unlike loneliness, solitude need not involve any deprivation, whether subjective or objective. This chapter considers the various goods to which solitude is constitutive or instrumental, with a focus on the promise that proper valuing of solitude holds for combating loneliness. The overall argument is this: If loneliness significantly detracts from individual wellbeing, and if the ability to value solitude protects against loneliness, then such an ability is obviously valuable to human flourishing. If, further, loneliness raises concerns of justice, then supporting people’s ability to value solitude is a way to implement a desideratum of justice. Individuals can cultivate their ability to value solitude, an ability that others can promote or hinder.
Freedom of Association: It’s Not What You Think
This article shows that associative freedom is not what we tend to thinkit is. Contrary to standard liberal thinking, it is neither a general moral permissionto choose the society most acceptable to us nor a content-insensitive claim-rightakin to the other personal freedoms with which it is usually lumped such asfreedom of expression and freedom of religion. It is at most (i) a highly restrictedmoral permission to associate subject to constraints of consent, necessity andburdensomeness; (ii) a conditional moral permission not to associate provided ourassociative contributions are not required; and (iii) a highly constrained, contentsensitive moral claim-right that protects only those wrongful associations thathonour other legitimate concerns such as consent, need, harm and respect. Thisarticle also shows that associative freedom is not as valuable as we tend to think itis. It is secondary to positive associative claim-rights that protect our fundamentalsocial needs and are pre-conditions for any associative control worth the name.
What a Home Does
Analytic philosophy has largely neglected the topic of homelessness.
The few notable exceptions, including work by Jeremy Waldron and Christopher
Essert, focus on our interests in shelter, housing, and property rights, but ignore the
key social functions that a home performs as a place in which we are welcomed,
accepted, and respected. This paper identifies a ladder of home-related concepts
which begins with the minimal notion of temporary shelter, then moves to persistent
shelter and housing, and finally to the rich notion of a home which focuses on meeting
our social needs including, specifically, our needs to belong and to have meaningful
control over our social environment. This concept-ladder enables us to distinguish
the shelterless from the sheltered; the unhoused from the housed; and the unhomed
from the homed. It also enables us to decouple the concept of a home from property
rights, which reveals potential complications in people’s living arrangements. For
instance, a person could be sheltered but unhoused, housed but homeless, or, indeed,
unhoused but homed. We show that we should reserve the concept of home to
capture the rich idea of a place of belonging in which our core social needs are met.
The Lonely Heart Breaks: On The Right to Be a Social Contributor
This paper uncovers a distinctively social type of injustice that lies in the kinds of wrongs we can do to each other specifically as social beings. In this paper, social injustice is not principally about unfair distributions of socio-economic goods among citizens. Instead, it is about the ways we can violate each other’s fundamental rights to lead socially integrated lives in close proximity and relationship with other people. This paper homes in on a particular type of social injustice, which we can call social contribution injustice. The paper identifies two distinct forms of social contribution injustice. The first form involves compromising a person’s social resources so as to deny her adequate scope to contribute socially. The second form involves unjustly misvaluing a person as a social contributor, usually by not taking her seriously as a social contributor.
The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony
Harmony is a concept essential to Confucianism and to the way of life of past and present people in East Asia. Integrating methods of textual exegesis, historical investigation, comparative analysis, and philosophical argumentation, this book presents a comprehensive treatment of the Confucian philosophy of harmony.
The book traces the roots of the concept to antiquity, examines its subsequent development, and explicates its theoretical and practical significance for the contemporary world. It argues that, contrary to a common view in the West, Confucian harmony is not mere agreement but has to be achieved and maintained with creative tension. Under the influence of a Weberian reading of Confucianism as “adjustment” to a world with an underlying fixed cosmic order, Confucian harmony has been systematically misinterpreted in the West as presupposing an invariable grand scheme of things that pre-exists in the world to which humanity has to conform. The book shows that Confucian harmony is a dynamic, generative process, which seeks to balance and reconcile differences and conflicts through creativity.
Illuminating one of the most important concepts in Chinese philosophy and intellectual history, this book is of interest to students of Chinese studies, history and philosophy in general and eastern philosophy in particular.
‘I Don’t Want To be a Playa No More’: An Exploration of the Denigrating effects of ‘Player’ as a Stereotype Against African American Polyamorous Men
Abstract: This paper shows how amatonormativity and its attendant social pressures converge at the intersections of race, gender, romantic relationality, and sexuality to generate peculiar challenges to polyamorous African American men in American society. Contrary to the view maintained in the “slut-vs-stud” phenomenon, I maintain that the label ‘player’ when applied to polyamorous African American men functions as a pernicious stereotype and has denigrating effects. Specifically, I argue that stereotyping polyamorous African American men as players estranges them from themselves and it constrains their agency by preemptively foreclosing the set of possibilities of what one’s sexual or romantic relational identities can be.