The topic of the self has long been salient in feminist philosophy, for it is pivotal to questions about personhood, identity, the body, and agency that feminism must address. In some respects, Simone de Beauvoir's trenchant observation, "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other," sums up why the self is such an important issue for feminism. To be the Other is to be the non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent — in short, the mere body. (...) In law, in customary practice, and in cultural stereotypes, women's selfhood has been systematically subordinated, diminished, and belittled, when it has not been outright denied. Since women have been cast as lesser forms of the masculine individual, the paradigm of the self that has gained ascendancy in U.S. popular culture and in Western philosophy is derived from the experience of the predominantly white and heterosexual, mostly economically advantaged men who have wielded social, economic, and political power and who have dominated the arts, literature, the media, and scholarship. Responding to this state of affairs, feminist philosophical work on the self has taken three main tacks: (1) critique of established views of the self, (2) reclamation of women's selfhood, and (3) reconceptualization of the self to incorporate women's experience. This entry will survey feminist perspectives on the self from all three of these angles. (shrink)

I first provide an analysis of Joel Feinberg’s anti-paternalism in terms of invalidation of reasons. Invalidation is the blocking of reasons from influencing the moral status of actions, in this case the blocking of personal good reasons from supporting liberty-limiting actions. Invalidation is shown to be distinct from moral side constraints and lexical ordering of values and reasons. I then go on to argue that anti-paternalism as invalidation is morally unreasonable on at least four grounds, none of which presuppose that (...) people can be mistaken about their own good: First, the doctrine entails that we should sometimes allow people to unintentionally severely harm or kill themselves though we could easily stop them. Second, it entails that we should sometimes allow perfectly informed and rational people to risk the lives of themselves and others, though they are in perfect agreement with us on what reasons we have to stop them for their own good. Third, the doctrine leaves unexplained why we may benevolently coerce less competent but substantially autonomous people, such as young teens, but not adults. Last, it entails that there are peculiar jumps in justifiability between very similar actions. I conclude that as liberals we should reject anti-paternalism and focus our efforts on explicating important liberal values, thereby showing why liberty reasons sometimes override strong personal good reasons, though never by making them invalid. (shrink)

The juxtaposition encompassed in the phrase "feminist epistemology" strikes some feminist theorists and mainstream epistemologists as incongruous. To others, the phrase signals the view that epistemology and the philosophy of science are not what some of their practitioners and advocates have wanted or claimed them to be-but also are not "dead," as some of their critics proclaim. This essay explores the grounds for and implications of each view and recommends the second.

This essay critiques feminist treatments of maternal-fetal "relationality" that unwittingly replicate features of Western individualism (for example, the Cartesian division between the asocial body and the social-cognitive person, or the conflation of social and biological birth). I argue for a more reflexive perspective on relationality that would acknowledge how we produce persons through our actions and rhetoric. Personhood and relationality can be better analyzed as dynamic, negotiated qualities realized through social practice.

This article reports on a method of group mentoring to strengthen responsible research conduct. A key feature of this approach is joint exploration of the issues by trainees and their faculty research supervisors. These interactions not only help participants learn about current ethical norms for research practice, but also draw on the accumulated experience of faculty and staff about practical problems of research conduct, and help to make faculty more articulate about responsible research conduct and so better able to guide (...) their trainees. By working with departments or laboratories as a whole the method facilitates the formulation of specific norms appropriate to particular research situations and to strengthen the group’s ability to support appropriate behavior and deal with new issues as they arise. It also gives students more ways to ask questions about research practice and to benefit from the experience of all members of their department or group as well as their own research supervisors. The method is well tested and has been well received by a wide variety of departments and research groups. It provides the means for a constructive and enjoyable response to the Public Health Service’s (PHS) new Policy on Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) that requires education in the responsible conduct of research for all those funded by PHS funds, including faculty and staff as well as trainees. (shrink)

In the social sciences, the iconic definition of privilege is that of unearned advantage. Consequently, professionals in the social services may devote less attention to the examination of their own professional privilege since it has been earned. This article addresses ethical concerns about the earned privilege that accrues to professionals in the caring fields and the potential effects on service users. This paper will focus particularly on some of the pedagogical dimensions. The inherent paradox in socializing students into professional roles, (...) which enhance privilege, while attempting to reduce the power differentials with service users, requires attention by teachers. How one might lessen the hierarchy that is created between the helper and service user as a result of that privilege will be explored. The paper will detail professional privilege and both constructive and problematic impacts on the helping relationship. The ‘uneven’ advantage of being able to set the standards of health and morality are also discussed. In the process, ethical trespass may result. We will explore this concept and its implications. Because, privilege contributes to social stratification between helpers and recipients, the final segment offers one educational strategy that can be used to potentially lessen the ‘we–they’ duality. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 2, Page 184-208, February 2022. Being critical does not come easy, not even within Critical Theory. In this article I respond to criticism of my book from 2019, Capitalism, Alienation and Critique, arguing that contemporary Critical Theory has something to learn from the founding fathers. Firstly, for Adorno immanent critique has metaphysical implications beyond Honneth’s critique of bourgeois society as inconsistent in terms of its professed ideals. Secondly, immanent critique is not the same (...) as ideology critique, and when it comes to Horkheimer and Habermas, they conducted the latter rather than the former. Thirdly, even though today nature must be our concern, answers are to be found in politics and metaphysics rather than science. Finally, critique of neoliberalism should be conducted as critique of political economy, that is, ideology critique, rather than sociological descriptions of the empirical details of globalized capitalism. Denaturalizing economics is a condition for economic democracy. (shrink)

This article seeks to locate the body and embodiment more centrally among the concerns of actor-network theory by exploring working bodies. Using a newly introduced national system of vocational training as an exemplary case, it explores the tension between representations of skilled human bodies—‘competencies’—as given to trainers and the ways in which these representations are incorporated into their everyday practice. Vocational training has had a long struggle with the apparent separability of subject and object—between what can be felt and experienced (...) as distinct from what can be stated, measured, and expressed in words. The argument is made that paying attention to bodies in vocational training can shed light on this struggle. Paying attention to bodies in networks can also strengthen network analyses. Like texts and other forms of materiality, ‘the body’ is not singular but multiple. Furthermore, body politics constitutes an important actor-network them e. (shrink)

Girls learn the lesson of cognitive deference most clearly, perhaps, growing up in patriarchal families. Taught to discount their own judgments and to depend on those of the family's dominant men, they lose self-trust and cannot take themselves seriously as moral deliberators. I argue that through the telling of counterstories, which undermine normative stories of oppression, it is sometimes possible for women to reclaim these families as places where they have cognitive authority.

The influence of feminist theory on philosophy has been less pervasive than it might have been. This is due in part to inherent tensions between feminist critique and the university as an institution, and to philosophy's place in the academy. These tensions, if explored rather than resisted, can result in a revitalized, more explicitly feminist conception of philosophy itself, wherein philosophy is seen as an attempt to rethink the deepest aspects of experience and culture.

The need for explicit theoretical reflection on cross-cultural bioethics continues to grow as the spread of communication technologies and increased human migration has made interactions between medical professionals and patients from different cultural backgrounds much more common. I claim that this need presents us with the following dilemma. On the one hand, we do not want to operate according to an imperialist ethical framework that denies and silences the legitimacy of cultural values other than our own. On the other hand, (...) we do not want to backslide into a form of cultural relativism that is unable to critically appraise cultural practices that are harmful, unjust, or oppressive. I examine two prominent attempts – the principlism of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress and the Contractarianism of Robert Baker – to frame cross-cultural bioethics between these two extremes and argue that both approaches have significant flaws. The principlist approach fails to provide a non-question begging way to identify cross-cultural norms that does not already assume the universal legitimacy of moral principles dominant in North American society. Baker's contractarianism cannot grapple with the realities of political power imbalances that often characterize cross-cultural moral disputes. I suggest that a naturalized feminist framework, though not free of its own theoretical difficulties, provides the best alternative for approaching moral diversity respectfully and critically. (shrink)

This article discusses and develops some recent debates in feminist epistemology, by outlining the concept of an ‘emancipatory value’. It outlines the optimum conditions that a ‘community’ of knowers must satisfy in order that its members have the best chance of producing knowledge claims. The article thus covers general ground in epistemology. The article also argues that one of the conditions that any ‘emancipatory community’ must satisfy is that its underlying values should not oppress women. It is related to feminist (...) debates, therefore, in two ways: first, it develops its arguments by drawing on those debates; and second, after developing the general concepts of emancipatory value and epistemic community, it argues that feminist values are one set of emancipatory values to which an epistemic community should pay regard. (shrink)

This paper argues that AI follows classical versions of epistemology in assuming that the identity of the knowing subject is not important. In other words this serves to `delete the subject''. This disguises an implicit hierarchy of knowers involved in the representation of knowledge in AI which privileges the perspective of those who design and build the systems over alternative perspectives. The privileged position reflects Western, professional masculinity. Alternative perspectives, denied a voice, belong to less powerful groups including women. Feminist (...) epistemology can be used to approach this from new directions, in particular, to show how women''s knowledge may be left out of consideration by AI''s focus on masculine subjects. The paper uncovers the tacitly assumed Western professional male subjects in two flagship AI systems, Cyc and Soar. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the structure of knowing, and it argues that existential trust is an epistemological category. The aim of the dissertation is to develop a view according to which all human activity is seen as an activity of a lived body, and in which the understanding of the structure of such activity is regarded as central for the solution even of epistemological problems. This view is not rooted in any one philosophical tradition, but circles around activity of the lived (...) body. It connects thinkers who in other respects belong to different "isms" in philosophy. Central to the dissertation are Aristotle, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Anscombe, Polanyi, and Grene. Michael Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge, and connected concepts like attend to, attend from, and subsidiary awareness, are presented. Different kinds of subsidiary awareness, not noted by Polanyi, are distinguished. It is also argued that Polanyi has not seen all the implicatons of his view that instruments can be interiorized and be part of the lived body. Conversely, parts of the normally lived body can be exteriorized. Nor has Polanyi seen that one has subsidiary awareness of oneself as a certain kind ofperson. This fact, in turn, is shown to have implications for the way we constitute ourselves as agents. Since we are engendered agents, we always attend from gender. In the last decade, the concept of trust has definitely entered epistemology. Mostly, it has been in terms of trusting testimony and/or testifier. This thesis wants to deepen that account. There is a more fundamental kind of trust, namely trust in oneself and trust in the world. It is called existential trust, and it is of epistemological importance, too. Existential trust, it is claimed, is necessary in all acts of knowing. Probably, this fact is hard to discover without having recourse to a distinction like that between attending from and attending to. Existential trust is shown in the way we attend from something. Observation and thinking are central epistemological categories, of course, but they should be supplemented by trust. Without trust they cannot perform any epistemological work. Linguistically, 'to know' is a state verb. Superficially, it describes only a state, not an activity. This fact, however, does not contradict the view of knowledge put forward in the dissertation. To know is to have a disposition to perform successfully either some kind of action, or to perform some kind of true assertive speech act. Basically, knowing is an activity. (shrink)