ABSTRACT:As Vice Chair of Clinical Services of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado, I choose to work where clinical services need most attention. As a woman, I want to show up where we can be seen and show up in the best possible way. Just as COVID began, I found myself doing clinical shifts in the newly created psychiatry emergency room. I became part of a front-line team, where “I” became “We,” facing an unknown enemy. Not only was my work (...) life upended, but my personal life was too, as I rushed to help my daughter, a medical student, care for her son when his day-care closed. My commentary highlights the increased burden experienced by women during this time, an example of systemic bias in medicine. (shrink)

Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” An Essay by Charles Taylor with commentary by Amy Gutmann, editor, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf.

Many philosophers endorse the ideal of justice yet disagree radically over what that ideal requires. One persistent problem for thinking about justice is that the unjust social arrangements that originally motivated our questions may also distort our thinking about possible answers. This paper suggests some strategies for improving our thinking about justice in the unjust meantime. As our world becomes more just, we may expect our thinking about justice to improve.

This paper argues that, by construing emotion as epistemologically subversive, the Western tradition has tended to obscure the vital role of emotion in the construction of knowledge. The paper begins with an account of emotion that stresses its active, voluntary, and socially constructed aspects, and indicates how emotion is involved in evaluation and observation. It then moves on to show how the myth of dispassionate investigation has functioned historically to undermine the epistemic authority of women as well as other social (...) groups associated culturally with emotion. Finally, the paper sketches some ways in which the emotions of underclass groups, especially women, may contribute to the development of a critical social theory. (shrink)

Behavioral immune system describes psychological mechanisms that detect cues to infectious pathogens in the immediate environment, trigger disease-relevant responses and facilitate behavioral avoidance/escape. BIS activation elicits a perceived vulnerability to disease which can result in conformity with social norms. However, a response to superficial cues can result in aversive responses to people that pose no actual threat, leading to an aversion to unfamiliar others, and likelihood of prejudice. Pathogen-neutralizing behaviors, therefore, have implications for social interaction as well as illness behaviors (...) and responses to health communications. In this study, we investigate how PVD influences conformity, attitudes to other people and to lockdown regulations through the lens of the Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory. RST describes personality in terms of biologically-driven approach and avoidance motivations which support personal goals. Participants from the United Kingdom public completed an RST personality questionnaire and then read either coronavirus morbidity-mortality statistics and current United Kingdom government lifestyle regulations, just the regulations, or no information at all. They all completed the Perceived Vulnerability to Disease scale to assess BIS-relevant Germ Aversion and Perceived Infectability, followed by questions measuring social conformity, warmth toward others and attitudes toward lockdown measures. Significantly lower PVD scores were observed in the no-information condition, with the other conditions showing no difference. In terms of RST, approach behaviors related to goal-drive persistence work alongside fear in explaining conformity to social norms. Reward related approach behaviors partially explained warmth toward others, indicating that social rewards gained through interaction continue to be strong drivers of behavior. We found no role for RST traits in attitudes toward lockdown. Overall, coronavirus-related behavior is not driven purely by fear, but also by social and/or protection goals regulated by approach motivation. This study presents new insights into public perceptions of coronavirus and government regulated lifestyle restrictions, helping to explain social behaviors in terms of biologically driven mechanisms. Such understanding is vital if we are to successfully motivate public behavior to constrain spread of the virus. (shrink)

A survey of Western feminist ethics over the past thirty years reveals considerable diversity; nonetheless, much recent work in this area is characterized by its adoption of a naturalistic approach. Such an approach is similar to that found in contemporary naturalized epistemology and philosophy of science, yet feminist naturalism has a unique focus. This paper explains what feminist naturalism can contribute to moral philosophy, both by critiquing moral concepts that obscure or rationalize women’s subordination and by paying attention to real-life (...) practices of moral inquiry, including those used by women. (shrink)

The feminist conception of discourse offered below differs from classical discourse ethics. Arguing that inequalities of power are even more conspicuous in global than in local contexts, I note that a global discourse community seems to be emerging among feminists, and I explore the role played by small communities in feminism's attempts to reconcile a commitment to open discussion, on the one hand, with a recognition of the realities of power inequalities, on the other.

This paper seeks to reconceptualise the basis for trusting teachers in current educational discourses. It proposes moving away from trust based on ‘absolute accuracy’ to trust as encapsulated in the practice of parrhesia. On the surface, parrhesia appears to be the opposite of Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’. Paradoxically, however, our attempts to be sincere in our accounts are inevitably tainted by this. This paradox is especially evident in autobiographical writing, an activity that is both parrhesiastic in nature and susceptible (...) to bad faith. This does not mean that we should abandon trust in these ways of accounting for oneself, however. Rather, parrhesiastic practices in autobiographical writing can offer a different understanding of how we account for ourselves and our practices, one that does not pertain to a narrow definition of truth as accuracy, but instead leads to a form of self-criticism where one situates oneself in relation to the ‘truth’ of their accounts in new ways. Towards the end of the paper, I explore three ‘parrhesiastic techniques’ and their relationship to accounting for oneself as a teacher, to reimagine these techniques from technicist to existential ways of relating to our practices. (shrink)

This article discusses the term erotology, which was applied to medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge, by European sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science. It argues that the homogenisation and minimisation of all ancient and non-European forms of medical knowledge about sex, even one as substantial as the (...) ‘ilm al-bah tradition, supported a particular story about the origins of sexology's own emergence as a new and unprecedented biomedical and scientific way of knowing, characterised by an opposition assumed between sexuality and religion, by a view of sexual variations as perversions or pathologies, and by a view of Arabs and Muslims as sexually excessive. The article focusses on French, English, German, Austrian, and Italian sources of the 19th century that discussed the history of sexual medicine, relating these accounts to recent attempts to historicise sexology. It considers how forms of colonial hierarchy and exoticist views of non-European cultures impacted the dismissal of ‘ilm al-bah among European sexual scientists and how they may continue to exert an influence on forms of modern historical inquiry that are not attentive to scholarship on medieval Islamicate sexual medicine. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Western moral and political theorists have devoted much attention to the victimization of women by non-western cultures. But, conceiving injustice to poor women in poor countries as a matter of their oppression by illiberal cultures yields an imcomplete understanding of their situation.

The massive disparity between the relative wealth of most citizens in affluent countries and the profound poverty of billions of people struggling elsewhere for survival is morally jolting. But why exactly is this disparity so outrageous and how should the citizens of affluent countries respond? Political philosopher, Thomas Pogge, has emerged as one of the world’s most ardent critics of global injustice which, he argues, is caused directly by the operation of a global institutional order that not only systematically disadvantages (...) poor countries but is imposed on them by precisely those wealthy, powerful countries that benefit the most from the order’s injustice. In allowing their governments to perpetrate this injustice, Pogge contends that citizens of the wealthy countries collude in a monumental crime against humanity. In this book Pogge’s challenging and controversial ideas are debated by leading political philosophers from a range of philosophical viewpoints. With a clear and informative introduction by Alison Jaggar, and original contributions from Neera Chandhoke, Jiwei Ci, Joshua Cohen, Erin Kelly, Lionel McPherson, Charles W. Mills, Kok-Chor Tan, and Leif Wenar, this volume deepens and expands the debate over global justice and moral responsibility in the world today. (shrink)

Is globalization good for women? The answer to this question obviously depends on what one means by "globalization" and by "good" and which "women" one has in mind. After explaining briefly what I mean by "globalization" and "good" and indicating which women I have in mind, I intend to argue that globalization, as we currently know it, is not good for most women. However, I'll suggest that the badness of the present situation is not due to globalization as such, but (...) rather to its specific neoliberal mode of organization. I'll identify some of the questions that globalization urgently raises for political philosophy and end by sketching one vision of an alternative form of globalization that could be very good for women-as well as for children and men. (shrink)

En las tres últimas décadas del siglo XX, muchos filósofos analíticos han abordado cuestiones de ética práctica, ampliando radicalmente el campo de la filosofía moral más allá de los temas metaéticos que habían sido su foco principal durante la mayor parte del siglo. Sin embargo, abordar este tipo de controversias prácticas rápidamente hizo surgir la cuestión de cómo justificar las afirmaciones morales normativas. Muchos filósofos analíticos se basaron en el intuicionismo, que tiene un linaje muy antiguo dentro de la filosofía (...) moral anglófona. Este artículo evalúa tres formas en las que los filósofos analíticos del siglo XX recurrieron a las intuiciones para apoyar o rebatir las afirmaciones morales. Argumentamos que esos métodos fracasaron en su objetivo de promover un conocimiento moral digno de confianza porque se basaron en supuestos que, cuando se presumen en contextos de injusticia epistémica estructural, son sistemáticamente engañosos. A pesar de que las intuiciones se encuentran entre las fuentes de conocimiento en las que los agentes morales deben confiar, la epistemología moral debe prestar especial atención a los procesos sociales a través de los cuales se recogen, refinan y evalúan las intuiciones y otras formas de evidencia. Producir un conocimiento moral digno de confianza requiere procesos de razonamiento democráticos que sean sensibles a la omnipresencia de la injusticia epistémica y la dominación, así como desarrollar estrategias para contrarrestarlas. (shrink)

The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the conviction that modern western paradigms of knowledge and reality are gender-biased.

This is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social power. The present article explains (...) how discourse ethics is flawed just in this way. The article begins by identifying several conditions of adequacy for assessing reasoning practices designed to achieve moral justification and shows that, when used in contexts of cultural diversity and social inequality, discourse ethics fails these conditions. It goes on to argue that the failure of discourse ethics is rooted in its reliance on a broader conception of moral epistemology that is invidiously idealized. It concludes by pointing to the need to rethink both the mission and the method of moral epistemology. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 78-87, February 2022.

Reviewed Work: Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition" by Charles Taylor, Amy Gutmann, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, Susan Wolf.

In this paper, I explain what I take to be one of the most significant contributions made by feminism to Western understandings of social justice. This is feminism’s disclosure of objects of justice ignored by most other mainstream philosophers. I also consider whether a feminist approach to social justice is usefully described as a way of fleshing out the ideal of androgyny.

This paper originated in a conference presentation with my colleague Michael Tooley, at which we were both asked to re-evaluate articles about abortion that each of us had written over twenty years earlier. While Tooley and I both contended that abortion should be legally unrestricted, there were striking differences in the style and content of our respective arguments. Contemplating these differences has reinforced my own belief in the importance of emphasizing the centrality of gender when discussing abortion. Since gender as (...) we know it is a system of dominance as well as difference , I take this to mean that contemporary discussions of abortion must address the relationship between abortion access and the social status of women. My early article addressed this relationship to some extent, but the present paper will raise a number of additional gender issues that the early article did not mention. (shrink)

This paper contrasts two prominent positions in contemporary Western feminist discourse about prostitution. The first is radical feminism, which emerged in the early 1970s; the second is libertarian feminism, which emerged in the late 1980s. The paper analyses the underlying assumptions and public policy recommendation of each position; it argues that each illuminates important aspects of the situations of some prostitutes but ignores or denies others. An approach to prostitution capable of providing an adequate guide to public policy must be (...) less dogmatic or “essentialist” than either radical or libertarian feminism; it should investigate how the sex trade operates in specific locations and the varying meanings it has in different cultural, contexts. Such investigations must be feminist not only in their commitment to ending the subordination of women but also in their respect for choices made by women who already must often endure not only exploitation but also stigmatization, discrimination and exclusion. In this paper, I sketch two prominent positions in contemporary Western feminist discourse about prostitution, discuss the strengths and inadequacies of each, and conclude by indicating an approach—as opposed to a substantive analysis—that I find more promising. (shrink)

The present issue of Philosophical Topics is devoted to global gender justice. In this introduction to the volume, I sketch the emergence of global gender justice as a field of philosophical inquiry and identify some of the philosophical challenges that its emergence raises. The easiest way to explain the distinctiveness of this field is to situate it in the context of earlier philosophical inquiries into justice.

The World Bank’s World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development 2012 makes many recommendations for addressing the severe gender disparities that it finds persisting across much of the world. This paper proposes that the recommendations focus too exclusively on remedies at the national level while paying insufficient attention to transnational arrangements. The imbalance of the report’s analysis places too much responsibility for addressing the disparities on local and national actors, while underplaying the responsibilities of transnational actors, including the World Bank (...) itself. The idea of transnational cycles of gendered vulnerability provides a methodological approach for better assigning responsibility for global gender disparities. (shrink)

IntroductionThe pelvic floor muscles are active during motor tasks that increase intra-abdominal pressure, but little is known about how the PFM respond to dynamic activities, such as gait. The purpose of this study was to characterize and compare PFM activity during walking and jogging in continent adults across the entire gait cycle.Methods17 able-bodied individuals with no history of incontinence participated in this study. We recorded electromyography from the abdominal muscles, gluteus maximus, and PFM while participants performed attempted maximum voluntary contractions (...) of all muscles and completed 60–70 strides in four gait conditions: slow walk ; regular walk ; transition walk ; jog. We quantified activity throughout the whole gait cycle and during periods of bursting for each participant, and analyzed the timing of PFM bursting periods to explore when the PFM were most active in the gait cycle. We also conducted a phase metric analysis on the PFM and GM burst timings. We performed a Spearman's rank-order correlation to examine the effect of speed on %aMVCGC, %aMVCBR, and phase metric score, and used the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test to evaluate the effect of gait modality, matched for speed, on these variables.ResultsThe PFM were active throughout the gait cycle, with bursts typically occurring during single-leg support. The PFM and GM were in phase for 44–69% of the gait cycle, depending on condition. There was a positive correlation between gait speed and both %aMVCGC and %aMVCBR. Phase metric scores were significantly higher during jogging than transition walking, but there was no difference between gait modality on %aMVCGC or %aMVCBR. Where possible we disaggregated data by sex, although were unable to make statistical comparisons due to low sample sizes.ConclusionThe PFM are active during walking and jogging, with greater activity at faster speeds and with bursts in activity around single-leg support. The PFM and GM co-activate during gait, but are not completely in phase with each other. (shrink)

The terms “ideal theory” and “nonideal theory” are used in contemporary Anglophone political philosophy to identify alternative methodological approaches for justifying normative claims. Each term is used in multiple ways. In this article Alison M. Jaggar disentangles several versions of ideal and nonideal theory with a view to determining which elements may be helpful in designing models of real-world justice that are contextually relevant, morally plausible, and practically feasible.