Abstracts of Selected Publications by Elizabeth Anderson

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 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.

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.
 

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.

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 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.

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.

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 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.

   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.

 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.

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.

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.

   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.

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.

Back to my vita.
Back to my homepage.