Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally (...) damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them--traits that Tessman refers to as "burdened virtues." These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer's own well being. Tessman's work focuses on issues that have been missed by many feminist moral theories, and her use of the virtue ethics framework brings feminist concerns more closely into contact with mainstream ethical theory. This book will appeal to feminist theorists in philosophy and women's studies, but also more broadly, ethicists and social theorists. (shrink)

Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality asks what happens when the sense that "I must" collides with the realization that "I can't." Bringing together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology, Lisa Tessman here examines moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that "ought implies can.".

In this accessible yet throught-provoking work, Lisa Tessman takes us through gripping examples of the impossible demands of morality -- some epic, and others quotidian -- whose central predicament is: How do we make decisions when morality demands we do something that we cannot?

Implicit in feminist and other critiques of ideal theorizing is a particular view of what normative theory should be like. Although I agree with the rejection of ideal theorizing that oppression theorists (and other theorists of justice) have advocated, the proposed alternative of nonideal theorizing is also problematic. Nonideal theorizing permits one to address oppression by first describing (nonideal) oppressive conditions, and then prescribing the best action that is possible or feasible given the conditions. Borrowing an insight from the "moral (...) dilemmas debate"— namely that moral wrongdoing or failure can be unavoidable—I suggest that offering (only) action-guidance under non-ideal conditions obscures the presence and significance of unavoidable moral failure. An adequate normative theory should be able to issue a further, non-action-guiding evaluative chim, namely that the best that is possible under oppressive conditions is not good enough, and may constitute a moral failure. I find exclusively action-guiding nonideal theory to be both insufficiently nonidealizing (because it idealizes the moral agent by falsely characterizing the agent as always able to avoid moral wrongdoing) and meanwhile too strongly adapted to the nonideal (because normative expectations are lowered and detrimentally adapted to options that, while the best possible, are still unacceptable). (shrink)

Characterizing feminist ethics and social and political philosophy as marked by a tendency to be non-idealizing serves to thematize the volume, while still ...

Nurses and other medical practitioners often experience moral distress: they feel an anguished sense of responsibility for what they take to be their own moral failures, even when those failures were unavoidable. However, in such cases other people do not tend to think it is right to hold them responsible. This is an interesting mismatch of reactions. It might seem that the mismatch should be remedied by assuring the practitioner that they are not responsible, but I argue that this denies (...) something important that the phenomenon of moral distress tells us. In fact, both the practitioners’ tendencies to hold themselves responsible and other people’s reluctance to hold the practitioners responsible get something right. The practitioners may be right that they are responsible in the sense of having failed to meet a binding moral requirement, even when the requirement was impossible to meet. This makes moral distress a fitting response because it correctly represents their own action as a wrongdoing. However, others may meanwhile be right that the practitioners are not responsible in the sense of being culpable and blameworthy. To blame others, or oneself, for certain failures, including those that are unavoidable, would be unfair. My claim depends on distinguishing between the fittingness and the fairness of holding someone responsible for moral failure. Having drawn the distinction, I suggest that moral distress should be addressed in a way that both recognizes it as a fitting response and avoids the unfairness of blame. (shrink)

This paper draws on Claudia Card’s discussions of moral luck to consider the complicated moral life of people—described as pessimists—who accept the heavy knowledge of the predictability of the bad moral luck of oppression. The potential threat to ethics posed by this knowledge can be overcome by the pessimist whose resistance to oppression, even in the absence of hope, expresses a sense of still having a ‘‘claim’’ on flourishing despite its unattainability under oppression.

A critically revised Aristotelian-based virtue ethics has something potentially useful to offer to those engaged in analyzing oppression and creating liberatory projects. A critical virtue ethics can help clarify one of the ways in which oppression interferes with flourishing; specifically, it helps clarify an aspect of oppression that can be called "moral damage.".

This paper considers whether eudaimonism is necessarily an idealizing approach to ethics. I argue, contrary to what is implied by Christine Swanton, that it is not, and I suggest that a non-ideal eudaimonistic virtue ethics can be useful for feminist and critical race theorists. For eudaimonist theorists in the Aristotelian tradition, the claim that one should aim to live virtuously assumes that there will typically be good enough background conditions so that an exercise of the virtues, in conjunction with these (...) favorable external conditions, will suffice for someone to flourish both in the sense of living virtuously and in the sense of living well or living the good life. However, under some forms of oppression the background conditions will not be good enough, and thus an exercise of the virtues will often be insufficient to constitute a flourishing life. It may seem that eudaimonism, with its foregrounding of the concept of flourishing and its assumption of a tight connection between living virtuously and living well, may function as a form of ideology that elides the ways in which non-ideal and oppressive conditions can separate virtue from well-being and can make the state of flourishing (in its dual senses) unattainable. I point out that eudaimonism can be revised to incorporate the claim that virtue and flourishing may typically be unlinked, and I advocate retaining flourishing as an unattainable end, exercising the virtues even with a sense of their absurdity, and confronting the existential states of frustration and disappointment that may result. (shrink)

I briefly introduce Moral Failure as a book that brings together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology to examine moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that “ought implies can.” I respond to Rivera by arguing that the process of construction that imbues normative requirements with authority need not systematize or eliminate conflicts between normative requirements. My response to Schwartzman clarifies what is problematic about nonideal theorizing that limits itself to offering action-guidance. In response to Kittay, (...) I defend my rejection of “ought implies can,” and consider the implications of the concept of unfair moral requirements. (shrink)

Written in an engaging narrative style these philosophical investigations undermine racist hierarchies along with false natualistic conceptions of the meanings of race and universalistic understandings of gender, by considering whiteness as it shapes and is infused by gender, class, sexuality, and culture. Central to this project are questions about how it is that culture and the state create such a wide range of different people who understand themselves as white. The essays collected here discuss how one learns to be a (...) good white Southern woman, what it means to pass as white, and whether there really is a dilemma that accompanies white privilege. (shrink)

A constructivist approach to ethics must include some process—such as Rawls’ (1971) reflective equilibrium—for moving from initial evaluative judgments to those that one can affirm. Walker’s (1998; 2003) feminist version of reflective equilibrium incorporates what she calls “transparency testing” to weed out pernicious, ideologically shaped intuitions. However, in light of empirical work on the plurality of values and on the cognitive processes through which people arrive at moral judgments (i.e. an automatic, intuitive process and/or a controlled reasoning process), I raise (...) one concern: some moral requirements can only be grasped intuitively and should not have to be affirmed from the perspective of other confidently held values. The “requirements of love” (Frankfurt 2004) are one such example; failing to fulfill these requirements is, for someone who loves, unthinkable (Frankfurt 1988); one transgresses the associated values merely by considering sacrificing them. I suggest—citing empirical work on “sacred values” (Tetlock 2000; 2003)—that to subject these requirements to transparency testing would be to transgress them by having “one thought too many” (Williams 1981). One’s confidence in these values, and the authority of these values, depend on an automatic process. I consider the risks, and the necessity, of embracing both intuitive and reasoning processes for affirming the authority of a plurality of moral values. (shrink)

Tessman responds to her three critics’ comments on Burdened Virtues, focusing on their concerns with her stipulation of an “inclusivity requirement,” according to which one cannot be said to flourish without contributing to the flourishing of an inclusive collectivity. Tessman identifies a naturalized approach to ethics—which she distinguishes from the naturalism she implicitly endorsed in Burdened Virtues—that illuminates how a conception of flourishing that meets the inclusivity requirement could carry moral authority.

Charles Mills has critiqued of the whiteness of the discipline of Philosophy by showing how ideal theorizing dominates Anglo-American philosophy and functions there as ideology, while it is non-ideal theorizing that can better attend to the realities of racialized lives. This paper investigates how idealization within the subfield of ethics leads mainstream ethical theorizing to fail to reflect moral life under racial and other forms of domination and oppression. The paper proposes recognizing the dilemmaticity that moral life tends to exhibit (...) under certain non-ideal conditions. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to untangle the purported connection between moral virtue and flourishing in the context of examining what looks like an unexpected effect of oppression: If moral virtue is necessary for flourishing—as Aristotle assumes that it is when he describes eudaimonia as an “activity of the soul in accordance with virtue” — then members of structurally privileged groups can only flourish if they are morally good. However, it is hard to conceive of the privileged as morally good, (...) since their privileges result from unjust social positionings. Thus it appears that they are prevented from leading good lives. This is an odd claim to add to a theory of oppression, which one would expect to explain how the victims of oppression — rather than its beneficiaries — are denied a shot at the good life.While the privileged may enjoy especially ample opportunities to develop certain virtues, I will be thinking here about vices associated with practices of domination, including active or passive acceptance of the benefits that come from occupying positionings that depend upon systems of male dominance, white supremacy, class divisions under capitalism, norms of heterosexuality, and so on. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhen is sacrifice – and particularly self-sacrifice – called for? This question turns out to be difficult to answer, for it tends to arise when values conflict, and hence the answer to it depends on how conflicts of values are to be resolved. If values are constructed, and if there is no single right way to construct them or prioritize them when they conflict, though there are identifiable ways in which the construction of values can go wrong, we may be (...) left in a position of ambivalence about what should be sacrificed. In cases of conflict in which self-sacrifice is one of the options, ambivalence may be particularly appropriate. In part this is because there may be in such cases special sources of plurality and incommensurability of values, because the conflict is likely to be between something that is valued by a social group, and something that is valued particularly by an individual who has to consider self-sacrificing. And in part it is because individuals may have trouble balancing self-regarding and other-regarding concerns in the process of value construction. This paper elaborates these complications, and presents cases in which we might suspect that someone has self-sacrificed too much or too little. (shrink)

This dissertation draws on the Aristotelian and contemporary communitarian belief that humans are socially constituted, and analyzes the manifestations of this belief in contemporary identity politics and in the concept of 'culture' that often underlies identity politics. While I argue that it is important to maintain a communitarian conception of the self, I depart from Aristotle and the communitarian tradition by rejecting the assumption that a constitutive community is characterized by unity and homogeneity. I then claim that identity politics has (...) inherited both the virtues and the problems of communitarian theory. Just as communitarians claim that the self is never free from social constitution, so identity politics have taken the self's identity to be formed along lines of socially defined group differences, and like communitarianism, some identity politics has entailed a call for unity. In the case of identity politics, the requirement for membership in the community may be sharing certain essential characteristics of identity; difference can result in marginalization, forced assimilation to the group norm, or expulsion. Because identity politics often relies upon the concept of 'culture' to ground group identities, I also examine this concept. When a community's unity derives from its members understanding themselves to share a culture, the maintenance of the culture itself can be conservatizing; the culture can remain closed off from changes as it preserves the "traditional" or "authentic"; furthermore, it can come to be treated as an object outside of the people who live it and as such the changing lived realities of these people--particularly changes that cross lines of identity--do not serve to continually offer new, changing, and ambiguous ways of conceiving of what is shared between members of the community. I argue for the development of group identity that recognizes intersecting group differences, and can permit hybridity or mixed identities. I end by suggesting that for a constitutive community to remain truly constitutive without harming its members through marginalization, forced assimilation to a norm or a shared essence, or stagnation, members must give up the sort of control that maintains the community as a unity. (shrink)

This volume brings together essays that reflect on ontological and moral dilemmas regarding Jewish identity and race. The reflections offered here take place in the context of post-Holocaust transformations and pay special attention to the double processes of the deracialization of Jews qua Jews and the recasting of Jews both in reracialized and in other terms. As a result, the essays bring together and create intersections between Jewish studies and critical theories of race and help stretch the limits of as (...) well as fill in some of the gaps in each. (shrink)

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.

Tessman responds to her three critics’ comments on Burdened Virtues, focusing on their concerns with her stipulation of an “inclusivity requirement,” according to which one cannot be said to flourish without contributing to the flourishing of an inclusive collectivity. Tessman identifies a naturalized approach to ethics—which she distinguishes from the naturalism she implicitly endorsed in Burdened Virtues—that illuminates how a conception of flourishing that meets the inclusivity requirement could carry moral authority.

While communities engaged in liberatory struggles have valued group loyalty and condemned betrayal, loyalty itself may be problematic, because remaining loyal to a community may require that one refrain from deconstructing the group identity on which the community is based. This essay investigates what loyalty is and whether loyalty is a virtue, and considers why, if loyalty is indeed a virtue, it may be one that is difficult to maintain in a context of oppression.