The aim of this essay is to rethink classic issues of freedom and moral responsibility in the context of feminist and antiracist theories of male and white domination. If personal identities are socially constructed by gender, race and ethnicity, class and sexual orientation, how are social change and moral responsibility possible? An aspects theory of selfhood and three reinterpretations of identity politics show how individuals are morally responsible and nonessentialist ways to resist social oppression.

Harry G. Frankfurt has put the problem of volitional conflict at the center of philosophical attention. If you care fundamentally about your career and your family, but these cares conflict, this conflict undermines the coherency of your decision standard and thereby your ability to choose and act autonomously. The standard response to this problem is to argue that you can overcome volitional conflict by unifying your foundational motivational states. As Frankfurt puts it, the ‘totality of things that an agent cares (...) about’ plus his ‘ordering of how important to him they are effectively specifies his answer to the question of how to live’ (The Reasons of Love(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 23). In this paper, I critically assess the three main reasons given for such a coherency requirement: 1) we can do only one action at a time; 2) our motivational states come with normative pressure towards coherency; and 3) conflicting motivational states provide us with an incoherent decision-making framework. I conclude that these reasons do not ground a coherency requirement for practical deliberation and argue that we can autonomously express ourselves as volitionally conflicted by acting on our conflicting motivational states over the course of multiple actions. (shrink)

Integrity is sometimes conceived in terms of the wholeness of the individual, such that persons who experience temptations or other sorts of inner conflicts, afflictions, or divisions of self would seem to lack integrity to a greater or lesser degree. I contrast this understanding of integrity—which I label psychological integrity —with a different conception which I call practical integrity . On the latter conception, persons can manifest integrity in spite of the various factors mentioned above, so long as they remain (...) true to their commitments in action and deliberation. Although psychological harmony is one feature reasonably associated with integrity, I suggest that practical integrity captures other features of character and action often (and reasonably) related to ascriptions of integrity. Practical integrity remains possible even for those who must confront, manage, and control factors that give rise to various kinds of inner conflict. (shrink)

The Asian American identity is intimately associated with upward class mobility as the model minority, yet women's earnings remain less than men's, and Asian American women are perceived to have strong family ties binding them to domestic responsibilities. As such, the exact class status of Asian American women is unclear. The immediate association of this ethnic identity with a specific class as demonstrated by the recently released Pew study that Asian Americans are “the highest-income, best-educated” ethnicity contrasts with another study (...) that finds Asian American women have the highest suicide rates in the United States. To understand these contrasting statistics, this article explores Asian American women's sense of authenticity. If the individual's sense of authenticity is intimately related with one's group identity, the association of the Asian American identity with a particular class ambivalently ensnares her as dichotomously inauthentic—as both the poor Asian American woman who fails to achieve economic upward mobility and the model minority Asian American woman who engages in assimilation practices. Feminist philosophers understand that identities change, but exactly how these transformations occur remains a mystery. The article ends with three speculations on the difficulties for practicing and recognizing individual acts that transform one's group identity. (shrink)

Many recent theorists have argued that the self is socially constituted, or “decentered” by its social world. With surprising consistency, and in various ways, this decentered self has been gendered feminine, by feminists and non‐feminists alike. In this paper I explore whether there is any special link between femininity and decenteredness. I distinguish between two different ways that the self might be decentered – by its position within a cultural order, or by its interactions and relations with particular others. I (...) then ask whether either of these potential forms of decenteredness bear a specific connection to femininity, and I try to spell out several such connections that are suggested by contemporary feminist theoretical writings. I argue that most of these cannot be made plausible or coherent. However, I conclude that there are some senses in which feminine selves are especially decentered, although it appears that the link depends upon women's disempowered social position, and not upon anything to do with femininity as a distinctive identity. (shrink)

Most Third World feminists consider nationalism as detrimental to feminism. Against this general trend, I argue that “polycentric” nationalism has potentials for advocating feminist causes in the Third World. “Polycentric” nationalism, whose proper goal is the attainment and maintenance of national self-determination, is still relevant in this neocolonial age of capitalist globalization and may serve feminist purposes of promoting the well-being of the majority of Third World women who suffer disproportionately under this system.

Audre Lorde reopened the question of the position of the erotic with respect to both knowledge and power in her 1983 essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." This is not a new question in the philosophical literature; it is a very old one. What is different about Audre Lorde's examination of Eros is that she starts with a decidedly lesbian conception of Eros, in marked contrast to other Western philosophers' work.