While Susan Moller Okin found much to celebrate in Rawls's earlier articulation of his theory of justice, she worried that his later turn to political liberalism evacuated his theory of its feminist potential. Here, I argue that we need not be so pessimistic: some of the strongest arguments for pursuing certain feminist projects can and should be made from within a politically liberal framework. In advancing this claim, I develop Rawls's idea of primary goods—namely those goods that all citizens need (...) qua citizens—as a key conceptual resource for arguing for the elimination of the gendered division of labor using public reason. Drawing on recent empirical literature, I point out that the gendered division of labor continues to distribute to women an unfair allocation of primary goods. I then advocate for a specific public policy, which I call Gender Egalitarian Daddy Quota—a parental leave policy that sets aside time specifically for fathers to encourage men and women to engage in childcare related leave-taking to similar extents—on the grounds that this policy would help secure a fairer distribution of primary goods, and thus is required as a matter of justice. (shrink)

This essay takes up an apparently minor idea of Susan Moller Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family—that employers should split the paycheck of wage-earning husbands between employees and their stay-at-home spouses—and suggests that it actually threatens to undermine Okin's entire argument by perpetuating the most central cause of women's inequality by Okin's own account: the sexual division of labor. Recognizing the vital contributions that Okin's seminal work made and the impact that it had on the field of feminist philosophy and (...) political theory, the essay explores the ethical, political, and philosophical problems with this solution to the dire problems of gender inequality and injustice that Okin correctly identifies. The essay suggests that her commitment to liberalism may have resulted in a commitment to an inadequate vision of how to solve the problems of gender inequality, and offers other possibilities that Okin could have pursued instead that sustain her strong commitment to liberalism. (shrink)

Qu’il faille repenser à nouveaux frais le féminisme à l’aune des nouvelles revendications différenciées et des exigences de reconnaissance aussi plurielles que complexes, voilà qui ne peut prêter à controverse. Mais les moyens et la perspective pour mener une telle tâche ne font pas, eux, l’unanimité. Le présent travail se propose de partir d’un diagnostic qui sonne comme un programme : décentrer le féminisme. Il s’agira, à travers une lecture critique du Rawls de Susan Okin, d’esquisser les principaux traits d’un (...) recentrage qui se donne à voir comme rotation plutôt que comme translation. (shrink)

Despite women’s increased labor force participation, household divisions of labor remain highly unequal. Properly implemented, gender egalitarian political interventions such as work time regulation, dependent care provisions, and family leave initiatives can induce families to share work more equally than they currently do. But do these interventions constitute legitimate uses of political power? In this article, I defend the political legitimacy of these interventions. Using the conception of citizenship at the heart of political liberalism, I argue that citizens would accept (...) political interventions aimed at protecting the ‘genuinely available option’ to enact gender egalitarian lifestyles. More strongly still, I argue that under certain circumstances, citizens would insist on the enactment of political interventions to protect this option. According to political liberalism’s constraints on legitimacy, this insistence renders these interventions not only legitimate but positively mandatory. It is legitimate for a state to exercise power to preserve the genuinely available option to enact a gender egalitarian lifestyle, and under certain circumstances, it is illegitimate for a state to fail to do so. (shrink)

Public reason accounts commonly claim that exercises of coercive political power must be justified by appeal to reasons accessible to all citizens. Such accounts are vulnerable to the objection that they cannot legitimate coercion to protect basic liberal rights against infringement by deeply illiberal people. This paper first elaborates the distinctive interpersonal conception of justification in public reason accounts in contrast to impersonal forms of justification. I then detail a core dissenter-based objection to public reason based on a worrisome example (...) advanced by Jonathan Quong. While we may be able to impersonally justify coercing the illiberal dissenter, public reason liberals must explain how we can interpersonally justify such coercion—meaning justify given the perspective of the dissenter. The two prominent strategies for dealing with dissenters involve idealization of reasoning and requiring liberal values; I show that these strategies do not succeed in a way compatible with the public reason project. That is, the prominent strategies leave public reason theorists with a dilemma between denying the legitimacy of using coercion to protect core freedoms against deeply illiberal people or abandoning the fundamental public reason project. I conclude by proposing a different answer to public reason liberalism’s fundamental question: what requires justification? On my account, it is not that coercion requires interpersonal justification for its permissibility, but that such justification is necessary as a constitutive element of a kind of moral community. (shrink)

Individuals have different experiences of work when they are self-employed, when they perform tasks in the gig economy, and when they follow directives from managers. But such differences are not represented in some of the most prominent non-ideal theories of work. These describe workers as a coherent group, with a position in the structure of the liberal capitalist economy. I present an alternative that does better at acknowledging difference, through a description of work and workers that has greater ‘pluralism’ and (...) less ‘unifying coherence’. Some might insist that their ‘unifying’ description has superior empirical plausibility. But if ‘pluralistic’ descriptions are valid rivals to provide an accurate characterization of our current condition, then we should consider whether their use in theory can serve valuable aims. I identify the distinctive and valuable non-ideal aims – epistemic, evaluative, and normative – that can be pursued with ‘pluralistic’ descriptions of work and workers. (shrink)

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argues that markets, absent political intervention, tend toward economic divergence and that this has deleterious consequences for democratic ideals of equal voice and meritocracy. His goal is to foster a public conversation about what a society dominated by wealth—which we already beginning to experience as the twenty-first century begins—would look like if we wish to maintain an egalitarian ethos. His work will contribute to and further motivate several discussions in feminist bioethics, namely, (...) on the funding and organization of care labor, reproductive rights, global health, and commodification. (shrink)

Philosophy and Literature is an internationally renowned refereed journal founded by Denis Dutton at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. It is now published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Since its inception in 1976, Philosophy and Literature has been concerned with the relation between literary and philosophical studies, publishing articles on the philosophical interpretation of literature as well as the literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature has sometimes been regarded as iconoclastic, in the sense that it repudiates academic pretensions, (...) insidious jargon and institutional vogue. Dutton, who remains the editor, still writes a regular column. A distinctive feature of Philosophy and Literature was the annual Bad Writing Contest, held from 1995–98, which sought to identify (and publish) the ‘most stylistically lamentable passages’ of academic prose, often to great amusement. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that men should take primary responsibility for protecting against pregnancy. Male long-acting reversible contraceptives are currently in development, and, once approved, should be used as the standard method for avoiding pregnancy. Since women assume the risk of pregnancy when they engage in penis-in-vagina sex, men should do their utmost to ensure that their ejaculations are responsible, otherwise women shoulder a double burden of pregnancy risk plus contraceptive responsibility. Changing the expectations regarding responsibility for contraception would (...) render penis-in-vagina sex more equitable, and could lead to a shift in the discourse around abortion access. I describe the sex asymmetries of contraceptive responsibility and of pregnancy-related risk, and offer arguments in favour of men taking primary responsibility for contraception. My arguments centre on: (1) analogies between contraception and vaccination, and unwanted pregnancy and disease; (2) a veil-of-ignorance approach, in which I contend that if a person were not told their sex, they would find a society in which men were expected to acquire and use effective contraceptives the fairest arrangement for everyone. (shrink)

Despite women’s increased labor force participation, household divisions of labor remain highly unequal. Properly implemented, gender egalitarian political interventions such as work time regulation, dependent care provisions, and family leave initiatives can induce families to share work more equally than they currently do. But do these interventions constitute legitimate uses of political power? In this article, I defend the political legitimacy of these interventions. Using the conception of citizenship at the heart of political liberalism, I argue that citizens would accept (...) political interventions aimed at protecting the ‘genuinely available option’ to enact gender egalitarian lifestyles. More strongly still, I argue that under certain circumstances, citizens would insist on the enactment of political interventions to protect this option. According to political liberalism’s constraints on legitimacy, this insistence renders these interventions not only legitimate but positively mandatory. It is legitimate for a state to exercise power to preserve the genuinely available option to enact a gender egalitarian lifestyle, and under certain circumstances, it is illegitimate for a state to fail to do so. (shrink)

At the center of many critiques of liberalism is liberal neutrality, which is attacked on two fronts. First, it is argued that neutrality yields a restrictive sphere of public reason. Contentious views—like those endorsed by citizens with marginalized comprehensive doctrines—are outlawed from public consideration. Second, state policies must have neutral effects, lest they differentially impact those with unpopular views. Contentious state actions—like those endorsed by citizens with marginalized moral views—are outlawed from implementation. It is this combination of demands for neutrality (...) at the individual and state levels that produces the concern: if marginalized comprehensive doctrines cannot be discussed in the realm of public reason, and if marginalized moral views cannot be acted upon by the state, how will we ever achieve the goals of feminism, itself a marginalized moral view? Does liberal neutrality prohibit progress toward gender equality? In this paper, I argue to the contrary. Many objections regarding liberalism’s supposed failure to secure gender justice rely on a conception of neutrality as neutrality of effect. But at both the individual and state levels, liberalism’s demand for neutrality is about justification. Liberalism, specifically political liberalism, requires neither neutral content of public reasons nor neutral effects of state policies. (shrink)

As part of a celebration of Susan Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family, this article notes how some impacts of the book were so accepted that their original source has been forgotten. It goes on to make three critical arguments about 1) Okin's pared-down account of gender injustice, 2) her choice to embrace the Rawlsian distributive view of justice, and 3) her treatment of the family as the linchpin of gender injustice.

This article examines the attempts by John Rawls in the works published after Political Liberalism to engage with some of the feminist responses to his work. Rawls goes a long way toward addressing some of the major feministliberal concerns. Yet this has the unintended consequence of pushing justice as fairness in the direction of a more comprehensive, rather than a strictly political, form of liberalism. This does not seem to be a problem peculiar to Rawls: rather, any form of liberalism (...) hospitable to feminist concerns must be, at the very least, a partly comprehensive, rather than a strictly political, doctrine. (shrink)

It has been widely argued that East Asian governments should be permitted to promote Confucian values. Recently, Zhuoyao Li rejected this view and advocates that East Asian govern- ments should be neutral to all cultures and religions, including Confucianism. Nevertheless, Li believes that Confucianism does not loses its significance in a political liberal state because Confucians can still propose laws and policies, so long as their proposals are justified by public reason. In this paper, I argue that Li misunderstands the (...) true significance of Confucianism in his model. Under the constraint of public reason, Confucians can hardly give any novel input in public deliberation. Rather, I believe that the contribution of Confucianism is to educate citizens to become fully just in the private sphere. Citizens may learn to be unjust if injustices are common in the private sphere. However, a political liberal state would be criticized as being overly invasive if it directly regulates the private sphere. Hence, I propose a division of educational labour between po- litical liberalism and Confucianism in the public and private sphere. Finally, I use the Confucian workplace as an example to show how rituals in the workplace can enhance citizens’ sense of justice in the private sphere. (shrink)

Este artigo tem o objetivo de apresentar e desenvolver as críticas feministas à Teoria da Justiça de John Rawls, especialmente por meio do diálogo e das contribuições de Martha Nussbaum e Susan Okin para um liberalismo feminista. Para tanto, discutimos três pontos centrais no debate entre essas duas filósofas feministas e Rawls: a) a noção de família como uma instituição básica da sociedade; b) a distinção entre doutrinas morais abrangentes razoáveis e não razoáveis; e c) a concepção de pessoa política (...) com autonomia plena. As críticas à teoria rawlsiana feitas por feministas demonstram a riqueza e a profundidade de Rawls para o liberalismo contemporâneo, ao mesmo tempo em que apontam para os problemas que teorias que tradicionalmente não desenvolvem um olhar crítico para a situação generificada dos sistemas democráticos encontram ao abordar a situação da cidadania das mulheres. As demandas do feminismo liberal, relacionadas à situação de mulheres ao redor do mundo, são muito bem-articuladas por Nussbaum a partir de sua crítica interna ao liberalismo rawlsiano, enfatizando que algumas das disposições teóricas desse autor não parecem ser radicais o suficiente para garantir a disponibilidade integral dessas capacidades para mulheres e crianças. Da mesma forma, o diálogo de Nussbaum com as críticas de Okin aprofundaram o debate sobre os limites da teoria da justiça rawlsiana. (shrink)

This article argues that a state-centered theory of global justice exhibits an epistemic problem of perspective, and that this worry exhibits a gendered character. Within a liberal domestic theory of justice, the public/private distinction has been repeatedly shown to be bad for women because it creates a domain for injustice that becomes invisible to public policy and the law. This article argues that state-centered theories of global justice create an analogous space that is cut off from questions of global justice. (...) The article therefore suggests that this way of framing questions of global justice is problematic, and is problematic for women in particular. Just as the public/private distinction in liberal domestic justice leaves cases of injustice outside the vision of the law, the hard distinction between the domestic (state) sphere and the international realm of justice leaves cases of injustice invisible to international law. For the question of global justice, the privileging of sovereignty and non-intervention compromises the ability of the theory to achieve its purported goal of universal justice. (shrink)