ABSTRACT:Research on political ideology in law and psychology can be fruitfully applied to the question of whether business ethics is ideological, and, if so, what response is warranted. I suggest that legal and psychological research streams can be drawn upon to create a new genre of critical business ethics that differs from normative and empirical business ethics. In psychology, Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) suggests how the mainstream ideology within an academic field can be criticized as a reflection of a self-righteous, (...) us-them mind-set. In law, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) suggests how a field’s mainstream ideology can be criticized as a rationalization of the status quo. I suggest that the MFT and CLS criticisms of ideology can be joined to develop a critical approach to business ethics that seriously examines science on normatively charged topics, such as liberal-conservative differences and implicit attitudes, and that frames it in terms of alternative narratives. (shrink)

Feminist and queer theorists influenced by Michel Foucault have given analyses of sexual violence and of sexually violent pornography that are generally taken to be in striking opposition to those defended by radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon. In this commentary on Linda Martín Alcoff’s Rape and resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation, I suggest that these seemingly divergent analyses of sexual violence are more similar than they have appeared to be and I ask: Might this book help to (...) bring an end to the so-called ‘sex wars’ between the Foucauldians and the MacKinnonites that have been raging since the mid-1980s? (shrink)

: Liberal rights theory can be used either to challenge or to support social hierarchies of power. Focusing on Ronald Dworkin's theory of rights and Catharine MacKinnon's feminist critique of liberalism, I identify a number of problems with the way that liberal theorists conceptualize rights. I argue that rights can be used to chal-lenge oppressive practices and structures only if they are defined and employed with an awareness and critique of social relations of power.

Feminism is an antiauthoritarian movement that has sought to unmask many traditional “authorities” as ungrounded. Given this, it might seem as if feminists are required to abandon the concept of authority altogether. But, we argue, the exercise of authority enables us to coordinate our efforts to achieve larger social goods and, hence, should be preserved. Instead, what is needed and what we provide for here is a way to distinguish legitimate authority from objectionable authoritarianism.

I argue that a gendered division of labor is often the result of choices by women that count as fully voluntary because they are an expression of preferences and commitments that reflect women's understanding of their own good. Since liberalism has a commitment to respecting fully voluntary choices, it has a commitment to respecting these gendered choices. I suggest that justified political action may require that we fail to respect some people's considered choices.

Silencing is a speech-related harm. We here focus on one particular account of silencing offered by Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton. According to this account, silencing is systematically generated, illocutionary-communicative failure. We here raise an apparent challenge to that account. In particular, we offer an example—the drowning case—that meets these conditions of silencing but does not intuitively seem to be an instance of it. First, we explore several conditions one might add to the Hornsby-Langton account, but we argue that none (...) are satisfactory. Then, we further explore the systematicity condition, which is insufficiently characterized in the current literature. Although we explore several promising ways to further characterize this condition, we ultimately conclude that more work needs to be done. Consequently, because this systematicity condition is under-specified, the Hornsby-Langton account of silencing is incomplete. (shrink)

The twenty-first century will witness an unprecedented decline in the diversity of the world’s languages. While most philosophers will likely agree that this decline is lamentable, the question of what exactly is lost with a language has not been systematically explored in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address this lacuna by arguing that language loss constitutes a problematic form of illocutionary silencing. When a language disappears, past and present speakers lose the ability to realize a range of speech (...) acts that can only be realized in that language. With that ability, speakers lose something in which they have a fundamental interest: their standing as fully empowered members of a linguistic community. (shrink)

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby provide accounts of how pornography silences women by appealing to J.L. Austin's account of speech-acts. Since their accounts focus only on instances of silencing where the hearer does not grasp the type of speech-act the speaker intends to perform, their accounts of silencing do not generalize to explain silencing that arises from what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice.” I argue that silencing arising from testimonial injustice can only be explained by what we shall call the (...) dialectical account of assertion, according to which assertion is the undertaking of a commitment in reasoned discourse. In doing so, I show that accounts of assertion based on speakers' intentions, proposals to common ground, and constitutive norms do not provide the necessary framework to explain silencing within the context of testimonial injustice. Having shown the strength of the dialectical account in explaining silencing, I conclude that the dialectical account also provides a way to remedy some instances of silencing arising from testimonial injustice providing further evidence that the dialectical account is the correct account of assertion. (shrink)

C.M. Concepcion's review of “Pornography: An Uncivil Liberty?” fundamentally misconstrues the position defended in that article. This paper examines possible sources of this misconstrual, focusing critical attention on the narrowly crafted, morally loaded notion of “pornography” that figures centrally in the original argument under review. Pornography is not a category of speech that can be characterized as having one crucial meaning or message, nor is the message of pornography easily identifiable in instances of pornographic speech. This raises the problem of (...) interpretive privilege, which haunts many of the antipornography arguments being offered in the contemporary debate, including the author's own earlier argument. (shrink)

With its implicit vilification of materiality, the notion of objectification has failed to produce a coherent and effective ethical analysis of heterosexual sex work. The concept of derivatization, grounded in an Irigarayan model of embodied intersubjectivity, is more effective. However, queer sex work poses new and different ethical challenges. This paper argues that although queer sex work can entail both objectification and derivatization, the former is not ethically objectionable, and the latter, although the cause for some justified ethical concern, must (...) be analyzed within the context of structural sexual injustice. (shrink)

All duties are either duties of right (officia iuris), that is, duties for which external lawgiving is possible, or duties of virtue (officia virtutis s. ethica), for which external lawgiving is not possible. – Duties of virtue cannot be subject to external lawgiving simply because they have to do with an end which (or the having of which) is also a duty. No external lawgiving can bring about someone's setting an end for himself (because this is an internal act of (...) the mind), although it may prescribe external actions that lead to an end without the subject making it his end. (shrink)

The formal theory of rational choice as grounded in desire-satisfaction cannot account for the problem of such deformed desires as women's slavish desires. Traditional “informed desire” tests impose conditions of rationality, such as full information and absence of psychoses, but do not exclude deformed desires. I offer a Kantian-inspired addendum to these tests, according to which the very features of deformed desires render them irrational to adopt for an agent who appreciates her equal worth.

In this paper, I develop two criticisms of Miranda Fricker’s attempt to offer an interpretation of MacKinnon’s claim that pornography silences women that conceives of the silencing in question as an extreme form of testimonial injustice. The intended contrast is with the speech act theoretical model of silencing familiar from Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby, who appeal to MacKinnon’s claim to argue against the standard liberal line on pornography, which takes a permissive stance to be demanded by a right to (...) freedom of speech. Fricker’s alternative suggestion is that women are the victims of ‘an especially acute form of testimonial injustice’, due to the kind of dehumanizing bad sexual ideology peddled in much pornography. Fricker suggests that both notions of silencing are coherent possibilities, but that ‘the epistemic model describes the more empirically likely possibility, simply because it requires less erosion of women’s human status before the silencing effect kicks in’. I question the truth of this advertised advantage of Fricker’s epistemic account of silencing, but also its relevance to philosophical debates about pornography and silencing. Second, I raise a concern about theorizing about sexual refusal as a kind of testimony, as Fricker does. (shrink)

Sexual assault is a common experience for women and a significant topic for feminist scholarship. However, discussions of forensic evidence collection have been largely neglected. This paper considers the ethics of forensic evidence collection by situating the conversation in the context of the experience of sexual assault. The power of patriarchal norms and rape myths, the impact of trauma, and the systemic sexism in the medical and legal systems are also discussed. With this literature in mind, recommendations are made to (...) improve the medical response to sexual assault survivors and the procedures of forensic evidence collection. (shrink)