Khader offers a deliberative perfectionist approach to identifying and responding to adaptive preferences-- deprived people's preferences that perpetuate their deprivation.

Decolonizing Universalism develops a genuinely anti-imperialist feminism. Against relativism/universalism debates that ask feminists to either reject normativity or reduce feminism to a Western conceit, Khader's nonideal universalism rediscovers the normative core of feminism in opposition to sexist oppression and reimagines the role of moral ideals in transnational feminist praxis.

Feminist socially constitutive conceptions of autonomy make the presence of idealized social conditions necessary for autonomy. I argue that such conceptions cannot, when applied under nonideal conditions, play two key feminist theoretical roles for autonomy: the roles of anti-oppressive character ideal and paternalism-limiting concept. Instead, they prescribe action that reinforces oppression. Treated as character ideals, socially constitutive conceptions of autonomy ask agents living under nonideal ones to engage in self-harm or self-subordination. Moreover, conceptions of autonomy that make idealized social conditions (...) a requirement of autonomy yield the conclusion that oppressed agents are appropriate objects of paternalism. (shrink)

Critics argue that adaptive preference theorists misrepresent oppressed people's reasons for perpetuating their oppression. According to critics, AP theorists assume that people who adapt their preferences to unjust conditions lack the psychic capacities that would allow them to develop their own normative perspectives and/or form appropriate values. The misrepresentation is morally problematic, because it promotes unjustified paternalism and perpetuates colonial stereotypes of third‐world women. I argue that we can imagine a conception of AP that is consistent with acknowledging agency in (...) people who perpetuate their oppression. I offer a weak perfectionist conception of AP that is consistent with recognising agentic capacities in the oppressed. On my conception, APs are preferences incompatible with an agent's basic wellbeing that formed under unjust conditions — and that an agent would reverse upon exposure to better conditions. My conception encourages respectful treatment of the oppressed without requiring us to abandon the feminist political goals the notion of AP is meant to serve. It helps us identify real‐world preferences that are problematically adapted to oppressive conditions and offers an account of why they seem not to be women's ‘true preferences’. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers, and debates in feminist philosophy. Fifty-six entries, written by an international team of contributors specifically for the _Companion_, are organized into five sections: Engaging the Past Mind, Body, and World Knowledge, Language, and Science Intersections Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. The volume provides a mutually enriching representation of the several philosophical traditions that contribute to feminist philosophy, including the analytic and continental traditions. (...) It also foregrounds issues of global concern and scope; shows how feminist theory meshes with rich theoretical approaches that start from transgender identities, race and ethnicity, sexuality, disabilities, and other axes of identity and oppression; and highlights the interdisciplinarity of feminist philosophy and the ways that it both critiques and contributes to the whole range of subfields within philosophy. (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)

Critics of transnational commercial surrogacy frequently call our attention to the race, class, and cultural background of surrogates in the global South. Consider the following sampling from the critics: "the women having babies for rich Westerners have been pimped by their husbands and are powerless to resist" (Bindel 2011); our "rules of decency seem to differ when the women in question are living in abject poverty half a world away" (Warner 2008); and we should worry that "women of color are (...) easier to commodify" (Smerdon 2008, 51-52). Critics suggest—rightly, in my view—that the race, class, and culture of Southern surrogates matter to the moral acceptability of transnational surrogacy. But how, precisely, do .. (shrink)

This piece contextualizes a discussion by liminal feminists on the identifiers ‘women of color’ and ‘Third World women’ that emerged from some uncomfortable and constructive conversations at the 2015 FEAST conference. I focus on concerns of marginalization and gatekeeping that are far too often reiterated within the uneasy racial dynamics among feminist philosophers.

I argue that the epistemological virtues of concrete thinking, self-transparency, and narrative understanding developed by care ethicists can help international development practitioners combat their own temptations to engage in “unconscious unjustified paternalism” (UUP). I develop the concept of UUP—a type of paternalism in which one party unjustifiably substitutes her judgment for another's because of difficulty distinguishing her desires for the other from the other's good. I show that the temptation to UUP is endemic to development and that care ethics contains (...) virtues for combating it. Key to my claim is a view of caregiving as a practice of negotiating conflict. (shrink)

This paper morally evaluates the phenomenon Sylvia Chant calls "the feminization of responsibility," wherein women's unrecognized labor subsidizes international development while men retain or increase their power over women. I argue that development policies that feminize responsibility are incompatible with justice in two ways. First, such policies involve Northerners extracting unpaid labor from women in the global South. Northerners are obligated to provide development assistance, but they are transferring the labor of providing it onto women in the global South and (...) expecting them to do it for free. Second, development policies that feminize responsibility increase women's exposure to sexist domination. These two problems are present irrespective of whether policies that feminize responsibility improve women's basic well-being. (shrink)

The “fathers’ rights” movement represents policies that undermine women's reproductive autonomy as furthering the cause of gender equality. Khader argues that this movement exploits two general weaknesses of equality claims identified by Luce Irigaray. She shows that Irigaray criticizes equality claims for their appeal to a genderneutral universal subject and for their acceptance of our existing symbolic repertoire. This article examines how the plaintiffs’ rhetoric in two contemporary “fathers’ rights” court cases takes advantage of these weaknesses.

This paper discusses Diana Meyers's book in light of postcolonial feminist insights. It argues that though Meyers's defense of empathy is admirably sensitive to the ways philosophical concepts and popular discourses can undermine our empathetic capacities, building a human rights culture requires attention to the relational and distributional dimensions of empathy. Meyers's criticism of the expectation of moral purity from victims attests to the richness of her work on agency and helps dismantle unduly narrow conceptions of who counts as a (...) victim of a human rights violation. Meyers's argument for empathy over sympathy is especially useful for understanding culturally encoded forms of degradation. However, human rights violations are caused not only by empathy deficits; they are caused also by empathy excesses toward some people and savior mentalities that can coexist with empathy. Empathy should be supplemented by a political analysis that helps us identify the causes of global injustice. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy_ is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers, and debates in feminist philosophy. Fifty-six chapters, written by an international team of contributors specifically for the _Companion_, are organized into five sections: Engaging the Past Mind, Body, and World Knowledge, Language, and Science Intersections Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. The volume provides a mutually enriching representation of the several philosophical traditions that contribute to feminist philosophy. It also foregrounds issues of global (...) concern and scope; shows how feminist theory meshes with rich theoretical approaches that start from transgender identities, race and ethnicity, sexuality, disabilities, and other axes of identity and oppression; and highlights the interdisciplinarity of feminist philosophy and the ways that it both critiques and contributes to the whole range of subfields within philosophy. (shrink)

An interdisciplinary and contemporary response to Irigaray’s work.

The “fathers’ rights” movement represents policies that undermine women’s reproductive autonomy as furthering the cause of gender equality. Khader argues that this movement exploits two general weaknesses of equality claims identified by Luce Irigaray. She shows that Irigaray criticizes equality claims for their appeal to a genderneutral universal subject and for their acceptance of our existing symbolic repertoire. This article examines how the plaintiffs’ rhetoric in two contemporary “fathers’ rights” court cases takes advantage of these weaknesses.

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)

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)

ABSTRACT This symposium brings together commentaries on Serene J. Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic from Linda Martín Alcoff, Sunaina Arya, and Olúfẹ'mi O. Táíwò with a reply from Khader. Khader’s book aims to develop a conception of feminism that is both universalist and anti-imperialist. Central to this feminism are the idea that the normative core of feminism is opposition to sexist oppression and the idea that the role of normative concepts in transnational feminist praxis is a justice-enhancing, or (...) nonideal theoretical, one. Khader resists the universalism/relativism framing of debates in global feminisms and argues that opposition to sexist oppression can be detached from the values and social ontology of what she calls ‘Enlightenment liberalism’. She asks whether the values that are most often accused of being vehicles for Western imperialism, namely autonomy, individualism, and gender role eliminativism, are necessary for feminism at all. (shrink)