In this investigation, I focus on individual memory behaviors for which we commonly blame and praise each other. Alas, we too often do so unreflectively. Blame and praise should not be undertaken lightly or without a good grasp on both what we are holding people responsible for, and the conditions under which they can be held responsible. I lay out the constructivist view of memory with consideration for both remembering and forgetting, and special attention to how we remember events as (...) well as whether we remember them. I generate seven defeasible generalized moral rules that should govern individual memory behaviors including remembering our own past wrongs, holding grudges, and creating positive as well as negative memories. By such means may we all remember and forget rightly and not for ill. (shrink)

Environmental philosophies concerning our obligations to each other and the natural world too rarely address the aftermath of environmental injustice. Ideally we would never do each other wrong; given that we do, as fallible and imperfect agents, we require non-ideal ethical guidance. Margaret Walker’s work on moral repair and Annette Baier’s work on cross-generational communality together provide useful hermeneutical tools for understanding and enacting meaningful responses to intergenerational injustice, and in particular, for anthropogenic climate change. By blending Baier’s cross-generational approach (...) with Walker’s emphasis on victim subjectivity and moral repair, I propose that a reparative model of intergenerational justice can provide some much needed direction on non-ideal moral issues comparatively neglected in climate-ethics debates today. (shrink)

Understanding evil requires both addressing the grave wrongs done to the victim and addressing the perpetrator who does these wrongs. Claudia Card's concept of social vitality was developed to explain what génocidaires destroy in their victims. This essay brings that concept into conversation with perpetrator testimony, arguing that the génocidaires’ desire for their own social vitality, achieved through their destruction of the social world of their targets, in fact boomerangs to corrode the vitality of their own lives. This is true (...) whether they succeed or fail in their genocidal project. Card's recent analysis of “being a badass” is brought to bear on the cultivation of evil, and the essay suggests four strategies for meeting Card's “moral challenge of avoiding evil responses to evil.”. (shrink)

How should feminist philosophers regard the inequalities that structure the lives of women? Some of these inequalities are trivial and others are not; together they form a framework of unequal treatment that shapes women’s lives. This paper asks what priority we should give inequalities that affect women; it critically analyzes Claudia Card’s view that feminists ought to give evils priority. Sometimes ending gender-based inequalities is the best route to eliminating gender-based evil.

There is a common intuition that genocide is qualitatively distinct from, and much worse than, mass murder. If we concentrate on the most obvious differences between genocidal killing and other cases of mass murder it is difficult to see why this should be the case. I argue that many cases of genocide involve not merely individual evil but a form of collective action manifesting a collective evil will. It is this that explains the moral distinctiveness of genocide. My view contrasts (...) with one put forward by Claudia Card, though we both agree that the notion of ‘‘social death’’ plays a significant role here. (shrink)

In this paper, we contextualize Claudia Card's work on forgiveness within wider literatures on forgiveness. With Card, we emphasize the costs of forgiveness and the sufferings of victims, and suggest alternatives to forgiving evils. Women who live in particularly unsafe contexts require recognition more than reconciliation. We conclude that those who forgive evil also require recognition that respects the choices of forgiving agents, seeing their decisions as relevant to conceptual analysis about forgiveness.