Abstracts of Selected
Publications by Elizabeth Anderson
“Epistemic Bubbles and Authoritarian Politics,” in Michael Hannon & Elizabeth Edenberg, eds. Political Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Contemporary
U.S. political discourse is distorted by "epistemic bubbles." In
social epistemology, an epistemic bubble is a self-segregated network
for the circulation of ideas, resistant to correcting false
beliefs. Dominant models of epistemic bubbles explain some of
their features, but fail to account for their recent spread, increasing
extremity, and asymmetrical distribution across political groups.
The rise of populist authoritarian politics explains these recent
changes. I propose two models of how populism creates epistemic
bubbles or their functional equivalents: (1) by promulgating
biased group norms of information processing; and (2) by replacing
empirically-oriented policy discourse with an identity-expressive
discourse of group status competition. Each model recommends
different strategies for popping epistemic bubbles. My analysis
suggests that social epistemology needs to get more social, by modeling
cognitive biases as operating collectively and outside people's heads,
via group epistemic and discursive norms.
“The Epistemology of Justice,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 58.1 (2020): 6-29
In
arguing about justice, different sides often accept common moral
principles, but reach different conclusions about justice because they
disagree about facts. I argue that motivated reasoning, epistemic
injustice, and ideologies of injustice support unjust institutions by
entrenching distorted representations of the world. Working from a
naturalistic conception of justice as a kind of social contract, I
suggest some strategies for discovering what justice demands by
counteracting these biases. Moral sentiments offer vital resources to
this end.
"Workplace Government and Republican Theory," in Geneviève Rousselière and Yiftah Elazar, eds., Republicanism and the Future of Democracy
(Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Contemporary
republican theory has mainly been developed in the context of the
relations of citizens to the state. Yet in the 19th century,
American workers, through the Knights of Labor, relied on republican
theory to challenge the emerging workplace governance regime of the
Industrial Revolution, as did their Chartist counterparts in
Britain. This essay draws insights from these early
republican-inspired labor movements for contemporary problems of
workplace governance. Liberal theory, with its stress on freedom
of contract, distributive justice, and pluralism about the good, tends
to overlook problems internal to employer-worker relations that
republican theory highlights. By taking freedom as non-domination
as a core value, republican theory enables us to focus on interpersonal
injustices expressed through the domination of employers over workers,
without displacing those concerns onto issues of distributive justice
or defective contracts. The republican idea of the common good as
an organizing principle coheres with the fact that in each workplace,
workers’ activity is orchestrated around a common productive goal—in
contrast with the pluralism presumed in liberal theory.
Republican theory can thereby stimulate a reconstruction of the common
good of the workplace. Finally, I argue that the classical
republican theory of the mixed constitution has potential for informing
a just constitution of workplace governance where workers do not own
the firm, but rely on the capital contributions of others.
"Moral Apprehension and Cognition as a Social Skill," Australasian J. Phil. 3.1 (2020): 26-34
Haslanger’s
‘Cognition as a Social Skill’ shows how ideology as embedded in
perceptions, habits, and practical skills cannot be changed merely by
changing people’s conscious beliefs. In this commentary, I explore the
roles of emotions in ideology. Oppressive ideologies propagate
stigmatizing images and ideas about subordinate groups in order to
evoke fear, disgust, contempt, and other emotions toward the oppressed.
Such emotions preempt sympathy and respect for the oppressed.
Oppressive ideologies also hijack moral motives by propagating false or
misleading factual beliefs about the oppressed. Yet understanding how
these ideological strategies work exposes their vulnerabilities.
Oppressive ideologies must spread distorted factual beliefs and images
because they cannot contest basic moral claims rooted in the moral
sentiments. But moral sentiments have natural objects, and are capable
of detecting them despite misleading propaganda. I focus on the
sentiments of sympathy and moral apprehension–an inchoate emotional
grasp of the fact that one is behaving unjustly toward another. These
sentiments can be cultivated and activated through practices of
accountability and group integration. Through such methods, moral
emotions can function as resources to overcome oppression, rather than
as resources hijacked by oppressive systems.
“How to be a Pragmatist,” in Ruth Chang and Kurt Sylvan, eds., Oxford Handbook of Practical Reason (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Pragmatism
is often loosely characterized as the view that people should adopt
“whatever works.” This seems like empty and useless advice, since it
omits any substantive criterion of what works. The key to pragmatism
lies in its method, which deeply integrates moral with empirical
inquiry. Pragmatism replaces the quest for an ultimate criterion or
principle of morally right action with a method for intelligently
updating our moral beliefs. It offers two ways to improve our moral
beliefs. First, we can study the conditions that tend to bias our
thinking and reconsider moral problems under conditions in which the
operations of such biases are blocked, counteracted, or diminished.
Second, we can test our moral beliefs through experiments in living –
by putting our moral principles into practice and seeing whether they
solve the problems we need them to solve without creating worse
problems. Instead of casting the quest for moral knowledge in terms of
the discovery of fixed ends or principles of action, pragmatists view
it as the continuing refinement of tools for living with others in
light of experience.
“Philanthropy
and Income Inequality,” (with Ing-Haw Cheng and
Harrison Hong), forthcoming in a volume on the future of capitalism,
ed. Subramanian Rangan.
Much
of the research in economics on giving has been focused on
middle-income households, so we know little about the motives for
giving by the very rich. We provide some initial evidence on
what
drives the giving of the richest Americans, focusing on esteem
competition and tax policy. The anthropological record indicates that
esteem competition can drive not only conspicuous consumption but
conspicuous giving, in which the wealthy attempt to outdo one another
in the scale of their generosity. Contemporary sociological evidence
concerning the ubiquity, scale, and conspicuousness of philanthropy
among the wealthiest supports the view that esteem competition
continues to motivate the wealthy to give. Bill Gates
recently
argued that philanthropy by households at the top of the
income distribution might help ameliorate wealth inequality, and that
tax policies should take this into account. We use the Jobs
and
Growth Tax Relief Act of 2003 to see how their giving responded to
unanticipated tax cuts, particularly for dividends. Tax cuts
could increase giving via an income effect: when people are richer,
they give more away. However, they could also decrease giving
via
a substitution effect: by reducing the benefits of the
charitable
tax deduction, they increase the relative cost of giving compared to
consumption. We find that the substitution effect outweighed
the
income effect for the 2003 tax cut, as total giving declined even as
the income of the wealthiest rose. We conclude by
considering the welfare implications of philanthropy as
opposed to
alternative models for redistributing the wealth of the extremely rich.
“The
Problem of Equality from a Political Economy
Perspective,” forthcoming, Oxford
Studies in Political Philosophy.
This paper explores challenges to the creation of an
egalitarian society—that is, a free society of equals, without
oppressive
social hierarchies—from what we know about different types of human
society
across human history. All
human beings
originally lived in hunter-gatherer bands, which, along with tribal
societies,
are remarkably egalitarian. Inegalitarian
social forms—rank societies and social stratification—are rooted in the
following causes: (1)
despotic
tendencies rooted in human psychology; (2) esteem competition; (3)
descent
group closure and ingroup opportunity hoarding; (4) inegalitarian
ideology; and
(5) the increasing scale of societies, administration of which requires
layers
of hierarchically organized bureaucracy. Large
scale social organization can deliver
dramatically reduced interpersonal violence and increased prosperity
and
opportunities. Securing
the benefits of
scale without oppressive social hierarchy requires the institution of
checks
and norms against bullies and narcissists, reworking the economy of
esteem,
ending descent group opportunity hoarding, integrating social groups,
promoting
egalitarian ideologies, and perfecting democratic practices.
“Moral
Bias and Corrective Practices,” Proceedings
and Addresses of the
APA 89 (2015): 21-47.
The
dominant methods of contemporary moral philosophy presuppose an
implicit social epistemology, according to which a priori reasoning by
socially privileged thinkers can generate satisfactory moral
conclusions. I test this view by examining the case of
arguments
against slavery in the U.S. before the Civil War. White
abolitionists used the dominant methods of contemporary moral
philosophy, but failed to make much progress. Black
abolitionists
deployed more effective methods. I show how pragmatism can explain
their successes in terms of methods for counteracting moral bias, based
on practical contention and inclusion of the victims of injustice in
moral inquiry. By naturalizing moral inquiry in collaboration
with history and the social sciences, and by practicing greater
inclusion, pragmatism offers more fruitful methods for moral philosophy.
“Freedom
and Equality,” in David Schmidtz, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Freedom
(Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Freedom and equality are often taken to be conflicting values.
But there are at least three conceptions of
freedom--negative, positive, and republican--and three conceptions of
equality--of standing, esteem, and authority. Republican
freedom turns out to require a significant degree of authority
egalitarianism. To block arguments that freedom requires
substantial material equality, libertarians typically argue that rights
to negative liberty override or constrain any claims to positive
liberty. I shall argue that, to the extent that libertarians
want to support private property rights in terms of the importance of freedom to
individuals, this strategy fails, because any coherent freedom-based
defense of private property rights depends on giving priority to
positive over negative freedom. I next argue that the core
rationale for inalienable rights depends on considerations of
republican freedom. A regime of full contractual alienability
of rights--on the priority of negative over republican freedom--is an
unstable basis for a free society. It tends to shrink the
domains in which individuals interact as free and independent persons,
and expand the domains in which they interact on terms of domination
and subordination. To sustain a free society over time, we
should accept the priority of republican over negative
liberty. This is to endorse a kind of authority
egalitarianism. I conclude with some reflections on how the
values of freedom and equality bear on the definition of property
rights. The result will be a qualified defense of some core
features of social democratic orders.
“Rawls’s
Difference Principle,” in Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams,
ed. The Cambridge
Companion to A Theory of Justice (Cambridge UP,
forthcoming).
Rawls's difference principle requires that social and economic
inequalities should be arranged to redound to everyone's benefit, and
especially to the benefit of the least advantaged. Critics of
the difference principle have charged that it violates principles of
desert and individual responsibility, freedom of contract and
individual property rights. I argue that these criticisms are
misguided, because the difference principle operates at a different
level of analysis from the other principles. As a systemic
principle, it regulates the overall structure of opportunities in
society, whereas the other principles are local principles, which
regulate the entitlements of particular individuals to particular
goods. I explain how the need for systemic principles arises,
and why local principles presuppose a background framework of systemic
principles. The local principle of desert may dictate that
the fastest runner in a race wins first prize, but it cannot determine
how many prizes there should be, or how much more the first prize
should be than the other prizes. Systemic principles are
needed to determine the overall structure of prize opportunities before
the race is run and individual deserts are known. I explain
how, historically, the attempt to raise the principle of desert, and
other local principles, to a systemic level led to irresolvable class
conflict in the 19th c. I also explain how the difference principle, in
conjunction with the principle of fair equality of opportunity,
attempts to transcend class conflict by transcending class
society: the inequalities permitted by Rawls’s principles are
only those that avoid consolidating socioeconomic inequalities into
distinct class identities. I conclude with some reflections
on the limitations of the difference principle as a basis for securing
social equality among persons.
“The
Business Enterprise as an Ethical Agent,” in Subramanian
Rangan, ed., Performance
& Progress: Essays on Capitalism, Business, and Society
(Oxford University Press, 2015), 185-202..
Many for-profit firms integrate ethical considerations into their
operations in ways that go beyond obedience to the law and to the
letter of contracts they make with employees, customers, creditors, and
suppliers. I argue that they can do so coherently by
recognizing that both their day-to-day operation and their legitimacy
depends on relations of reciprocity and trust among internal and
external stakeholders in the firm. Reciprocity depends on
reasonable, informed expectations that all sides will gain from their
relationship. On this understanding, multiple stakeholders, including
not just shareholders but creditors, suppliers, employees, the
surrounding community and even customers commit investments to the firm
that it is costly or impossible for them to withdraw. Living
up to the demands of reciprocity requires not only that firms not
exploit those commitments, but that they conceive of their mission in a
positive sense as including the interests of all
stakeholders. The firm is not just a nexus of contracts but a
nexus of reciprocal relationships. I consider the implications of this
model of ethics for for-profit firms, and argue that it is feasible
within some varieties of capitalism.
“On
Ralph Barton Perry’s ‘What Do We Mean by Democracy?’ ” Ethics 125.2
(2015): 517-520.
Ralph Barton Perry's discussion of democracy marks an important
transition in thinking about distributive justice, shifting from
parochial perspectives grounded in conflicting class interests to the
quest for a perspective that can be shared by members of all class
positions. In locating this perspective in the ideas shared by citizens
in a democracy, Perry's theory anticipates Rawls.
“Social
Movements, Experiments in Living, and Moral Progress: Case
Studies from Britain’s Abolition of Slavery,” Lindley Lecture,
University of Kansas, 2014.
This
lecture draws on Dewey's pragmatist ethics to explain progressive moral
change. Pragmatism replaces the quest for an ultimate foundational
principle of morality with methods for intelligent updating of moral
beliefs. Intelligent updating requires (1) counteracting
known
biases in moral thinking, and (2) testing moral principles in practice
to see whether they solve the social problem they are supposed to
solve, with acceptable side-effects. I show how pragmatism
can
explain the dramatic transformation of moral consciousness in Britain
during the movement to abolish slavery and the slave trade, which
culminated in the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. British
abolitionists invented the democratic social movement, a mode
of
contestation that played a key role in securing abolition. I
argue that democratic social movements have a tendency
to lead to intelligent updating of normative beliefs, insofar as they
"speak truth to power." This tendency arises from the fact
that
mobilization of mass popular opposition to de facto
norms upheld by the powerful, when it is based on empirically accurate
accounts of what is opposed, tends to counteract a known bias in the
moral thinking of the powerful--namely, their tendency to confuse their
own self-interest with the moral right--that is, with what others have
a duty to do for them. However, the ultimate test of any
moral
change is ex post,
and based
on experiences in living under the new norms. I consider the
contestation over standards of success that took place after abolition,
and show how, as pragmatists have argued, the evaluation of moral
principles is not purely instrumental, because experience in living
according to them enables intelligent revision of ends as well as
refinement of means.
“Equality and Freedom in the
Workplace: Recovering Republican Insights,” Social Philosophy and Policy,
forthcoming, 2014.
State
regulation of employment relations is typically represented as
interfering with freedom of contract. This frame errs in
supposing that the terms of the laissez-faire labor contract are
determined by negotiation between employers and workers, independent of
state action. In fact, the fundamental terms of the labor
contract in capitalist economies are not determined by the parties, nor
could they be, given capitalism's need for conventions that can govern
cooperation on very large scales. Such conventions are
supplied
by the state, through corporate, property, and labor law.
These
laws establish the constitution of workplace governance, which defaults
to employer dictatorship in the laissez-faire baseline. This
default cannot be justified by freedom of contract or by property
theory. Institutional economists provide compelling efficiency
arguments for centralized, hierarchical management of the firm, but
these arguments do not entail that workers have no voice in
management. I discuss pre-capitalist republican theories of
freedom as non-domination, and how they were used for two centuries to
criticize dictatorship, whether in governing the state or economic
production. While republican theory failed to offer a viable
constitution of workplace governance for large-scale production, some
of its principles of constitutional design for protecting individuals
from arbitrary, unaccountable authority remain relevant for designing
workplace constitutions that limit employer authority for the sake of
workers' freedom.
“Outlaws,”
The Good Society 23.1
(2014): 103-113.
This
paper locates mass incarceration in the context of a broader phenomenon
of what I call "modern outlawry." Traditionally, the outlaw
was a
person designated beyond the protection of the laws. Modern
outlawry creates classes of persons from whom some of the ordinary
protections and benefits of the law are withheld, or who are subject to
private punishment in virtue of their membership in an outlaw class.
In the U.S. today, numerous intersecting groups, including
immigrants, Latino citizens and permanent residents, the homeless,
low-wage workers, sex workers, the poor, especially poor blacks, and
ex-convicts are constituted as outlaws through institutions such as the
criminalization of status or victimless activity, "broken windows"
policing, civil forfeiture laws, failure to enforce laws
against
wage theft and domestic violence, and mass imposition of civil
consequences of conviction over and above the criminal punishment
assigned at sentencing. I argue that such practices, far from
deterring crime, invite the criminal victimization of outlaw groups,
and undermine democracy by creating classes of virtual nonpersons and
undermining the rule of law, equality under the law, and a democratic
culture.
“The Social Epistemology of
Morality: Learning from the
Forgotten History of the Abolition of Slavery” in Miranda Fricker and
Michael Brady, eds., The
Epistemic Life of Groups:
Essays in
Collective Epistemology (Oxford UP, forthcoming).
During
the 19th century, the belief that individuals have a right against
being enslaved became a nearly worldwide consensus. Most people today
believe that this change in moral convictions was a case of moral
learning. How we can know this, or similar claims about moral progress,
without begging the question in favor of our current beliefs? I answer
this question by developing a naturalized, pragmatist moral
epistemology through case studies of moral lessons people have drawn
from the history of abolition and
emancipation. I
argue that processes of contention, in which participants challenge
existing moral and legal principles governing interpersonal
relationships, play critical roles in moral learning.
Contention
may take the form of argument, but takes many other forms as well,
including litigation, protest, and revolution.
“Thomas
Paine’s Agrarian Justice and the Origins of Social Insurance,” in Eric
Schliesser, ed., Ten
Neglected Classics of Philosophy (Oxford UP, forthcoming).
Paine
is a pivotal figure in the history of egalitarianism. He
developed the first realistic proposal in the world to abolish
systematic poverty by means of a comprehensive social insurance/young
adult stakeholder scheme, to be financed out of an inheritance
tax. He used strict Lockean principles to justify an
inheritance
tax. Thus, his system is based on private property
entitlements,
not means-tested welfare. In historical context, Paine
offered a
third way between state communism (advocated by Babeuf and the
Conspiracy of Equals, which tried to overthrow France's Directory) and
England's Poor Law, which only relieved rather than abolished poverty,
and only on stigmatizing terms. Paine is also a pivotal
figure in
theorizing poverty as an injustice, not only as a misfortune, and hence
in forging the modern idea of distributive justice. I trace
the
subsequent history of social insurance and the deep irony that in the
US it is now condemned as socialism or as making us dependent on
government, when Paine originally proposed it as a defense of a private
property system against communism, and insisted that because
the
entitlements of social insurance were property entitlements, they
remove the stigma of dependency on recipients.
“Adam
Smith and Equality,” in Ryan Hanley, ed., The Princeton
Guide to Adam Smith (Princeton University Press,
forthcoming).
Adam
Smith was a moderate egalitarian, who held that individuals have equal
moral standing to claim rights and have their interests count, and who
insisted that authority relations be tempered by egalitarian norms.
Virtually all the state policies he condemned exacerbated
inequality by unjustly favoring the rich and powerful at the expense of
workers, consumers, the poor, or colonial subjects. Yet he
defended the economic inequalities generated by commercial society.
Rousseau argued that these inequalities were based on
positional
competition for unequal esteem, and condemned them for leading to
social relations of domination and subjection, pervaded by spite and
envy. Smith agreed that the quest for great wealth and power
in
commercial society was driven by esteem competition, but disagreed with
Rousseau as to its consequences. The poor suffered not from
the
dominion or spite of their superiors, but from obscurity and the
indifference of others. Smith thought commercial society
might
ultimately address these problems by lifting all out of poverty.
This paper explores the merits and limitations of Smith's
moderate egalitarian defense of commercial society against Rousseau's
radical egalitarian critique.
“Epistemic
Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions,” Social Epistemology 26.2
(2012): 163-173.
In Epistemic Injustice,
Miranda Fricker makes a tremendous contribution to theorizing the
intersection of social epistemology with theories of justice.
Theories of justice often take as their object of assessment either
interpersonal transactions (specific exchanges of goods between
persons) or particular institutions. They may also take a
more comprehensive perspective in assessing systems of
institutions. This systemic perspective may enable control of
the cumulative effects of millions of individual transactions that
cannot be controlled at the individual or institutional
levels. This is true not only with respect to the overall
distribution of such goods as income and wealth, but also with respect
to the goods of testimonial and hermeneutical justice.
Cognitive biases that may be difficult for even epistemically virtuous
individuals to correct on their own may be more susceptible to
correction if we focus on the principles that should govern our systems
of testimonial gathering and assessment. Hence, while
Fricker's focus on individual epistemic virtue is important, we also
need to consider what epistemic justice as a virtue of social
institutions would require. My paper will indicate some
directions forward on this front, focusing on the need for integration
of diverse institutions and persons engaged in inquiry.
“Race,
Culture, and Educational Opportunity,” Theory and Research in Education 10.2
(2012): 105-129.
This
paper criticizes the view that, if cultural
factors within the black community explain poor educational outcomes
for
blacks, then blacks should bear all of the disadvantages that follow
from
this. Educational
outcomes are the
joint, iterated product of schools’ responses to students’ and parents’
culturally conditioned conduct. Schools
are not entitled to excessively burden such conduct even when it is
less than
educationally ideal. Cultural
capital
theory illuminates the ways schools may unjustly penalize the
culturally
conditioned conduct of blacks and the poor. However,
it must be refined to take into
account normative differences between arbitrary and educationally
important
forms of cultural capital. Differential
impact analysis offers a useful tool for revealing when schools’
responses to
students’ and parents’ conduct reflects unjust racial stigmatization
and
ethnocentric bias.
“Democracy, Public Policy, and Lay
Assessments of Scientific Testimony,” Episteme 8.2
(2011): 144-164.
Responsible
public policy making in a technological society must rely on complex
scientific reasoning. Given that ordinary citizens cannot
directly assess such reasoning, does this call the democratic
legitimacy of technical public policies in question? It does
not,
provided citizens can make reliable second-order assessments of the
consensus of trustworthy scientific experts. I develop
criteria
for lay assessment of scientific testimony and demonstrate, in the case
of claims about anthropogenic global warming, that applying such
criteria is easy for anyone of ordinary education with access to the
Web. However, surveys show a gap between the scientific
consensus
and public opinion on global warming in the U.S. I explore
some
causes of this gap, and argue that democratic reforms of our culture of
political discourse may be able to address it.
“The
Fundamental Disagreement between
Luck Egalitarians and Relational Egalitarians,” Canadian
Journal of Philosophy,
Supplementary vol. 36 (2012): 1-23.
Luck
egalitarians and relational egalitarians disagree on several
matters. First, they disagree about whether equality is
fundamentally a distributive pattern, or a relation among
people.
Second, they disagree about when distributive inequality is unjust:
when it is accidental, or when it disadvantages others.
Third,
they disagree about whether justice is a state of affairs or a virtue
expressed in agents' conformity to just principles. I shall
argue
that all of these disagreements follow from a fourth: whether
the
principles of justice are to be justified from a third person or second
person standpoint. If justice is essentially tied to
interpersonal claim-making, then luck egalitarianism does not formulate
an acceptable conception of justice, because the fundamental luck
egalitarian principle, that accidental inequality is unjust, cannot be
vindicated from a second-person standpoint.
Brown,
Tony; Akiyama, Mark; White, Ismail;
Jayaratne, Toby; Anderson, Elizabeth, "Differentiating
Contemporary Racial Prejudice from Old-Fashioned
Racial Prejudice,"
Race
and Social Problems 1
(2009): 97–110.
The present study addresses the distinction between contemporary and
old-fashioned prejudice using survey data from a national sample (n =
600) of self-identified whites living in the United States and
interviewed by telephone in 2001. First, we examine associations among
indicators of contemporary and old-fashioned prejudice. Consistent with
the literature, contemporary and oldfashioned prejudice indicators
represent two distinct but correlated common factors. Second, we
examine whether belief in genetic race differences uniformly predicts
both types of prejudice. As might be expected, belief in genetic race
differences predicts old-fashioned prejudice but contrary to recent
theorizing, it also predicts contemporary prejudice.
"Defending
the Capabilities Approach to
Justice," in Harry
Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns, eds., Measuring Justice:
Primary Goods and
Capabilities (Cambridge
University Press,
2010), pp.
81-100.
Thomas Pogge
has recently
criticized the
capabilities approach to justice, questioning its ability to specify a
plausible criterion of distributive justice that avoids stigmatizing
the
naturally less well-endowed. In this
essay, I defend the capabilities approach against Pogge's critique, and
explain
why it is superior to its main rivals, subjective and resourcist
approaches. A capability metric is
superior to any subjective metric because only an objective metric,
such as
capability, can satisfy the demand for a public criterion of justice
for the
basic structure of society. It is
superior to a resource metric because it focuses on ends rather than
means, can
better handle discrimination against the disabled, is properly
sensitive to
individual variations in functioning that have democratic import, and
is
well-suited to guide the just delivery of public services, especially
in health
and education.
"Expanding
the Egalitarian Toolbox: Equality and Bureaucracy," Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society
Supplementary Volume 82
(2008): 139-160.
Many
problems of inequality in developing
countries resist
treatment by formal egalitarian policies.
To deal with these problems,
we must shift from a distributive
to a
relational conception of equality, founded on opposition to social
hierarchy.
Yet the production of many
goods requires the coordination of wills by means of commands. In
these cases, egalitarians must seek to
tame rather than abolish hierarchy.
I
argue that bureaucracy offers important constraints on command
hierarchies that
help promote the equality of workers in bureaucratic organizations. Bureaucracy
thus constitutes a vital if
limited egalitarian tool applicable to developing and developed
countries alike.
"Recent
Thinking about Sexual
Harassment: A Review Essay," Philosophy
and Public Affairs 34
(2006): 284-311.
Nearly thirty years ago, Catharine MacKinnon established a paradigm of
sexual harassment, as unwelcome sexual conduct that men impose on women
in the workplace because of their sex. Recent
thinking about sexual harassment has been
inspired by people who object to sex- and gender- related conduct that
appears
to fall outside the scope of the standard paradigm: gays,
lesbians, and transsexuals who are sexually harassed on account of
their sexual identity or orientation; women in male-dominated jobs who
are harassed, but in a nonsexual way; men who are bullied for appearing
effeminate, or just for sport; conservative workers who complain of
pervasive sexual banter, even if it is not directed at them.
I
survey the prevailing theories of why sexual harassment is wrong,
arguing that none of them satisfies all of the desiderata expected of
such theories: to
provide a normative account of what is wrong
with sexual harassment, to offer sociological insight into the causes,
effects,
and meanings of sexual harassment, and to fit complaints of sexual
harassment
to legal remedies. Nevertheless, suitable modifications and
extensions of MacKinnon's gender subordination theory of sexual
harassment offer a powerful sociological and normative account of a
surprising variety of cases. Several recent contributions to
the
literature on sexual harassment are reviewed, prominantly including
Catharine
MacKinnon and Reva Siegel, eds., Directions
in Sexual Harassment Law (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
"Emotions
in Kant's Later Moral
Philosophy:
Honor and the Phenomenology
of Moral Value," in Monika Betzler, ed., Kant's
Virtue Ethics
(New York and Berlin: de Gruyter).
Kant's views about the value of emotion deserve a closer look than they
have received by those who favor sentimentalist foundations for ethics.
Although he rejected such foundations, and denied that
emotions
could add to the moral worth of agents or their actions, his
later
moral philosophy, especially The
Metaphysics of Morals, called
for the cultivation of many feelings,
both
moral and nonmoral, and credited the nonmoral feelings with moving
humanity
toward recognition of the moral law and helping us to follow it.
Moreover, Kant had a deep insight into the structure of
values, which
he saw
that we grasp at first through
our feelings.
This is the fact that
values appear to us in two dramatically different forms, as appeal and
as
command. Appealing
values constitute the domain of the
good, commanding values the domain of the right. I argue that
Kant was
right to associate the feeling of
commanding value with moral rightness, but wrong to ground it exclusively
in
the categorical imperative.
The
genealogy of commanding value originates in the ethic of honor.
I show how Kant's ethics emerges from the ethic of honor, how
this explains important contrasts between Kantian ethics and
contractualist and Christian ethics, and how it also explains some
problematic aspects of Kantian ethics, notably his claim that victims
of rape should fight to their deaths rather than submit to sexual
violation.
"Democracy:
Instrumental vs.
Non-Instrumental Value," forthcoming in Thomas Christiano and John
Christman,
eds., Contemporary Debates in
Political Philosophy (Oxford:
Blackwell).
Democratic participation is commonly understood to have merely
instrumental value. I argue that it has non-instrumental
value as
well, but that, surprisingly, its non-instrumental value depends on its
having instrumental value. Standard theories of value cannot
accommodate such thoughts; Dewey's theory of value can. I use
Dewey both to illuminate the interactions of instrumental and
non-instrumental value, and, more importantly, to develop an ideal of
democracy as not just a formal governing apparatus, but a form of
culture and community. It is a way of life that embodies the goods of
equality, autonomy, sympathy, and social intelligence.
"The
Future of Racial Integration," in Lawrence Thomas, ed., Social
Philosophy (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2008), pp. 229-249.
The ideal of racial
integration is quietly returning to the
civil rights agenda. I explain why this is so, and defend the
importance of this ideal. I develop an account of different
stages of integration, survey the state of racial integration in the
United States today, and detail the persistent harms to dignity,
socioeconomic opportunity, and democracy of pervasive de facto
segregation of African-Americans and Latinos. These harms
cannot
be removed except by creating racially integrated communities of
cooperation and affiliation. Conservative and
left-multiculturalists join in resisting the call for integration,
arguing that integration is harmful, at least if it is promoted by
public policies, and that voluntary self-segregation is innocuous or
good. I acknowledge that the experience of racial integration
is
often stressful, but reject the arguments of
Stephan and
Abigail Thernstrom on the
right, and Beverly Tatum, Iris Young
and Aimee
MacDonald on the left, that justice is compatible with pervasive
voluntary self-segregation. The
integrated "us," not the self-segregated
racial group, is the critical agent of racial justice that most
urgently awaits
deeper and richer construction. It
is time to
strike a new balance between
moments of self-segregation and of integration, decidedly in favor of
the
racially inclusive "us."
"How
Should Egalitarians Cope with Market
Risks?,"
Theoretical Inquiries in Law
9 (2007): 61-92.
Individuals in capitalist
societies are increasingly exposed to
market risks. Luck egalitarian theories, which advocate neutralizing
the influence of luck on distribution, fail to cope with this problem,
because they focus on the wrong kinds of distributive constraints.
Rules of distributive justice can specify (1) acceptable procedures for
allocating goods, (2) the range of acceptable variations in
distributive outcomes, or (3) which individuals should have which
goods, according to individual characteristics such as desert or need.
Desert-catering luck egalitarians offer rules of the third type. Their
theories fail because considerations of market efficiency, freedom, and
dignity undermine the claims of desert to inform standards of justice
for society as a whole. Responsibility-catering luck egalitarians offer
rules of the first type. Their theories fail because such rules
don’t constrain the downside risks of
market
choices. To solve
this problem, we need rules of the second type, which allow market
forces, and hence luck, to influence distributive outcomes, but only
within an acceptable egalitarian range. The ideal of equality in social
relations helps us devise acceptable constraints at the top, bottom,
and middle of the income range.
"Fair
Opportunity in Education: a Democratic
Equality Perspective," Ethics
117 (2007):
595-622.
Most discussions of fair educational opportunity focus on the good
education is supposed to do for the individuals who have it.
I
argue that we should reframe the issue by focusing on the good the more
educated are supposed to do for everyone else. In a
democratic
society, elites--those who hold positions of responsibility and
authority in society--must serve the interests of all in
society.
Education for elites should be designed to ensure that they respond
competently to these interests. This requires not just that
elites have technical knowledge, but that they are aware of the
interests of people from all walks of life, disposed to serve those
interests, and able to respectfully interact with
all. Elites drawn overwhelmingly from
segregated,
advantaged groups lack first-person access to the problems and
predicaments of the less advantaged, tend to harbor stigmatizing
stereotypes about them, and to interact with them in awkward and
disrespectful ways. I argue that to develop the competence to
serve all, elites must be drawn from all sectors of society, and be
educated together. Thus, a democratically qualified elite must be
integrated across all major lines of social inequality. This
implies that members of all sectors of society have effective access to
a K-12 education sufficient to qualify them for elite educational
opportunities. I argue that this adequacy standard of fair
educational opportunity, developed from the point of view of what we
need elites to do for everyone else, is also satisfactory from the
point of view of what opportunities individuals can legitimately claim
for themselves. The integrationist perspective developed here
also offers a reply to those who object to adequacy standards of fair
opportunity on the ground that they ignore the positional advantages of
having a more-than-adequate education, and helps us understand why
levelling down in the name of equality is not justified.
"The
Epistemology of Democracy," Episteme
3 (2006): 9-23.
This paper investigates the epistemic powers of democratic institutions
through an assessment of three epistemic models of democracy: the
Condorcet Jury Theorem, the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem, and
Dewey's experimentalist model.
Dewey's model is superior to
the others in its ability to model the epistemic functions of three
constitutive features of democracy: the epistemic diversity of
participants, the interaction of voting with discussion, and feedback
mechanisms such as periodic elections and protests. It views democracy
as an institution for pooling widely distributed information about
problems and policies of public interest by engaging the participation
of epistemically diverse knowers. Democratic norms of free discourse,
dissent, feedback, and accountability function to ensure collective,
experimentallybased learning from the diverse experiences of diff erent
knowers. I illustrate these points with a case study of community
forestry groups in South Asia, whose epistemic powers have been hobbled
by their suppression of women's
participation.
"Moral
Heuristics: Rigid
Rules or Flexible Inputs in Moral Deliberation?" Commentary
on Cass Sunstein,
"Moral Heuristics,"Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 28 (4)
(2005): 544-545.
Cass Sunstein represents moral heuristics as rigid rules that lead us
to jump to moral conclusions, and contrasts them with reflective moral
deliberation, which he represents as independent of heuristics and
capable of supplanting them. Following John Dewey's
psychology of moral judgment, I argue that successful moral
deliberation does not supplant moral heuristics but uses them
flexibly as inputs to deliberation. Many of the flaws in moral judgment
that Sunstein attributes to heuristics reflect instead the limitations
of the deliberative context in which people are asked to render
judgments.
"Welfare,
Work Requirements,
and Dependent Care," Journal
of Applied Philosophy 21 (2004):
243-256.
This article considers the justice of requiring employment as a
condition of receiving public assistance. While none of the main
theories of justice prohibits work requirements, the arguments in their
favour are weak. Arguments based on reciprocity fail to explain why
only means-tested public benefits should be subject to work
requirements, and why unpaid dependant care work should not count as
satisfying citizens' obligations to reciprocate. Arguments based
on promoting the work ethic misattribute recipients' nonwork to
deviant values, when their core problem is finding steady employment
consistent with supporting a family and meeting dependant care
responsibilities. Rigid work requirements impose unreasonable costs on
some of the poor. A welfare system based on a rebuttable presumption
that recipients will work for pay, conjoined with more generous work
supports, would promote justice better than either unconditional
welfare or strict requirements.
Lanie,
Angela D.; Jayaratne, Toby Epstein; Sheldon, Jane P.; Kardia, Sharon L.
R.; Anderson, Elizabeth S.; Feldbaum, Merle; Petty, Elizabeth M.;
(2004). "Exploring the Public Understanding of Basic Genetic Concepts."
Journal of Genetic Counseling 13 (4): 305-320.
<http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/44921>.
It is predicted that the rapid acquisition of new genetic knowledge and
related applications during the next decade will have significant
implications for virtually all members of society. Currently, most
people get exposed to information about genes and genetics only through
stories publicized in the media. We sought to understand how
individuals in the general population used and understood the concepts
of “genetics” and “genes.” During in-depth one-on-one telephone
interviews with adults in the United States, we asked questions
exploring their basic understanding of these terms, as well as their
belief as to the location of genes in the human body. A wide range of
responses was received. Despite conversational familiarity with genetic
terminology, many noted frustration or were hesitant when trying to
answer these questions. In addition, some responses reflected a lack of
understanding about basic genetic science that may have significant
implications for broader public education measures in genetic literacy,
genetic counseling, public health practices, and even routine health
care.
"If
God is Dead, is
Everything
Permitted?," in Louise Antony, ed., Philosophers
without Gods
(Oxford University Press, 2007)
Many people object to atheism because they believe that if there is no
God,
then morality lacks authority. The worry is that "if God is
dead,
then
everything is permitted." We know that not everything is
permitted--and
in particular, that practices such as genocide, ethnic cleansing,
slavery,
torture, plunder, rape, punishing people for the sins of others, and
punishing
people for blameless error are not
permitted. It follows
that
any doctrine that entails that such things are permitted is false. I
accept
the logic of this argument. But I deny that atheism entails
that
such
things are permitted. This charge is better made against the
evidence
for theism. The main evidence for theism is scripture.
If
we
take this evidence with the utmost seriousness, as inerrant, then the
evidence
entails that the evil practices listed above are permitted, since the
God
of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran either commits these deeds
himself,
is prophecied to commit them in the future, or commands humans to
commit
them. Since these practices are not permitted, the evidence
for
theism
is systematically unreliable--so unreliable, that it cannot be trusted
to
advance the case for theism at all. I consider theistic
replies
to
this argument, and go on to consider independent evidence for the
incorrigible
unreliability of all
the types of extraordinary evidence
offered for
the existence of God: testimonies of miracles, revelations in
dreams
or what people take to be direct encounters with God, experiences of
divine
presence, and prophecies that have been subject to test. These types of
evidence
are equally available to all religions, including pagan religions.
There
is no independent natural evidence that supports the extraordinary
evidence
for one sort of God or gods more than another. Nor do we have
other
noncircular tests for determining the reliability of extraordinary
evidence.
It follows that these purported types of evidence make no
proposition
about the divine more probable than any other contradictory proposition
about
the divine. Such "evidence" is no evidence at all.
In other
words,
there is no evidence for the existence of a theistic (personal) God.
"Ethical
Assumptions of Economic Theory: Some
Lessons
from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy," in Economics,
Justice,
and
Welfare, Carl-Henric Grenholm,
ed., special issue of Ethical
Theory
and Moral Practice (Kluwer,
Sept. 2004).
Most opponents of the normative framework of economic theory criticize
it
for failing to notice the defects of capitalism. I shall
argue,
through
an examination of the capitalist transformation of creditor-debtor
relations
in the 18th century, that it fails to represent some of the virtues of
capitalism.
Capitalism enabled masses of people, for the first time, to obtain
credit
without being subject to moral opprobrium or social
subordination.
By placing debtor-creditor relations on a footing of self-interest
rather
than aristocratic honor, and by demoralizing the conditions of debt and
insolvency,
capitalism dramatically increased the freedom, equality, and prosperity
of
millions of people. Classical 18th century economists such as
Smith
and Condorcet possessed the ethical concepts to appreciate these
facts.
Ironically, the normative assumptions of the main schools of
contemporary
economic thought that support capitalism--libertarian political
economy,
and Paretian welfare economics--are unable to represent the capitalist
transformation
of credit as an improvement. I trace the fault in these
judgments
to
the excessively abstract, formal representations of freedom,
efficiency,
and markets in economic theory. The virtues of capitalism lie
in
the
concrete social relations, motivations, and social meanings through
which
capital and commodities are exchanged. Against the standard
idealization
of laissez faire capitalism, I argue that the conditions for sustaining
these
concrete capitalist formations often require limits on freedom of
contract
and the scope of private property rights.
"Racial
Integration as
a
Compelling Interest," Constitutional
Commentary
21 (2004): 101-127.
The principle and ideal developed in Brown
v. Board of Education
and
its successor cases lie at the heart of the rationale for affirmative
action
in higher education. The principle of the school
desegregation
cases
is that racial segregation is an injustice that demands
remediation.
The ideal of the school desegregation cases is that racial integration
is
a positive good, without which "the dream of one Nation,
indivisible"
cannot be realized. Both the principle and the ideal make
racial
integration
a compelling interest. The Supreme Court recognized these
claims
in
Grutter v. Bollinger.
However, it failed to take full
advantage
of them. It thereby failed to answer crucial questions that
must
be
answered by policies subject to strict scrutiny. I display
the
links
tying Grutter
to Brown,
discuss the vulnerabilities of Grutter
in the absence of an explicit grounding in Brown,
and
demonstrate
how the affirmative action policy upheld in Grutter,
when
explicitly
grounded in Brown,
survives strict scrutiny.
"Rethinking
Equality
of Opportunity:
Comment on Adam Swift's How Not to be a Hypocrite," Theory
and Research in Education
2 (2004): 99-110.
Adam Swift argues that private K-12 schools violate the principle of
equality of opportunity by enabling less talented students to "jump"
the meritocratic queue for education. I argue that the
principle
of equality of opportunity makes no sense in K-12 contexts, because it
relies on an underlying concept of merit that is inapplicable to
children whose merits are yet to be developed. The principle
therefore presupposes an ordering already given, when that ordering is
determined by the very allocation it is supposed to guide.
Swift's queue-jumping objection to private education also
relies
on the perspective of envy, which has no normative force in a theory of
justice. Swift has a better argument against private and
selective public K-12 schools, based on considerations of social
solidarity. I trace the force
of this argument to the fact that such schools tend to produce a
self-perpetuating elite isolated and alienated from the rest of
society, which is thereby less competent to perform the representative
functions of elites in a democratic society, and less able to claim
legitimacy. Democratic societies have a compelling interest
in
educating an integrated elite, drawn from all socially significant
groups in society.
"Sen,
Ethics, and
Democracy," Feminist Economics
9
(2003): 239-261.
Amartya Sen's ethical theorizing helps feminists resolve the tensions
between the claims of women's particular perspectives and moral
objectivity. His concept
of "positional objectivity" highlights the epistemological significance
of
value judgments made from particular social positions, while holding
that certain values may become widely shared. He shows how
acknowledging positionality is consistent with affirming the universal
value of democracy. This article builds on Sen's work by proposing an
analysis of democracy as a set of institutions that aims to
intelligently utilize positional information for shared ends. This
epistemological analysis of democracy offers a way to understand the
rationale for reserving political offices for women. From a political
point of view, gendered positions are better thought of as an
epistemological resource than as a ground of identity politics--that
is, of parochial identification and solidarity.
"Uses
of Value Judgments in Feminist Social
Science: A Case Study of Research on Divorce," Hypatia
19
(2004): 1-24.
This paper critically examines the thesis that social science is
value-neutral--that is, that it neither presupposes nor supports any
nonepistemic (social, political, moral) value judgments. I
argue
that the standard arguments for value-neutrality are
contradictory. Their real concern is not that scientific
theories
might have evaluative content, but that they might be held
dogmatically. I demonstrate, through a detailed examination
of a
case study of feminist research on divorce, how to distinguish
legitimate from illegitimate (dogmatic) uses of value judgments in
science, and more from less epistemically fruitful values. I
also argue that there is empirical evidence for value judgments, which
lies in our emotional experiences to things in the world.
"Situated
Knowledge and
the Interplay of Value Judgments and Evidence in Scientific Inquiry,"
in P. Gärdenfors, J. Wolenski
and K. Kijania-Placek, eds. In
the Scope of Logic, Methodology and
Philosophy of Science, vol. 2
(Kluwer, 2002), pp. 497-517.
Feminist standpoint theory asserts that the oppressed have an
epistemically privileged standpoint for generating and evaluating
scientific theories of social phenomena. Such theories
thereby
challenge the 3 core theses that underwrite the claim of science to be
"value-free": (1) Neutrality:
scientific theories
neither presuppose nor imply any nonepistemic value judgments; (2)
Impartiality: the only grounds
for accepting a theory are its
relations to the evidence and manifestation of epistemic values, which
are impartial among rival nonepistemic values; (3) Autonomy:
science
progresses best when scientists are free from political pressure to
choose
their own subjects and questions of investigation, research methods,
and
members. This paper uses a case study of antiracist
science--various scientific studies that undermined the thesis that the
black-white gap in IQ is genetically determined--to adjudicate the
dispute between standpoint theory and advocates of the value-freedom of
science. The case study shows that moral, social, and
political
values penetrate the content of theories and the arguments used to
justify them. However, nonepistemic values nevertheless play
roles in legitimate science that are distinct
from the
evidence. The upshot of this paper for standpoint
epistemologies
is twofold: (1) the values and interests of oppressed people
have
bearing on the significance, but
not on the truth, of
theories concerning them and the society to which they belong; (2)
oppressed people are sometimes in a unique (hence privileged) position
to generate critical data
not
otherwise attainable, bearing on the theories concerning them and their
society.
In particular, they are in a unique position to falsify
claims
that
their capabilities are inherently limited, by demonstrating higher
capabilities than the theory attributed to them. In view of
these
findings, the autonomy
and neutrality of science need to be replaced by successor concepts.
By
contrast, a version of impartiality can still be retained, albeit with
conditions,
due to the fact that, in matters of social ontology, there is not a
sharp
boundary between deciding that certain classifications of phenomena are
socially
significant and discovering that these phenomena exist.
"Animal
Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life,"
in Martha Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein, eds., Rights
For Animals? Law
and Policy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
Standard arguments for animal
rights depend on the assumption that
creatures have rights solely in virtue of their intrinsic
capacities. Animals therefore have whatever rights humans
with
equivalent sensory, intellectual, and agentic capacities
enjoy.
Since there is significant overlap between the capacities of (at least)
higher animals and certain human beings, such as infants and severely
retarded and demented people, it follows that such animals have rights
at least equivalent to such human beings, who we acknowledge have many
rights. I criticize this argument by examining a series of
test
cases in which its implications go awry. The test cases
demonstrate that creatures do not enjoy rights simply in virtue of
their intrinsic traits: their actual and possible relations to moral
agents, the interests and capacities of moral agents, and the social
and historical context in which rights claims arise also matter to what
rights a creature should have. These factors show that
species
membership is not
a morally irrelevant trait, as many advocates
of animal rights contend. However, none of the additional
constraints on rights attributions draw a categorical line between
rights-holders and others at the species divide between humans and
others. I offer an alternative account of the many values of
animals, some of which help ground
rights claims, based on the evaluative attitudes it is rational to take
toward
them: sympathy, admiration, awe, and even respect.
"Integration,
Affirmative Action, and Strict Scrutiny," NYU
Law Review,
77 (2002): 1195-1271.
This Article defends racial
integration as a central goal of
race-based affirmative action. Racial integration of
mainstream
institutions
is necessary both to dismantle the current barriers to opportunity
suffered
by disadvantaged racial groups, and to create a democratic civil
society. Integration, conceived as a forward-looking remedy
for
de facto racial segregation and discrimination, makes better sense of
the actual practice of affirmative action than backward-looking
compensatory rationales, which offer restitution for past
discrimination, and diversity rationales, which claim to promote
nonremedial educational goals. Integrative rationales for
affirmative action in higher education could also easily pass equal
protection analysis, if only the point of strict scrutiny of racial
classifications were understood. Unfortunately, the
development
of strict scrutiny as an analytical tool has been hampered by the
Court's confusion over the kinds of constitutional harm threatened by
state uses of racial classification. This Article sorts out
these
alleged harms and shows how strict scrutiny should deal with
them. It shows how the narrow tailoring tests constitute
powerful
tools for putting many allegations of constitutional harm from
race-based affirmative action to rest, and for putting the rest into
perspective. It also argues that
there is no constitutional or moral basis for prohibiting state uses of
racial
means to remedy private sector discrimination. Integrative affirmative
action
programs in educational contexts, which aim to remedy private sector
discrimination,
can therefore meet the requirements of strict scrutiny, properly
interpreted.
"Should
Feminists Reject Rational Choice Theory?" in Louise Anthony and
Charlotte
Witt, eds. A Mind of One's Own
(2d. ed.) (Boulder: Westview,
2001),
369-397.
Feminists
are
ambivalent
about the value of using rational choice theory to describe women's
behavior. I argue that the epistemic value of using rational
choice theory to explain human behavior is partly a function of its normative
credentials,
which are subject to feminist assessment. Feminist
ambivalence
about
the theory is due to the fact that rational choice theory offers both
resources and obstacles to understanding the problems women face, and
helping women overcome them. I explore both the resources and
the
obstacles rational choice theory offers to feminism through a critical
examination of Kristin Luker's Taking
Chances, a
rational-choice account of women's contraceptive decisions.
Luker's commitment to rational choice theory enables her to
successfully model certain aspects of the strategic interactions of
women with their male partners, as well as to explain why the
reproductive health care system fails to deliver contraceptive services
to the women who need them. However, in modelling women as if
their sexual agency were fully realized, Luker's rational choice model
fails to exhibit the ways in which social norms of femininity,
internalized by women themselves, prevent women from acting as
autonomous agents in sexual contexts. Luker's own data show
how
her subjects resist conceiving of themselves as sexual agents, in ways
that undermine both the rationality of their contraceptive choices and
their interests as women. Attempts to model such resistance
in
the terms
of rational choice theory obscure rather than reveal feminist concerns
about
women's lack of sexual autonomy.
"Unstrapping
the Straitjacket of 'Preference': on Amartya
Sen's Contributions to Philosophy and Economics," Economics
and
Philosophy 17 (2001): 21-38.
Much
of Amartya
Sen's
work
has been devoted to criticizing the concept of "preference,"
particularly
in the context of prisoner's dilemmas. Building on Sen's work, I argue
that the preferences upon which people rationally act depend on their
practical identities, which may vary in context and encompass a
plurality of agents. Rational choice is thus not fully
explicable
in terms of individual preference, because individuals have multiple
preference orderings related to their
multiple identities, and
rational choice among them is based on principles not reducible to
preferences. When an agent asks
not "what should I do?" but "what should we do?" in a prisoner's
dilemma, cooperative emerges as a rational choice even in the absence
of altruism or
a positive marginal impact of her choice. I draw out some
implications of this fact for Sen's work on gender inequality in the
family, arguing that for women to achieve full functioning as equals,
they need to acquire practical identities both as individuals and as
members of plural agencies more cosmopolitan than the family.
"Beyond
Homo Economicus:
New Developments in Theories of Social Norms," Philosophy
and Public Affairs 29 (2000):
170-200.
One of
the
central
problems of social theory is to explain why people cooperate and obey
social norms. In this paper, I explore the four dominant
approaches to this problem that are inspired by rational choice
theory: the theory of
conventions,
repeated game
theory, sanctioning theories, and evolutionary game theory. I
argue that none of these approaches, even when modestly modified to
incorporate non-self-interested motivations (e.g., sensitivity to the
moral approval of others) succeed in explaining the actual scope of
observed cooperation and norm-following behavior. I
argue,
through extended discussion of contributions to Ben-Ner and Putterman's
Economics, Values, and
Organization, that more
far-reaching
departures from standard economic models are needed to explain
cooperation and social norms. Recent advances in theories of
collective agency provide some resources for explaining these phenomena.
"Expressive
Theories of Law: A General
Restatement" (with Richard Pildes), University
of Pennsylvania Law
Review 148
(2000): 1503-1575.
This article provides
the first general statement of the aims
and features of expressivism in law and morality. Expressive
conceptions of practical reason, morality, and law tell agents to
express (that is,
to manifest in their actions) appropriate attitudes toward people and
various substantive values. For example, in one well-known
view
of liberalism, the state ought to express equal respect and concern for
its citizens. We outline the basic structure of expressive
theories of rationality, morality and law, arguing that they function
mainly by constraining the reasons that can count in favor of taking
certain actions (means) toward particular ends. We show how
collective agents, including the state, can have and express attitudes,
and argue that therefore the state is subject to expressive
requirements just
as individuals are. We then analyse several areas of Constitutional Law
from
an expressive perspective, including the Establishment Clause, Equal
Protection,
the Dormant Commerce Clause, and Federalism, arguing that expressive
concerns
animate the Supreme Court's rulings in these areas, and that the
expressive
conception of law makes better sense of these areas of doctrine than
rival
consequentialist, functional, and formalist readings. We then
respond
to criticisms of expressive theories of law that have been made by
Matthew
Adler in the same issue of this journal.
"Why
Commercial Surrogate Motherhood Unethically
Commodifies Women and Children: Reply to McLachlan and Swales," Health
Care Analysis 8 (1), 2000.
McLachlan and Swales dispute my
arguments against commercial
surrogate motherhood. In reply, I argue that commercial surrogate
contracts objectionably commodify children because they regard parental
rights over children not
as trusts, to be allocated in the best interests of the child, but as
like property rights, to be allocated at the will o the parents. They
also express disrespect for mothers, by compromising their inalienable
right to act in the best interest of their children, when this interest
calls for mothers
to assert a custody right in their children.
"What
is the Point of Equality?,"
Ethics 109
(1999): 287-337.
Many egalitarians argue that
the point of equality is to compensate
people for undeserved bad luck. This view leaves egalitarians open to
devastating conservative criticisms, fails to fruitfully engage active
egalitarian political movements, and reproduces a Poor Law regime that
moralistically excludes many
citizens from aid and offers only stigmatizing aid to others, on
grounds of
their innate inferiority. The point of equality is better
conceived as creating a democratic society, in which people stand in
relations of equality to one another. Democratic equality
entitles all citizens to the goods they need to function as free and
equal citizens, and to avoid oppression by others. This view
explains, against conservative objections, how citizens can be
obligated to promote equality. It supports the focus of
active
egalitarian movements on broader goals than the distribution of
goods. It expresses respect for citizens by entitling them to
claim goods on account of their equality rather than their inferiority
to others. Finally, democratic equality offers a way to
understand the diversity of human
endowments as a common good, rather than as a cosmic injustice.
"Consumer
Sovereignty vs. Citizens' Sovereignty:
Some Errors in Neoclassical Welfare Economics," Isegoria
(Madrid,
in Spanish translation) 18 (1998): 19-46.
The principle of consumer
sovereignty says that social arrangements,
including government policies, should be evaluated by the degree to
which they satisfy the preferences of individuals, as these are
expressed in their market choices. I argue that this principle is
ambiguous between advocating the promotion of welfare or autonomy, but
that the better arguments for consumer sovereignty favor the autonomy
interpretation. Yet, the individualist conception of autonomy
that economists favor cannot account for collective action problems
generated by external conformity to social norms. Some kinds
of
autonomy can only be exercised collectively. The
institutional
design of democratic states can be viewed as an attempt to achieve
collective autonomy--that is, the autonomy of citizens acting
together. The principle of consumer sovereignty, however,
cannot
function as a coherent basis for collective autonomy.
It conflicts with the autonomy of citizens, and therefore cannot serve
as
a coherent basis for guiding state policy.
"Pragmatism,
Science, and Moral Inquiry," in
Richard Fox and Robert Westbrook, eds.
In Face of the Facts: Moral
Inquiry in American
Scholarship (Cambridge: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press/Cambridge
University
Press, 1998), pp. 10-39.
Pragmatism urges us to view
social scientific, humanistic, and
ethical inquiry as interconnected aspects of a joint
enterprise.
While leaving the logical distinction between facts and values intact,
it shows us how
deeply they are interrelated in inquiry into human affairs.
Empirical
facts--particularly the (emotion-laden) experiences we have in living
out
our conceptions of the good--provide the crucial evidence for our
intrinsic
value judgments. Value judgments, in turn, provide an
indispensible
basis for delineating the concepts we use in the human sciences to
classify
phenomena. We need to allow value judgments to guide
scientific
classification
in the human sciences because one of their functions is to inform our
self-understandings, which are our fundamental basis for practical
reasoning.
"Practical
Reason and Incommensurable Goods," in
Ruth Chang, ed., Incommensurability,
Incomparability, and Practical
Reason (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1997).
Two goods are incommensurable
if neither one is better than or equal
in value to the other. I argue that many goods are
incommensurable, but that, contrary to dominant theories of rational
choice, this fact does not pose serious problems for practical
reason. Pragmatism about value--the view that the structure
of
values is a construction of practical reason--explains how
incommensurabilities arise, but also why they do not interfere with
rational choice. What I call the expressive theory of rational choice
explains how we can choose among incommensurable goods without
resorting to weighing, balancing,
or comparing their values on the same scale.
"Knowledge,
Human Interests, and
Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology," Philosophical
Topics 23
(1995): 27-58.
Feminist epistemologists argue
that social and moral values do and
ought to play important roles in shaping scientific inquiry--not only
in the process of discovery, but in the justification of theories
themselves. Critics respond with charges of "political
correctness": fears that feminist prescriptions invite
dogmatism,
tyranny, and dishonesty. I argue that these fears are based
on
the mistaken view that feminist ethical judgments must compete with the
evidence for control of inquiry. Feminist epistemology urges
us,
rather, to view non-epistemic value judgments and evidential
considerations as cooperating: as playing distinct, but
jointly
necessary roles in directing inquiry. This is possible
because
inquiry aims not simply at accumulating truths, but at constructing
theories that represent significant truths. Social and moral
values guide inquiry not by directly determining what is true, but by
determining what is significant, what counts as the whole
truth, or as an unbiased or objective account of a domain of phenomena
delineated
by human interests.
"Comment
on Dawson's "Exit,
Voice,
and Values in Economic Institutions," Economics
and Philosophy 13
(1997): 101-105.
Graham Dawson provides a novel
moral defense of market provision by
stressing the value of theinterpersonal relationships of customer
markets. I argue that
his distinction between auction and customer markets cannot bear the
moral
weight he places on it, nor does it undercut my arguments for ethical
limitations
on the market.
"The
Democratic University: the
Role
of Justice in the Production of Knowledge," Social
Philosophy and
Policy
12 (1995): 186-219.
Rival views about free speech
in higher education express
distinctive
political epistemologies--accounts of the social relations among people
that
best promote inquiry. This paper defends a democratic epistemology. In
cultures
marked by inequalities of race, class, and gender, "free markets of
ideas"
enable dominant groups to marginalize the speech of subordinate groups.
A
liberal democratic culture of inquiry promotes academic freedom and
sound
research through informal speech norms that recognize the equality of
inquirers.
Although limited "speech codes" are defensible, liberal theory must
emphasize
the requirements of a democratic "culture" of equality, which cannot be
secured by legalistic means.
"Reasons,
Attitudes, and Values: Replies to
Sturgeon and Piper," Ethics
106 (1996): 538-554.
Sturgeon claims that
consequentialism offers the best interpretation
of my expressive principles ofpractical reason. I show how expressive
principles differ from consequentialist principles in constraining
intentions rather than prescribing consequences to achieve. Piper
claims that my requirement that reasons for action be interpersonally
endorsable unjustly requires
the marginalized to seek validation for their reasons from those who
oppress
them. In reply, I argue that her individualist account of rationality
disables
criticism of unjust social practices, and that my social conditions on
rational
justification hold the dominant accountable to the perspectives of the
marginalized.
"Feminist
Epistemology: An Interpretation and
Defense," Hypatia
10 (1995): 50-84.
Feminist epistemology has often
been understood as the study of
feminine "ways of knowing." But feminist epistemology is better
understood as the
branch of naturalized, social epistemology that studies the various
influences
of norms and conceptions of gender and gendered interests
andexperiences
on the production of knowledge. This understanding avoids dubious
claims
about feminine cognitive differences and enables feminist research in
various
disciplines to pose deep internal critiques of mainstream research.
"John
Stuart Mill and Experiments in Living,"
Ethics 102 (1991): 4-26.
Mill
thought that we learn about the good through
experiments in living. This paper argues that Mill viewed his own early
life as an experiment in living that revealed the superiority of
hisconception of the good over Bentham's. Bentham's quantitative
hedonistic psychology could neither explain Mill's youthful depression
nor help him overcome it. But Mill's qualitative theory of pleasures,
grounded in a hierarchy of sentiments and a plurality of nonhedonic
values, could. Theories of the good can be experimentally
tested
because they imply empirical claims about what lives living up to them
are like.
Value
in Ethics and in Economics.
Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1993.
This book articulates
a pluralist theory of value, which
claims
that goods differ in kind if they areproperly valued in different ways,
such
as respect, love, and use. Practical reason is exercised in
"expressing"
these different modes of valuation in action. This
pluralist-expressivist
theory of value and practical reason offers a systematic alternative to
consequentialist theories of rational choice and monistic theories of
value. It also explains why some goods should not be sold on the market
or otherwise treated as commodities. Cases discussed include
prostitution, contract pregnancy, school vouchers, health and
environmental safety.
"Slinging
Arrows At Democracy: Social Choice
Theory, Pluralism, and Democratic Politics." with Richard
Pildes. Columbia Law
Review 90 (December 1990):
2121-2214.
Kenneth Arrow's famous
Impossibility Theorem demonstrates that,
under
certain seemingly weak and plausible conditions, no voting procedure
among
3 or more issues, involving 3 or more voters, can be guaranteed to
issue
in a consistent (transitive) preference ordering among these
issues.
Many social choice theorists have drawn highly pessimistic conclusions
about
the viability or rationality of democracy from Arrow's
result:
that
democracy is inherently unstable, that it produces arbitrary outcomes,
that
it is inevitably subverted by the manipulation of elites, that it
cannot
meaningfully reflect the "will of the people", that it makes purposive
interpretation
of statutes by the judiciary impossible. We argue that none
of
these
dire conclusions for democracy follow from Arrow's theorem, and that
social
choice theory misconceives the nature of democratic decisionmaking as
well
as of rational choice. The values that democracies uphold are
plural
and incommensurable; to adequately express these values in democratic
decisionmaking
requires institutional structures and procedures that cannot be
rationalized
in terms of optimizing a single preference ordering. The
plurality
of incommensurable values is instead better represented in terms of
multiple
preference orderings, or in terms of nonconsequentialist procedural
rationality.
Rational, democratic choice involves determining which preference
ordering
or decisionmaking procedure, given the institutional context and role
of
the agent, has authority. We show how the differentiation of
legislative,
executive, and judicial roles in democratic orders manifest this
nonconsequentialist
pluralistic logic of values.
"Compensation
within the Limits of Reliance
Alone," in John W. Chapman, ed., Compensatory
Justice: Nomos,
vol. 33, (1991), pp. 178-185.
Robert Goodin argues that
considerations of reliance constitute the
basic justification for practices of compensatory justice. This author
disputes Goodin's thesis: practices of compensatory justiceserve a
plurality of aims, such as satisfying needs and securing autonomy,
which are distinct from the aim of enabling people to carryout their
already conceived plans. Goodin's arguments exemplify the flaws of
parsimony in ethical theorizing. We should not confine our ethical
principles to the minimum set needed to generate intuitively
acceptable outcomes, for ethical principles playexpressive roles
notfulfilled
by the minimum set.
"The
Ethical Limitations of the Market." Economics
and Philosophy 6 (1990):179-205.
An
alternative framework to welfare economics is
offered
for deciding whether something isproperly treated as a commodity. It is
argued that different kinds of goods are properly subject todifferent
norms of production and exchange. Some values and ideals can be
realized only bycirculating goods according to nonmarket norms--for
example, the exchange of gift values should be sensitive to the motives
and personalities of the exchangers, and the provision
of shared values should be nonexclusive. The analysis is applied to
prostitution,
marriage contracts, labor contracts, parks, schools, streets, blood,
and
in-kind welfare provisions.
"Values,
Risks, and Market Norms," Philosophy
and Public Affairs 17 (Winter
1988): 54-65.
The article criticizes
cost-benefit analysis applied to health and
safety, through a review of D. Maclean's "values at risk" and D. Nelkin
and M. Brown's "workers at risk". It is argued that cost-benefit
analysis inappropriately treats the values of life and health as
commodity values. Empirical evidence shows that workers do not regard
their health and safety in the ways which cost-benefit analysis
assumes. A democratic alternative to cost-benefit analysis is
defended.
"Is
Women's Labor a Commodity?" Philosophy
and Public Affairs 19 (1990):
71-92.
Contract parenting (commercial
surrogate motherhood) is a practice
whereby a man pays a woman to bear a child and release it to his
custody.
I argue that this practice is objectionable for the ways it treats
children and mothers' reproductive capacities as commodities.
The
market norms of contract parenting express disrespectful attitudes
toward children, in regarding them as properly created and alienated
for profit. They also undermine the autonomy of mothers by
manipulating and exploiting their feelings, while denying the claims
their feelings make on others in the event that they
decide to keep their children.
Hugh
M. Lacey and Elizabeth Anderson, "Spatial
Ontology and Physical Modalities," Philosophical
Studies 38
(1980): 261-285.
Most relational theories of
space assert both that spatial discourse
is reducible to talk about physical objects and their spatial
relations, and that the relation of congruence derives from a
non-metrical relation which intervals bear or possibly bear to
measuring instruments. We show that there are serious logical
difficulties involved in maintaining both these positions together with
the thesis of the continuity of space. We also show that Grunbaum's
motivating argument for the reduction of congruence is unsound, and,
moreover, that the prospects of formulating the kind of definition
which this reduction requires seem to rest upon a wholly vague notion
of physical possibility. Alternatively, if congruence is taken as
primitive, it seems plausible that spatial discourse can be
reconstructed so that there is no ontological commitment to spatial
objects other than physical objects.
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