This paper elaborates and renders explicit some of the views about political philosophical methodology that underlie the author’s arguments in Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. It shows how the author’s stances on autonomy, individualism, intersectionality, human rights, the coloniality of gender, and the oppression of genders besides man and woman grow out of a commitment to scrutinizing our normative views in light of transnational criticism and empirical information from the qualitative social sciences.

ABSTRACTSerene Khader and Rosa Terlazzo have each recently proposed theories of adaptive preferences which purport to both respect persons’ agency and provide an effective political tool. While Khader and Terlazzo thus share a similar goal, they take fundamentally different paths in its pursuit: Khader offers a perfectionist account of APs and Terlazzo an autonomy-based theory. In this paper, I argue first that if it is to adequately respect persons’ agency, a theory of APs should in some way include autonomy considerations. (...) If it is to provide an effective political tool, however, our theory should not be entirely autonomy-based, but include a condition addressing a preference’s compatibility with basic flourishing. The suggestion is thus that it is worth considering the possibility of a ‘mixed,’ rather than exclusively perfectionist or exclusively autonomy-based, theory of APs. I outline two such theories. The first, I argue, does quite well with respect to the political efficacy aim of AP theoriz... (shrink)

Although the problem of adaptiveness plays an important motivating role in her work on human capabilities, Martha Nussbaum never gives a clear account of the controversial concept of adaptive preferences on which she relies. In this paper, I aim both to reconstruct the most plausible account of the concept that may be attributed to Nussbaum and to provide a critical appraisal of that account. Although her broader work on the capabilities approach moves progressively towards political liberalism as time passes, I (...) aim to show that her account of adaptive preferences continues to maintain her earlier commitment to perfectionism about the good. I then distinguish between two obligatory kinds of respect for persons, which I call, respectively, primary and secondary recognition respect. This distinction allows us to see that her perfectionist account of adaptive preferences allows her to show persons primary but not secondary recognition respect. Ultimately, I claim that an acceptable account of adaptive prefer.. (shrink)

Accounts of adaptive preferences are of two kinds: well-being accounts fully theorized for their own sake and political accounts theorized to facilitate the political project of reducing oppression and marginalization. Given their practical role, the latter are often less fully theorized, and are therefore less robust to theoretical criticism. In this paper, I first draw on well-being accounts to identify the well-theorized elements that political accounts should want to adopt in order to strengthen their project and avoid common criticisms. Second, (...) I appeal to the political project to show the shortcomings of the well-being accounts on which I draw. (shrink)

Social problems such as racism, sexism, and inequality are often cited as structural rather than individual in nature. What does it mean to invoke a social structural explanation, and how do such explanations relate to individualistic ones? This article explores recent philosophical debates concerning the nature and usages of social structural explanation. I distinguish between two central kinds of social structural explanation: those that are autonomous from psychology, and those that are not. This distinction will help clarify the explanatory power (...) that each type of SSE has, points of convergence with methodological traditions such as critical theory and rational choice theory, and the difficulties that each type of SSE faces. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT. — This article examines the concept of adaptive preference as it has appeared in feminist political philosophy since the 2000’s. This concept refers to preferences shaped in compliance with an oppressive environment and that jeopardizes one’s well-being. In the first part, the two most influential conceptions of adaptive preference will be discussed : the ones provided by the philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Serene Khader. Afterwards, I will assess these conceptions in the light of recent work by feminist anthropologists Saba (...) Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod, in which they revaluate the political project of feminist philosophy underlying adaptive preferences. -/- RÉSUMÉ. — Cet article porte sur le concept de préférence adaptative tel qu’il est apparu en philosophie féministe politique et anglophone depuis les années 2000. Ce concept désigne les préférences formées conformément à un milieu oppressif et qui vont à l’encontre du bien-être. Dans un premier temps, il sera question des deux théorisations les plus influentes à l’heure actuelle: celles développées par les philosophes Martha Nussbaum et Serene Khader. Ensuite, j’évaluerai ces positions à l’aune des récents travaux des anthropologues fémi- nistes Saba Mahmood et Lila Abu-Lughod, dans lesquels elles remettent en question le projet politique de la philosophie féministe sous-jacent aux préfé- rences adaptatives. (shrink)

An important question confronting feminist philosophers is why women are sometimes complicit in their own subordination. The dominant view holds that complicity is best understood in terms of adaptive preferences. This view assumes that agents will naturally gravitate away from subordination and towards flourishing as long as they do not have things imposed on them that disrupt this trajectory. However, there is reason to believe that ‘impositions’ do not explain all of the ways in which complicity can arise. This paper (...) defends a phenomenological account of complicity, which offers an alternative explanation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I discuss the issues raised by Alcoff, Arya, and Táíwò in their responses to Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. I pay special attention to a fact I think all nonideal theorists, particularly ones who care about reducing oppression, must take seriously: the fact that oppression characteristically faces its victims with tradeoffs such that attempts to advance their interests usually come with significant costs. I discuss how this fact bears on the situations of poor women and those oppressed by (...) sexism and imperialism simultaneously. I also discuss how the nonideal universalist perspective I develop in Decolonizing Universalism supports criticism of neoliberalism, how it takes seriously concerns about the locus of enunciation in Latin American decolonial theory, how it supports transnational solidarities, and its upshots for thinking the relationships between feminism, culture, and modernity. (shrink)

I argue that postcolonial feminist critiques draw our attention to four phenomena that are easily confused with what I call ?paradigmatic adaptive preference? ? and that the ability to distinguish these phenomena can improve the quality of development interventions. An individual has paradigmatic adaptive preferences (APs) if she perpetuates injustice against herself because her normative worldview is nearly completely distorted. The four look-alike phenomena postcolonial feminist critics help us identify are (a) APs caused by selective value distortion (SAPs), (b) APs (...) caused by forced tradeoffs (TAPs), (c) APs caused by misperceptions of the facts (MAPs), and (d) wellbeing-compatible preferences that are misunderstood because of a lack of cultural or contextual knowledge. The first three, I argue, are non-paradigmatic forms of AP that have gone previously unrecognized and that we need to expand our conceptual vocabulary to describe; the last is not a form of AP at all. Development practitioners can grapple more seriously with the real-world complexities of moral psychology and cross-cultural moral judgments if they are capable of distinguishing paradigmatic AP from the look-alike phenomena. (shrink)

Development ethicists see reducing intrahousehold gender inequality as an important policy aim. However, it is unclear that a minimalist cross-cultural consensus can be formed around this goal. Inequality on its own may not bring women beneath a minimal welfare threshold. Further, adherents of complementarian metaphysical doctrines may view attempts to reduce intrahousehold inequality as attacks on their worldviews. Complicating the justificatory task is the fact that familiar arguments against intrahousehold inequality, including those from agency and self-esteem, depart from premises that (...) complementarians reject—premises about the value of independence or the moral irrelevance of gender. I propose that development ethicists should offer complementarianism-compatible arguments against the norms and practices constitutive of intrahousehold inequality. I develop arguments against two intrahousehold inequality-supportive practices that depart from complementarian premises. Specifically, I argue that patriarchal risk and gender schemas that devalue women's labor prevent men from discharging complementarian duties to promote women's welfare. (shrink)

Questions about the normative significance of ‘transparency’ do not receive much attention, even though they were central to Richard Moran’s (2001) original account. Instead, transparency is typically studied because of its epistemic and psychological peculiarities. In this paper, I consider three normative conceptions of transparency: teleological rationalism, procedural rationalism, and relational rationalism. The first is a theory about how transparency might relate to flourishing as a rational agent; the latter two are theories about how transparency relates to non-alienated self-knowledge. All (...) three conceptions, I argue, face serious problems. I end the paper by suggesting where the rationalist might go from here and by highlighting the importance of focusing not on the methods but on the broader circumstances in which self-knowledge is gained or lost. (shrink)

Adaptation to illness, and its relevance for distribution in health care, has been the subject of vigorous debate. In this paper I examine an aspect of this discussion that seems so far to have been overlooked: that some illnesses are difficult, or even impossible, to adapt to. This matters because adaptation reduces suffering. Illness severity is a priority setting criterion in several countries. When considering severity, we are interested in the extent to which an illness makes a person worse-off. I (...) argue that no plausible theory of well-being can disregard suffering when determining to what extent someone is worse-off in terms of health. We should accept, all else equal, that adapting to an illness makes the illness less severe by reducing suffering. Accepting a pluralist theory of well-being allows us to accept my argument, while still making room for the possibility that adaptation is sometimes, all things considered, bad. Finally, I argue that we should conceptualize adaptability as a feature of illness, and thereby account for adaptation on a group level for the purposes of priority setting. (shrink)

This paper revisits Tocqueville’s famous portrait of the American female, which begins with assertions of her equality to males but ends with her self-cloistering in the domestic sphere. Taking a cue from Tocqueville’s extended sketch of the “faded” pioneer wife in “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” and drawing connections to Tocqueville’s criticisms of the division of industrial labor, I argue that the American girl’s ostensibly free choice to remove herself from public life is not an act of freedom. Rather, it (...) is a manifestation of a particular type of unfreedom that reveals underappreciated connections between the two great dangers about which Democracy in America warns: tyrannical majoritarianism and soft despotism. My argument that the girl’s choice to withdraw from public life is coerced rather than free thus highlights the nonpolitical sources of oppression that exist within democratic societies. The paper concludes by raising questions about the need for coercion within Tocquevillian democracy and the implications of this for Tocqueville’s “new” political science—indeed, for his liberalism more generally. (shrink)

This article proposes a way to disambiguate the evaluative states currently identified as “adaptive preferences” in development literature. It provides a brief analysis of Serene Khader's Deliberative Perfectionist Approach, and demonstrates that distinguishing between adaptive states has important implications for the theory and practice of development intervention. Although I support Khader's general approach and consider my project to be complementary, I argue that the term preferences be replaced with four distinct terms: beliefs, choices, desires, and values. Distinguishing among adaptive states (...) can serve to prevent inappropriate intervention and appreciate the costs of transforming inappropriate adaptations. I argue that adaptive values are especially problematic, given how central a person's values are to their sense of meaning and self. Attempts to transform adaptive values are likely to produce internal conflict, resulting in psychological distress and diminished agency. Furthermore, some values preclude deliberation and comparison given their communal status as infinitely valuable. To deliberate about sacred values is to violate them. The emotional and psychological damage that may result from value transformation is thus likely to be extensive, and must be taken into account when determining whether, and what type of, intervention is justified. (shrink)

It is common in the autonomy literature to claim that some more demanding theories of autonomy disrespect certain individuals by giving the result that those individuals lack autonomy. This claim is often made in the context of the debate between substantive and content-neutral theories of autonomy. Proponents of content-neutral theories often argue that, in deeming certain people non-autonomous—especially certain oppressed people who seem to have internalized their oppression in certain ways—the substantive theories disrespect those people. They take this as reason (...) to accept content-neutral views over substantive views. Despite its ubiquity, this concern about disrespect is hard to pin down precisely. In this paper, I articulate two questions that need to be answered before we can understand the disrespect objection. First: Who, exactly, is supposedly being disrespected by substantive views? Second: Why is it that excluding people with these features is disrespectful? I consider a number of possible answers to each of these questions, and I argue that none of them gives us a plausible explanation of why we should think substantive theories of autonomy are disrespectful to anyone. No matter how we fill in the details, I will argue, there is simply no reason to prefer content-neutral theories of autonomy over substantive ones on the grounds of respect. (shrink)

Some bemoan the incivility of our times, while others complain that people have grown too quick to take offense. There is widespread disagreement about what counts as an insult and when it is appropriate to feel insulted. Here I propose a definition and a preliminary taxonomy of insults. Namely, I define insults as expressions of a lack of due regard. And I categorize insults by whether they are intended or unintended, acts or omissions, and whether they cause offense or not. (...) Unintended insults are of particular concern since greater understanding may help us to avoid them. And insults by omission warrant special consideration because they suggest an interesting extension of Grice’s theory of conversational implicature. (shrink)

The dialogue between Pūjanī and Brahmadatta is a lesser known episode in the Mahābhārata. This paper explores how Pūjanī’s voice is relevant when rethinking autonomy for feminist relational selves. I first unravel the different ‘stories’ that can be told through this single but multi-layered narrative. Then, by re-arranging their insights and using the idea of ‘normative authority’ proposed by Catriona Mackenzie, I piece together a picture of autonomy foregrounding dependence on others and volatile emotionality––both of which are generally thought to (...) be opposed to ‘being in control’ or being autonomous. This emerging picture of self-governance indicates how even selves constituted by relationships to others can exit relational situations that are or become harmful. I also show that the episode leaves behind ‘internalist’ conceptions of autonomy for more capacious notions of self-determination that incorporate the importance of structural changes for agentive freedom. This goes beyond the insights of the Mahābhārata in a self-reflexive move built into the story itself. (shrink)

The suggestion that individuals should be considered disadvantaged, and consequently entitled to compensation, only if they consider themselves disadvantaged (Dworkin’s ‘continuity test’) is initially appealing. However, it also faces problems. First, if individuals are routinely mistaken, then we routinely fail to assist the deserving. Second, if individuals assess their circumstances differently then the state will provide different levels of assistance to people in identical situations. Thus, should we instead ignore individuals’ convictions and provide assistance that some, at least, do not (...) feel they need? One set of cases where this dilemma is salient are those in which disabled individuals disagree over whether they are disadvantaged. Focussing on these, I argue that despite objections, individuals should have a voice in determining whether they are disadvantaged. However, I contend that our goal should not be ensuring continuity with individuals’ ethical convictions (concerning the pursuits they deem worthwhile or valuable), but their convictions regarding whether they are relevantly disadvantaged (whether they have what they are entitled to). (shrink)

Feminists debate whether women can autonomously embrace their own subordination. Some argue that it is the process of identifying with desires and values that matters; others, that it is the content of the desires and values that matters. In this paper, I introduce a novel class of cases of ‘thwarted autonomy,’ in which women pursue autonomy but in ways that reinforce gendered subordination, and draw on these cases to develop an expressivist view of women’s autonomy. On this view, agents must (...) embody desires and values in the social world if they are to achieve self-understanding, such that the social world mediates the relation-to-self. Oppressive meanings and norms can channel this expressive activity in ways that violate women’s physical integrity and involve self-abnegation that is incompatible with autonomy. (shrink)

Feminists have always been concerned with how the clothes women wear can reinforce and reproduce gender hierarchy. However, they have strongly disagreed about what to do in response: some have suggested that the key to feminist liberation is to stop caring about how one dresses; others have replied that the solution is to give women increased choices. In this paper, we argue that neither of these dominant approaches is satisfactory and that, ultimately, they have led to an impasse that pervades (...) the contemporary feminist debate. The problem is that both sides of the debate understand women’s complicity in patriarchal subordination as a matter of what women wear and do. Instead, we propose a phenomenological analysis that understands complicity as based in our relations to our clothes. Starting from this phenomenological perspective, we sketch a new relational feminist ethics of dressing. This alternative ethical paradigm cannot yield a simple recipe for how to dress or tell us what garments are off-limits. But it can offer a way to make critical feminist judgements about clothes without veering into a stifling new prescriptivism. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I respond to the feminist critique of traditional theories of autonomy, which revolves around the charge that such theories are too individualistic. Feminists argue against the liberal atomism that they see at the center of traditional autonomy theories. Their resulting theory of relational autonomy is meant to remedy that traditional theories of autonomy posit an individualistic conception of both the self and autonomy. Instead, feminists have argued for a theory of autonomy that takes account of the ways (...) in which persons are irreducibly social, and the ways in which autonomy itself is only possible within certain types of social relationships. I separate the feminist charges against liberalism from the feminist charges against traditional autonomy, since it is at least prima facie possible to consider personal autonomy separately from political autonomy. I thus isolate the feminist critique of liberal atomism from the feminist critique of individualistic autonomy. The first chapter examines the feminist critique of liberalism to determine why it is that the charge of liberal atomism continues to stick, even though it has been clearly established by both feminist and mainstream liberals that liberalism is not guilty of such a charge. While I do not provide a full defense of liberalism, I do argue that such a defense is possible, and possible in a way that upholds feminist goals. Having separated the critiques of liberalism from the critiques of traditional autonomy, the rest of the dissertation focuses exclusively on the autonomy debate. I present an argument against the most robustly relational feminist accounts of autonomy those which accept a relational account of both the self and autonomy. I argue that, although such theories are explicitly designed to vindicate the normative commitments of feminism, their implications yield unwelcome results from this very same feminist perspective. I then present my own procedural account of autonomy. Because it is not constitutively social, it is unlikely to be characterized as a relational account at all. I argue, however, that it is this very feature which allows my account to vindicate the feminist normative commitments espoused by constitutively relational accounts. (shrink)