In an article published in Prolegomena 2006, Christoph Schmidt-Petri has defended his interpretation and attacked mine of Mill’s idea that higher kinds of pleasure are superior in quality to lower kinds, regardless of quantity. Millian qualitative superiorities as I understand them are infinite superiorities. In this paper, I clarify my interpretation and show how Schmidt-Petri has misrepresented it and ignored the obvious textual support for it. As a result, he fails to understand how genuine Millian qualitative superiorities determine the novel (...) structure of Mill’s pluralistic utilitarianism, in which a social code of justice that distributes equal rights and duties takes absolute priority over competing considerations. Schmidt-Petri’s own interpretation is a non-starter, because it does noteven recognize that Mill is talking about different kinds of pleasant feelings, such that the higher kinds are intrinsically more valuable than the lower. I conclude by outlining why my interpretation is free of any metaphysical commitment to the “essence” of pleasure. (shrink)

Work on Stanley Cavell in contemporary political theory tends to foreground Cavell’s reading of Emersonian moral perfectionism, but this aspect of Cavell’s thought is often left out of feminist rea...

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. Work on Stanley Cavell in contemporary political theory tends to foreground Cavell’s reading of Emersonian moral perfectionism, but this aspect of Cavell’s thought is often left out of feminist readings of his work. In this paper, I give an overview of Cavell’s importance to political theory, and I also trace two Cavellian-inspired feminisms: Sandra Laugier’s ordinary language inflected ethics of care and Toril Moi’s understanding of feminist theory as the close and careful reading (...) of examples. I argue that Cavellian-Emersonian moral perfectionism enhances these feminist readings of Cavell because it helps us explain certain practices in feminist activism, such as resisting conformity, acknowledging the limits of our understanding and being receptive to other members of our feminist community. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Stanley Cavell’s reading of the notion of privacy as it appears in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s private language argument (PLA). Defined as a fantasy or fear either of inexpressiveness or excessive expressiveness (cf. Cavell 1979: 254), I argue that such an account is partial, in that it does not represent those individuals that are exposed to epistemic injustice. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s seminal work Epistemic Injustice (2007) and on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I trace (...) some similarities between the conditions of marginalized subjectivities and the private language speaker. This comparison suggests a correction of Cavell’s words and discloses an understanding of the clarificatory import that Wittgenstein’s PLA conveys, rendering it a way to resist marginalization and alienation due to the logical impossibility of a private language. In the second part of the paper (section 3), I consider two other Cavellian notions, namely the “claim to community” and ‘the turn to the ordinary’. Following the line of criticism developed in section 2, which revolves around the need of considering the situatedness of marginalized subjectivities and the oppressive character of the dimension of the ordinary, I try to implement Cavell’s concepts. I do so by taking into account (i) the Wittgenstein-inspired wider conception of rationality Alice Crary (2015) purports and (ii) the practices of some feminist consciousness-raising groups that were active in Milan (Italy) during the Seventies and some ideas developed by feminist and art critic Carla Lonzi. These contributions show that it is possible to maintain the general asset purported by Cavell, but they also call for criteria for better defining on which principles a community can form and which role the collectivity plays in revising the structure of the ordinary. (shrink)