Traits like simplicity and explanatory power have traditionally been treated as values internal to the sciences, constitutive rather than contextual. As such they are cognitive virtues. This essay contrasts a traditional set of such virtues with a set of alternative virtues drawn from feminist writings about the sciences. In certain theoretical contexts, the only reasons for preferring a traditional or an alternative virtue are socio-political. This undermines the notion that the traditional virtues can be considered purely cognitive.

In the limited literature on gender and climate change, two themes predominate – women as vulnerable or virtuous in relation to the environment. Two viewpoints become obvious: women in the South will be affected more by climate change than men in those countries and that men in the North pollute more than women. The debates are structured in specific ways in the North and the South and the discussion in the article focuses largely on examples from Sweden and India. The (...) article traces the lineage of the arguments to the women, environment and development discussions, examining how they recur in new forms in climate debates. Questioning assumptions about women's vulnerability and virtuousness, it highlights how a focus on women's vulnerability or virtuousness can deflect attention from inequalities in decision-making. By reiterating statements about poor women in the South and the pro-environmental women of the North, these assumptions reinforce North–South biases. Generalizations about women's vulnerability and virtuousness can lead to an increase in women's responsibility without corresponding rewards. There is need to contextualise debates on climate change to enable action and to respond effectively to its adverse effects in particular places. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Socrates believed that there is no distinction between man's virtue and woman's virtue and that there is no difference in the achievement of virtue between men and women. My analysis shows Plato's position on the moral equality of guardian women and men in the Republic to be a continuation of the Socratic position of nongendered virtue. I thus disagree with Spelman's recent interpretation of the Republic on this issue.

Robust clinical decision-making depends on valid reasoning and sound judgment and is essential for delivering quality healthcare. It is often susceptible, however, to a clinician’s biases such as towards a patient’s age, gender, race, or socioeconomic status. Gender bias in particular has a deleterious impact, which frequently results in cognitive myopia so that a clinician is unable to make an accurate diagnosis because of a patient’s gender—especially for female patients. Virtue epistemology provides a means for confronting gender bias in (...) clinical decision-making and for correcting or even preventing its impact. The medical literature on cardiovascular and coronary heart disease is used to illustrate the role intellectual virtues can play in redressing the deleterious impact of gender bias on clinical decision-making and practice. Finally, questions are considered surrounding the pedagogy of intellectual virtues for medical students and practicing clinicians in order to provide quality care for patients, regardless of gender. (shrink)

The ecofeminist argument for veganism is powerful. Meat consumption is a deeply gendered act that is closely tied to the systematic objectification of women and nonhuman animals. I worry, however, that presenting veganism as "the" moral ideal might reinforce rather than alleviate the disordered status quo in gendered eating, further disadvantaging women in patriarchal power structures. In this chapter, I advocate a feminist account of ethical eating that treats dietary choices as moral choices insofar as they constitute an (...) integral part of our relationships to ourselves and to others. I believe that we should think of dietary choices in Aristotelian moral terms as a mean relative to us, falling on a continuum between the vice of doing injustice to ourselves, on the one hand, and the vice of doing injustice to others, on the other. On this view, what it is moral to eat for individuals is not a fixed ideal, but rather depends on particulars of our physiological, psychological, economic, cultural, and relational situations. (shrink)

Gendered Morality offers a textual-critical examination of gender in Islamic metaphysics and virtue ethics. Through a close reading of how masculinity and femininity are constructed, the book argues that the historically contingent nature of gender hierarchy, characterized as Islamic and ethical, is at odds with the overarching goal of Islamic ethics as earthly justice. Because the book moves beyond the typical Qur'anic and jurisprudence-based discourses about women's status, it makes a lasting contribution to our understanding of gender in (...) the ethical philosophy of Islam. (shrink)

The language and ideals of Greek political life identified citizenship with manliness. Plato saw this engendering of politics as a threat to the unity, stability, and excellence of a city, for the unmoderated manliness of actual cities, he claimed, fosters bigoted patriotism, female dissipation, and unnatural vice. Moreover, these cities' civic pieties could not match the egoistic appeal of tyranny, for the Greek ideal of masculinity itself points to tyranny as the most manly life. ;Plato's project, as I will argue (...) through a study of the Republic and the Laws, is to harness spirit and desire to reason in order to rescue cities from these tragedies of engendered politics. Such a rationalization requires a proper understanding of the "male" passions and their subjugation to a disgendered reason. Plato argues not only that the engendered politics of Greek cities treats women unjustly, but also that by excluding females and the feminine these cities make their male citizens vicious and unhappy. ;Since Plato apparently contradicts the egalitarian views of the Republic in his later dialogue, the Laws, I aim to recover the single intention behind two political proposals differing widely in detail. Plato's teaching on gender and politics has been subject to a wide variety of criticism in recent years, but both his feminist and anti-feminist interpreters have generally failed to appreciate the thick and profound political psychology which stands behind his radical views on gender and politics. Plato describes both soul and city as complexes of frequently contradictory desires for whom unity of purpose must be achieved. The lives of men and women in actual cities display distinct and apparently incompatible virtues, but the rationalization of politics requires that these virtues be reconciled in a single regime for both soul and city. ;In conclusion, I will argue that arguments for gender justice, that, like Plato's, are founded in a critique of the pretensions of masculinity, provide more powerful arguments for sexual egalitarianism than more "feminist" arguments that attack patriarchy simply as unjust toward women. (shrink)

Two debates in contemporary philosophical moral psychology have so far been conducted almost entirely in isolation from one another despite their structural similarity. One is the debate over the importance for virtue ethics of the results of situational manipulation experiments in social psychology. The other is the debate over the ethical implications of experiments that reveal gender and race biases in social cognition. In both cases, the ethical problem posed cannot be identified without first clarifying the cognitive structures underlying (...) the problematic phenomena. In this chapter, I argue that the two kinds of phenomena share a basic cognitive structure, which is well articulated by the findings of the empirical psychology of attitudes, especially if these findings are understood in the context of the cognitive-affective system theory of personality. On the basis of this joint construal of situationism and implicit bias, I argue that the negative programme of ethical improvement that many philosophers recommend in response to one or other problem is unrealistic. Instead, we should consider more seriously the prospects of the positive programme of ethical improvement recommended by Aristotle, the direct aim of which is to instil deeply in ourselves the values at the heart of each of the virtues. (shrink)

This book argues that pre-modern societies were characterized by a common quest for human flourishing or excellence, i.e. virtue. The history of virtue is a particularly fruitful approach when studying pre-modern periods. Systems of moral philosophy and more day-to-day moral ideas and practices in which virtue was central were incredibly important in pre-modern societies within and among diverse scholarly, literary, religious and social communities. Virtue was a cornerstone of pre-modern societies, permeating society in many different ways, (...) and on many different levels, and it was conveyed in erudite and pedagogical texts, ritual, performance and images. The construction of virtues such as wisdom, courage, and justice helped shape identities and communities, but also served to legitimize and reinforce differences pertaining to gender, social hierarchies, and nations. On a more fundamental level, studying the history of virtue helps us understand the guiding principles of historical action. Thus, we believe that the history of virtue is central to understanding these societies, and that the history of virtue, including criticisms of virtue and virtue ethics, tells us important things about how men and women thought and acted in ages past. (shrink)

What gender are you? And in virtue of what? These are questions of gender categorization. Such questions are increasingly at the core of many contemporary debat.

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 2, Page 103-114, May 2022. Several feminists have been arguing on the superiority of women over men. This debate, instead of being biological, revolves around the gender roles and moral characteristics of humans, based on which women have been regarded better than men. The current study supported this claim by involving 620 participants, including men and women. Character Strengths Rating Form was used to obtain data. Women projected significantly higher levels on a variety (...) of character strengths as compared to men. The results revealed that women had significantly higher levels of wisdom, justice, curiosity, love of learning, social intelligence, leadership and appreciation of beauty and excellence. The overall picture confirmed women to be more virtuous than men. (shrink)

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 2, Page 103-114, May 2022. Several feminists have been arguing on the superiority of women over men. This debate, instead of being biological, revolves around the gender roles and moral characteristics of humans, based on which women have been regarded better than men. The current study supported this claim by involving 620 participants, including men and women. Character Strengths Rating Form was used to obtain data. Women projected significantly higher levels on a variety (...) of character strengths as compared to men. The results revealed that women had significantly higher levels of wisdom, justice, curiosity, love of learning, social intelligence, leadership and appreciation of beauty and excellence. The overall picture confirmed women to be more virtuous than men. (shrink)

Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author finds most salient but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We begin by reviewing studies 1 and 2, in which obituaries were carefully read and labeled. We then report study 3, which further develops these results with a semi-automated, large-scale semantic analysis of several thousand obituaries. Geography, gender, (...) and elite status all turn out to be associated with the virtues and values associated with the deceased. (shrink)

The expectation used to be that men would be masculine and women would be feminine, and this was assumed to come naturally to them in virtue of their biology. That orthodoxy persists today in many parts of society. On this view, sex is gender and gender is sex. -/- A new view of gender has emerged in recent years, a view on which gender is an 'identity', a way that people feel about themselves in terms of masculinity or femininity, (...) regardless of their sex. On this view, sex is dismissed as unimportant, and gender is made paramount. -/- In the rush to celebrate this new view of gender, we have lost sight of a more powerful challenge to the traditional orthodoxy, namely the feminist sex/gender distinction according to which sex is biological and gender is social. On this view, gender is something done to people on the basis of sex. Women are socialised to conform to norms of femininity (and sanctioned for failure), and masculinity and femininity exist in a hierarchy in which femininity is devalued. This view helps us to understand injustice against women, and what we can do about it. -/- Holly Lawford-Smith introduces and defends gender-critical feminism, a theory and movement that reclaims the sex/gender distinction, insists upon the reality and importance of sex, and continues to understand gender as a way that men and women are made to be, rather than a way they really are. (shrink)

For decades, intelligence and achievement tests have registered significant differences between people of different races, ethnicities, classes, and genders. We argue that most of these differences are explained not as reflections of differences in the distribution of intellectual virtues but as evidence for the metacognitive mediation of the intellectual virtues. For example, in the United States, blacks typically score worse than whites on tests of mathematics. This might lead one to think that fewer blacks possess the relevant intellectual virtues, or (...) that they possess them less fully. However, research on stereotype threat shows that when blacks are not reminded of their race, they do much better on these tests than when they are. Simply raising to salience the race of the student triggers the activation of the stereotype, which in turn leads to poorer performance. However, learning about stereotype threat to a large extent immunizes people against it. This suggests that the psycho-social dimension of intelligence that recognizes the possibility of effects like stereotype threat is a crucial mediating variable in the development and expression of the intellectual virtues. The Socratic, “Know thyself” needs to be expanded to, “Know thyself and thy society.” Self-knowledge and knowledge of relevant stereotypes are a necessary condition for optimal development and expression of the other intellectual virtues. (shrink)

The connection between Chinese sexism and Confucianism has been a subject of study on the condition of Chinese women in the West since the rise of feminist consciousness in the 1970s. However Confucianism in feminist scholarship is inescapably construed as a misogynous ideology that is incapable of self-rectification in regards to the issue of gender parity. Hence, conceptually the eradication of Confucianism becomes the necessary condition for the liberation of Chinese women, and the adoption of Western ideology let it be (...) Marxist-socialism, Liberalism, or Existentialism is then a logical next step for Chinese women. Yet, such a dichotomization of the West as a superior moral subject and the East as a passive object victimized by their "sexist" tradition is nevertheless an oversimplification of the condition and the liberation of women in the developing world. In the end, it is essentially a neo-colonial discourse in a feminist disguise. This dissertation sets itself up to accomplish two tasks: first, it is to obtain a conceptual clarity of what constitutes Confucianism and its connection with dominant sexist, social practices; second, it is to go beyond a mere critique of Confucianism and feminism as an ally of Chinese patriarchal family structure and Western imperialism respectively, and to lay a foundation for a future construction of a gender theory based on Confucianism as a theoretical ground to explain the cultural construct of Chinese women and to conceive an alternative ethical ground for women's liberation. Eventually, the whole project can be seen as an act of self-affirmation of my ethnic identity as a Chinese and an act of reconciliation with my feminist identity in the modern world. (shrink)

The body, touch and its sensations are present, sometimes viewed in contradictory ways, both expressed, visualized, and rejected, in early modern art and literature. In seven essays moving from the 16th to the mid-18th century, and from Italy and Spain to France and Sweden, this volume explores strategies used by early modern women poets, philosophers, and artists in order to create subversive expressions of the body, gender and the senses. Showing how body and soul, the carnal and the divine, the (...) senses and the mind, could be represented as intertwined and dependent on each other in various ways, it gives due attention to European women writers and artists that in unconventional ways responded to the period's two main intellectual and philosophical attitudes - Epicurean and Stoic - towards the body and its senses. These attitudes not only intersect in the period's discussions of virtue and other moral phenomena, but are central to critical assessment of the relations between emotions, perception, and reason. By following this topic from a gender perspective, the book highlights other forms of subjectivity than the ones usually related to the early modern period's dominating subjectivation of female bodies, thinking and desires. (shrink)

Sôphrosunê ("self-discipline") is the often-forgotten sibling of justice, wisdom, courage, and piety in discussions of canonical Greek virtues. Christopher Moore shows that during the classical period it was the object of significant debate--about its scope, its feel, its practical manifestations, and its value. By interpreting sôphrosunê as a commitment to norm-following, we see that these pointed discussions of the virtue, previously ignored as parodic moralizing or expressions of political propaganda, are in fact concerned with the ideal of human agency. (...) These discussions query the way we become fully responsible for our actions. Greek thinking about sôphrosunê becomes thinking about self-constitution, our crucial capacity to act on the general reasons that we come to identify with as our own. This perspective explains sôphrosunê's inclusion in Plato's canon of virtues, and before that its frequent appearance in funerary inscriptions, elegiac poetry, tragic drama, and historiography. It also explains the analytic attention given to it by Heraclitus, the Sophists, the historians, Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato. Moore deals principally with the classical period, though the book includes one chapter addressing earlier poetry and another addressing the virtue in two gender-sensitive post-classical works. An appendix deals with the epigraphic material. For the Greeks (and perhaps for us) there is a virtue of agency, an acquirable capacity to be guided by what's best. Hardly just a concern for reticence and reserve, commitment to sôphrosunê is a commitment to whatever it is that makes us truly ourselves. (shrink)

In this article, I trace the politics of shame in the context of the problematization of women’s bodies as markers of sexual immorality in modern Ireland. I argue that the post-Independence project of national identity formation established women as bearers of virtue and purity and that sexual transgression threatening this new identity came to be severely punished. By hiding women, children, and all those deemed to be dangerous to national self-representations of purity, the Irish state, supported by Catholic moral (...) values and teaching, physically removed its embodied instances of national shame through a system of mass institutionalization. Just as shame entails the covering of one’s blemishes, so the shaming of women deemed to be deviant by church and state involved their covering via incarceration in Magdalen laundries, among other institutions. By assessing recent events highlighted by inquiries into Irish institutions—Magdalen laundries, reformatory and industrial schools, and soon mother and baby homes—in terms of the politics of shame, this article aims to shed light on the pervasiveness of institutionalization in Ireland and the complex relationship between said institutions, gender, sexuality, and nation building in the early decades of the Irish state. (shrink)

Sex, Love, and Gender is the first volume to present a comprehensive philosophical theory that brings together all of Kant's practical philosophy — found across his works on ethics, justice, anthropology, history, and religion — and provide a critique of emotionally healthy and morally permissible sexual, loving, gendered being. By rethinking Kant's work on human nature and making space for sex, love, and gender within his moral accounts of freedom, the book shows how, despite his austere and even anti-sex, (...) cisist, sexist, and heterosexist reputation, Kant's writings on happiness and virtue (Part I) and right (Part II) in fact yield fertile philosophical ground on which we can explore specific contemporary issues such as abortion, sexual orientation, sexual or gendered identity, marriage, trade in sexual services, and sex- or gender-based oppression. Indeed, Kant's philosophy provides us with resources to appreciate and value the diversity of human ways of loving and the existential importance of our embodied, social selves. Structured on a thematic basis, with introductions to assist those new to Kant's philosophy, this book will be a valuable resource for anyone who cares about these issues and wants to make sense of them. -/- Alternatively: Sex, Love, and Gender identifies a set of possibilities that define human beings’ sexuality. These sets come with their own concepts, which specify how the possibilities are realized and what effects they have on our lives lived together. Partly the task is descriptive. The description has to be plausible. Plausibility comes from the phenomenology (and not the other way around). Partly the task is normative. The normative content also has to be plausible. Plausibility here comes from vindicating the principles that underwrite the possibilities that define human beings’ sexualities and sexual experiences and behaviors lived by human beings and from the philosophical explanations and conclusions that follow. Overall plausibility, then, comes from discursive analysis of alternatives, from a priori argument, and, in the evaluative case, from showing how the Kantian account of a good life fits with reasonable conceptions of goodness consistent with the phenomenology of human lives. Although this exploration leads us, as we will see, to most corners of Kant’s practical philosophy, including his metaethics and metaphysics, the main focus is on an account of human sex, love, and gender explored explicitly with respect to happiness and ethics (virtue) and justice (right). It is because of this focus that the book is divided into two parts: Part 1 (“Human Sexuality and Virtue”) and Part 2 (“Human Sexuality and Right”). (shrink)

‘Gender ’ is a troublesome loanword in Japan. While this term has been prevalent in feminist and scholarly circles, it has evoked confusion in the government and stimulated a backlash from the ultra-conservatives against gender equality. Japanese reactionaries have attacked the concept of gender because of their anxiety about cultural destruction – I thus call them the ‘old guard’. Focusing on a dispute over the term ‘gender’ between feminists and the old guard, this paper examines the changes in the term's (...) usage and meanings in the Japanese political context. I first shed light on Japan's reaction to the newly arrived term ‘gender’, outlining different attitudes towards gender between the feminist/scholarly circles and the government. Secondly, I discuss the old guard's condemnation of the concept of gender, in which they distort its significance in order to diminish its positive impact on society. I then scrutinize the old guard's reasons behind their attack on the concept of gender. My findings reveal that the old guard, whose political cause is to protect traditional Japanese culture, asserts that gender equality damages this culture. Moreover, I refute their emphasis on Japan's uniqueness, demonstrating that Japanese women's traditional virtues under the patriarchal family system are not peculiar to Japan. To gauge how the concept of gender has been interpreted politically, I highlight legislative debates about the term ‘gender’. In doing so, I elucidate the extent to which the concept of gender has infiltrated Japanese society through the dispute.Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Gender and Rhetoric in Plato's Thought explores the relation between Plato's Republic and Laws on the set of issues that the Laws itself marks out as fundamental to the comparison: the unity of the virtues, the role of women, and the place of the family. Plato aims to persuade men to abandon the view of the good life that Greek cities and their laws inculcate as the only life worth living for those who would be real men and not effeminate (...) weaklings. What we can learn about Plato is the importance for him of understanding the nature of persuasion in order to come to terms with gender justice and the apparent plurality of human goods. What we learn from Plato is that to tackle the issues that arise in our new political community of men and women we must comprehend the proper bases and limits of persuasion. (shrink)

The way society is organised means that we all get made into members of various types of people, such as judges, wives, or women. These ‘human social kinds’ may be brought into being by oppressive social arrangements, and people may suffer oppression in virtue of being made into a member of a certain human social kind. This book argues that we should pay attention to the ways in which the very fact of being made into a member of a (...) certain human social kind can be oppressive in and of itself. For example, someone who becomes a wife under circumstances where husbands have unjust powers over their wives has suffered a wrong, even if her husband never in fact exercises these powers. The book argues that social movements against racial and gendered oppression, including efforts to advance trans liberation, must get to grips with this phenomenon, and it supplies the conceptual tools needed to do so. The first tool is an analysis of this general form of wrong, termed ‘ontic injustice’. The second tool is an account of ‘ontic oppression’, a particular kind of ontic injustice in which the wrong amounts to a form of oppression, in the sense of being structural and pervasive. The third tool is a pluralist account of race and gender kinds, according to which there is no single social kind that corresponds to a gender category such as ‘woman’, but, rather, there are various different social kinds, each of which is explanatory for different purposes. (shrink)

Using the author's social analysis of scientific knowledge, two ways of understanding the importance of gender to the philosophy of science are offered. Given a requirement of openness to multiple critical perspectives, the gender, race and class structure of a scientific community are an important ingredient of its epistemic reliability. Secondly, one can ask whether a gender sensitive scientific community might prefer certain evaluative criteria (or virtues of theory or practice) to others. Six such criteria (several of which are at (...) odds with criteria accepted in mainstream science) are discussed. Their articulation prompts a series of philosophical questions, the answering of which would constitute one program (or more) of a gender sensitive philosophy of science. (shrink)

The ethics of care, adopted in much of the nursing literature, is usually framed in opposition to the Kantian ethics of principle. Irrespective of whether the ethics of care is grounded in gender, as with Gilligan and Noddings, or inscribed on Heidegger's ontology, as with Benner, Kant remains the philosophical adversary, honouring reason rather than emotion, universality rather than context, and individual autonomy rather than interdependence. During the past decade, however, a great deal of Kantian scholarship – including feminist scholarship (...) – has rendered this series of oppositions questionable, challenging the view that an ethics of care and Kant's moral law are irreconcilable. This paper therefore re‐examines Kant's writings, drawing on recent scholarship, and argues both that they provide the care ethicists with everything they require, and that they offer something beyond an ethics of care, something that repairs the deficits in philosophies of caring. It concludes by suggesting that a Kantian ethics of care has significant implications for the construction of nursing knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gender in The Gay ScienceKathleen Marie HigginsIn his recent novel, When Nietzsche Wept, Irwin Yalom reiterates a common portrait of Nietzsche: a sexist über alles. Much as the quip “Isn’t business ethics a contradiction in terms?” ubiquitously accosts philosophers involved in that subdiscipline, “What’s a nice girl like you doing studying a misogynist like that?” has haunted my career in Nietzsche scholarship. I have never been entirely certain as (...) to whether this ad hominem is more directed at me or at Nietzsche.A sympathetic but jovial colleague played on this ambiguity by remarking, when he heard my topic for this essay, “Yes, that must be an interesting topic for someone who isn’t even shallow.” Yes, Nietzsche did say that women, far from deep, were not even shallow. But does this remark prove him a sexist? Are we even certain what it means?I will attempt to complicate our appraisal of Nietzsche’s alleged sexism by focusing on Book Two of The Gay Science. Considering his passages on women in that book, I will suggest along the way reasons why at least some readings of these as sexist should be rejected. More positively, I will show that these passages urge a reassessment of the relationship between men and women that can be seen as a contribution toward feminist theory (if an unwitting one), and that one of Nietzsche’s intended impacts on his male readers is to initiate a radical revolution in their thinking about women.IThe term “gender” is used advisedly in this context, for Nietzsche made the distinction, common in feminist discussion, between sex (the biological potential to play one role rather than another in [End Page 227] reproduction) and gender (the contingently assigned roles that a society attaches to those who are biologically male or female). Nietzsche urged his readers to recognize the contingency of gender roles and to consider the desirability of changing them.We can hardly begin to consider Nietzsche’s suggestions in these regards, however, without confronting the allegation that Nietzsche was a paradigmatic sexist. Although many of the most important names in Western philosophy have been singled out for feminist censure, Nietzsche is often held up as an exemplar of all that is misogynistic, both in the philosophical tradition and within patriarchy generally. Nietzsche is identified as a misogynist for a variety of reasons. He is seen as an essentialist, an opponent of women’s rights, an enthusiast of masculine virtue, and an advocate of male domination. While none of these attributions may be entirely apt, I agree with Nietzsche’s feminist critics that he was, at least sometimes, too willing to rest content with truisms about women and to vent personal rage in the guise of philosophy.That said, some of the attacks on Nietzsche are both unfair and unfortunate. I am not the only feminist to think so. Maudemarie Clark, Sarah Kofman, Maryanne Bertram, and Deborah Bergoffen have all suggested that certain of Nietzsche’s views offer starting points for feminist theorizing. I will describe some attacks made on Nietzsche by certain other feminists, however, because they represent the popular perspective on Nietzsche (if not that most typical of Nietzsche scholars) and because they indicate certain pitfalls that feminists would do best to avoid.Carol Diethe’s article “Nietzsche and the Woman Question,” for example, criticizes Nietzsche in a number of unwarranted ways. Consider, for example, her complaint that Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power entails an affirmation of the domination of women.If we take his key concept, the will to power, we find that it is so gender based that it practically comes to represent the archetypal phallic symbol. Bernstein describes it as a phenomenon which includes the “will to violate” so that the “feeling of power” (Machtgefühl) is generated, yet when he goes on to mention “Nietzsche’s desire to avoid reducing the will to power to sexuality,” he fails to realize that his own critique has relied heavily on the language of rape and the whole area of male dominance of women which stretches behind words such as “violation.” 1Diethe simply accepts Bernstein’s characterization of Nietzsche’s... (shrink)

According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but this view seems incompatible with the substantivity of gender. The goal of this paper is to argue that the notion of (...) substantivity can be understood in a way that accommodates gender pluralism. First, I claim that gender terms (at least as used in the ontology room) are referentially indeterminate, where referential indeterminacy holds in virtue of the way the world is. Second, I propose a degree-theoretic (or scalar) account of metaphysical substantivity; genders are substantial to the degree that they are determinate. I conclude that gender is relatively, although not absolutely, substantial. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered nature of speech and silence in ancient Greece by showing how women were denied the measure of moderation with regard to speech. Drawing on examples from Plato and Aristotle, it shows how the voice of Greek women was associated with irreducibly contradictory qualities of being too loud, yet never silent enough. Exploring these contradictions through Plato's chōra and Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, it argues that Greek women were ultimately considered essentially atopos, (...) or out of place by virtue of their measurelessness, with great political consequences for the city. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Marie E. Zakrzewska (1829–1902) is known among historians of women and medicine for her advocacy of the natural sciences at a time when most women physicians preferred to emphasize their nurturing qualities. This article suggests that Zakrzewska’s views have been poorly understood because scholars have tried to position them along a fault line that divides femininity and sympathy from masculinity and science. It suggests instead that feminist scholarship on the “situatedness of gender” offers a more promising conceptual framework for (...) understanding the diverse strategies women (and men) have utilized in trying to achieve their goals. Zakrzewska, unlike many of her colleagues, did not seek to empower feminine virtues as a way of justifying women’s entry into the medical profession. Instead, she tried to reappropriate science for women and to use it as a weapon against the barriers designed to keep women out of the public sphere. She was fighting her own battle against the gendering of science. (shrink)

The writings of women philosophers have often been neglected in the discipline of virtue ethics. In this historical survey of feminist virtue ethics, Sandrine Berges redresses the balance by focusing on key writings of important women philosophers, including Perictione, Heloise, Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft and Sophie de Grouchy. A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics first applies the findings of its historical survey to questions on the ethics of care, gender and the public life, and global justice. (...) In what follows, it is argued that the ethical theorizing of women in the past can and should be brought to bear on current philosophical debates. (shrink)

Focusing on contemporary debates in moral and political theory, Situating the Self argues that a non-relative ethics, binding on us in virtue of out humanity, is still a philosophically viable project. This intersting new book should be read by all those concerned with the problems of critical theory, the analysis of modernity, and contemporary ethics, as well as students and professionals in philosophy, sociology and political science.

ABSTRACT Marie E. Zakrzewska (1829–1902) is known among historians of women and medicine for her advocacy of the natural sciences at a time when most women physicians preferred to emphasize their nurturing qualities. This article suggests that Zakrzewska’s views have been poorly understood because scholars have tried to position them along a fault line that divides femininity and sympathy from masculinity and science. It suggests instead that feminist scholarship on the “situatedness of gender” offers a more promising conceptual framework for (...) understanding the diverse strategies women (and men) have utilized in trying to achieve their goals. Zakrzewska, unlike many of her colleagues, did not seek to empower feminine virtues as a way of justifying women’s entry into the medical profession. Instead, she tried to reappropriate science for women and to use it as a weapon against the barriers designed to keep women out of the public sphere. She was fighting her own battle against the gendering of science. (shrink)

This book makes a vigorous reassessment of the moral dimension in Chaucer's writings. For the Middle Ages, the study of human behavior generally signified the study of the morality of attitudes, choices, and actions. Moreover, moral analysis was not gender neutral: it presupposed that certain virtues and certain failings were largely gender-specific. Alcuin Blamires, mainly concentrating on The Canterbury Tales, discloses how Chaucer adapts the composite inherited traditions of moral literature to shape the significance and the gender implications of his (...) narratives. Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender is therefore not a theorization of ethical reading but a discussion of Chaucer's engagement with the literature of practical ethical advice. Working with the commonplace primary sources of the period, Blamires demonstrates that Stoic ideals, somewhat uncomfortably absorbed within medieval Christian moral codes as Chaucer realized, penetrate the poet's constructions of how women and men behave in matters (for instance) of friendship and anger, sexuality and chastity, protest and sufferance, generosity and greed, credulity and foresight. The book will be absorbing for all serious readers or teachers of Chaucer because it is packed with commanding new insights. It offers illuminating explanations concerning topics that have often eluded critics in the past: the flood-forecast in The Miller's Tale, for example; or the status of emotion and equanimity in The Franklin's Tale; the "unethical" sexual trading in the Shipman's Tale; the contemporary moral force of a widow's curse in The Friar's Tale; and the quizzical moral link between the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. There is even a new hypothesis about the conceptual design of The Canterbury Tales as a whole. Deeply informed and historically alert, this is a book that engages its reader in the vital role played by ethical assumptions (with their attendant gender assumptions) in Chaucer's major poetry. (shrink)

This paper borrows from philosopher John Macmurray's insightsin order to advance work in feminist theology relating to perceptions of God. Mac-murray argues that we cannot have an adequate concept of a personalGod, if our concept of the human person is inadequate.He asserts that we are persons by virtue of our agency and our personal relationships; hence, the growth and development of persons requires communities of equals. Beliefin God, then, is an attitude expressed through behaviour that creates and sustains such (...) communities. As feminist theologians indicate, a‘male’ God is a stumbling block to equality; yet, thealogy remains on the periphery of mainstream academic and Christian circles. Hence, this paper sets the groundwork for a truly gender-transcendent concept of God, examining some contemporary language liturgies and employing Macmurray's portrayal of a supreme agent, in an attempt to resolve the main problems encountered by inclusive God-language. (shrink)

Some scholars have argued that Margaret Cavendish was ambivalent about women's roles and capabilities, for she seems sometimes to hold that women are naturally inferior to men, but sometimes that this inferiority is due to inferior education. I argue that attention to Cavendish's natural philosophy can illuminate her views on gender. In section II I consider the implications of Cavendish's natural philosophy for her views on male and female nature, arguing that Cavendish thought that such natures were not fixed. However, (...) I argue that although Cavendish thought women needed to be better educated, and could change if they had such an education, she also thought their education should reinforce the feminine virtues. Section III examines Cavendish's notorious “Preface to the Reader” (from The Worlds Olio), where Cavendish claims that women are naturally inferior in strength and intelligence to men. Section IV addresses another notorious Cavendish text, “Female Orations,” arguing that its message is similar to that of the “Preface to the Reader.” Nonetheless, although Cavendish held conventional views about male and female nature and appropriate gender roles, she also recognized how social institutions could limit women's freedom; section V explores the complexities of Cavendish's critique of one such institution, patriarchal marriage. (shrink)

Gender and populism have been extensively theorized separately, but there has not been sufficient study of the way that gender undergirds populism, strengthening its diverse manifestations. Focusing on the cases of Vladimir Putin and Recep T. Erdoğan, we argue that their political performance allows them to project a right-wing populism that hides much of its political program in an ostentatious masculine posturing that has the virtue of being relatively malleable. This political masculinity allows them to position themselves at different (...) points in time as outsiders yet insiders, bad boys yet good fathers. In their early years Putin and Erdogan established themselves as transgressive outsiders who developed a profile of power by building up their masculine, working-class biographies. As their power became consolidated, they turned to a more paternal role, fostering a conservative gender order while attacking the masculinity of their opponents and casting them as outsiders. In this way over the years they have combined political performances that have both breached the conventional gender norms and also upheld and reinforced them. The result is a Janus-faced masculinity of outsiders-yet-insiders, bad-boys-yet-good-fathers, which establishes that the leader is both the same as other men and also different from them, standing above the citizenry, mediating and fostering a conservative political order. Understanding this gender performance also helps to explain the paradox of “electoral authoritarianism” (Levitsky and Way Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 51–65, 2002; Schedler 2006), demonstrating how performed political masculinity can support and connect the cult of a popularly elected leader with conservative social and political gender norms. (shrink)

This research investigates the efficacy of business ethics intervention, tests a theoretical model that the love of money is directly or indirectly related to propensity to engage in unethical behavior (PUB), and treats college major (business vs. psychology) and gender (male vs. female) as moderators in multi-group analyses. Results suggested that business students who received business ethics intervention significantly changed their conceptions of unethical behavior and reduced their propensity to engage in theft; while psychology students without intervention had no such (...) changes. Therefore, ethics training had some impacts on business students' learning and education (intelligence). For our theoretical model, results of the whole sample (N = 298) revealed that Machiavellianism (measured at Time 1) was a mediator of the relationship between the love of money (measured at Time 1) and unethical behavior (measured at Time 2) (the Love of Money → Machiavellianism → Unethical Behavior). Further, this mediating effect existed for business students (n = 198) but not for psychology students (n = 100), for male students (n = 165) but not for female students (n = 133), and for male business students (n = 128) but not for female business students (n = 70). Moreover, when examined alone, the direct effect (the Love of Money → Unethical Behavior) existed for business students but not for psychology students. We concluded that a short business ethics intervention may have no impact on the issue of virtue (wisdom). (shrink)

A number of sociologists have identified the emergence of a ‘new paradigm’ of health, based on the principle that the National Health Service should seek to prevent ill-health rather than simply treat the sick. The sociology of health promotion that has emerged over the past 15 years has contributed to debates about risk, lifestyle and consumerism, but the gendered nature of what some refer to as the ‘new morality of health’, and in particular its urging of feminine attributes, has (...) largely been neglected. This article provides a critical examination of the ‘new paradigm’ of health and its relationship to femininity. I suggest that femininity involves a certain attitude to the body that we also find in current health policy, and cultural representations of health more generally: that the body is essentially uncontrollable (yet something we should seek to control, as a matter of virtue), that it is a good in and of itself, and that it is synonymous with the self. (shrink)

Nearly two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote what is considered to be the first major work of feminist political theory: A Vindication of the Rights of Women . Much has been written about this work, and about Wollstonecraft as the intellectual pioneer of feminism, but the actual substance and coherence of her political thought have been virtually ignored. Virginia Sapiro here provides the first full-length treatment of Wollstonecraft's political theory. Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft's works and treating them thematically (...) rather than sequentially, Sapiro shows that Wollstonecraft's ideas about women's rights, feminism, and gender are elements of a broad and fully developed philosophy, one with significant implications for contemporary democratic and liberal theory. The issues raised speak to many current debates in theory, including those surrounding interpretation of the history of feminism, the relationship between liberalism and republicanism in the development of political philosophy, and the debate over the canon. For political scientists, most of whom know little about Wollstonecraft's thought, Sapiro's book is an excellent, nuanced introduction which will cause a reconsideration of her work and her significance both for her time and for today's concerns. For feminist scholars, Sapiro's book offers a rounded and unconventional analysis of Wollstonecraft's thought. Written with considerable charm and verve, this book will be the starting point for understanding this important writer for years to come. (shrink)

We consider Helen Longino's proposal that "ontological heterogeneity", "complexity of relationship", and "the non-disappearance of gender" are criteria for good science and cannot be separated into cognitive and social virtues. Using a research program in neuroendocrinology investigating a hormonal basis for sex-differentiated lateralization as a case study, the authors disagree concerning whether the first two criteria can be construed as criteria for good science. Concerning the non-disappearance of gender criterion, we argue that its appropriateness is context specific, and that its (...) cognitive and social formulations are separable and should be construed as such. (shrink)

abstract: Mary Wollstonecraft is an early and important critic of Adam Smith, engaging with his Theory of Moral Sentiments in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Given Wollstonecraft's arguments against moralists who "give a sex to virtue," what did she make of Smith's use of gender-coded language and the oft-cited passage where he claims that "humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man" ( TMS IV.2.10)? This paper revisits the scholarly debate over gender essentialism (...) in Smith, arguing that Smith's view of virtue is not gender essentialist, and that Wollstonecraft saw this and did not target Smith with her critique. Instead, Wollstonecraft affirms Smith's claims, leveraging them in order to advocate for educational and social reform. Reading these texts together corrects the tenacious reading of Smith as a gender essentialist, while also illuminating the differences between Smith's and Wollstonecraft's conceptions of self-control. (shrink)