Autonomy Reconsidered

It is my aim, in this paper, to illustrate the restrictive nature of the ontological assumptions that give rise to an excessive focus on autonomy characteristic of much traditional moral theory. Through a discussion of the implications of good friendship, I show that a differently-conceived, relational conception of the self can lead to reflective moral practices of a sort that is consonant with feminist concerns.Dans cet expose, mon but est d’illustrer la nature restrictive des présupposés ontologiques qui entraînent une attention excessive à l’autonomie. Cette attention à l'autonomie est typique d’une grande partie de la théorie traditionnelle de la morale. A travers une discussion au sujet des implications d’une amitié solide, je tente de montrer qu’il serait possible de formuler différemment un concept relationnel du moi, ce qui aboutirait à des pratiques morales réfléchies qui seraient en harmonie avec le point de vue féministe

Doubt and denial : epistemic responsibility meets climate change scepticism

The analysis in this essay is indebted to the analysis of climate change scepticism developed in Naomi Oreskes’s and Eric Conway’s Merchants of Doubt where they expose the vested interests that produce a degree of doubt with respect to climate change science. The argument addresses the appeal to an inflated conception of human freedom – Liberty – that is allegedly threatened by injunctions to control pollution in the interests of ecologically conscious behaviour across a range of human practices of consumption. The essay draws on and advocates rethinking issues about epistemic responsibility and testimonial injustice in working toward developing ecologically informed climate change advocacy. El análisis de este ensayo está influenciado por el análisis sobre escepticismo ante el cambio climático desarrollado por Naomi Oreskes y Eric Conway en Merchants of Doubt, donde exponen los intereses creados, que producen un grado de duda en relación a la ciencia del cambio climático. El argumento se refiere a la apelación a una concepción exagerada de la libertad humana - la Libertad - , presuntamente amenazada por medidas cautelares para controlar la contaminación en los intereses de la conducta ecológicamente consciente a través de toda una gama de prácticas humanas de consumo. El ensayo se basa en, y aboga por repensar las cuestiones acerca de la responsabilidad epistémica y defiende replantear las cuestiones acerca de la responsabilidad epistémica e injusticia testimonial en el trabajo hacia el desarrollo ecológicamente informado de la defensa del cambio climático

Care, Concern, and Advocacy: Is There a Place for Epistemic Responsibility?

Departing from an epistemological tradition for which knowledge properly achieved must be objective, especially in eschewing affect and/or special interests; and against a backdrop of my thinking about epistemic responsibility, I focus on two situations where care informs and enables good knowing. The implicit purpose of this reclamation of care as epistemically vital is to show emphatically that standard alignments of care with femininity—the female—are simply misguided. Proposing that the efficacy of epistemic practices is often enhanced when would-be knowers care about the outcomes of investigation, I suggest that epistemic responsibility need not be compromised when caring motivates and animates research. Indeed, the background inspiration comes from the thought, integral to feminist and post-colonial theory and practice that, despite often-justified condemnations of research that serves "special interests," particularities do matter, epistemically. Such thoughts, variously articulated, are integral to enacting a shift in epistemology away from formal abstraction and toward engaging with the specificities of real-world, situated knowledge projects. They are not unequivocally benign, for villains too care about the outcomes of their projects. Hence multi-faceted engagements with epistemic practices and processes are urgently required across the social-political world

Knowing Responsibly, Thinking Ecologically: Response to Panelists

In this final paper in the invited collection, Lorraine Code responds to panelists and provides background and reflections on her work

Feminist antecedents?: Mary Whiton Calkins\u27 project for a scientific psychology

This presentation is part of the Researching Sex Differences: Feminist Critiques and their Antecedents track. In this paper I will develop a feminist analysis of Mary Whiton Calkins’s project for a scientific psychology in her work on self-psychology. There are good reasons for philosophers to read Calkins as a colleague and proto-feminist, for her first academic position was in the Philosophy Department at Wellesley College, when psychology was still regarded as a subfield of philosophy. She was required to prepare for this position by studying psychology for a year; but throughout her professional life her concern with philosophy was a continuing and increasingly prominent thread. Remarkable in a discipline that has had so few women presidents, Calkins was elected president of the American Philosophical Association in 1918, thirteen years after being elected president of the American Psychological Association, in 1905. Several aspects of Calkins’s work are illuminating for the epistemological, ethical, and political research of present-day feminist and other hitherto marginalized philosophers, especially in the philosophy of the social sciences. Her opposition to the behaviourist conviction that “the self” was so ephemeral a concept and so perniciously metaphysical a construct that it had no place in a properly scientific psychology, is continuous, if variously, with feminist and other post-colonial philosophers’ dissatisfaction with the presumptive abstract masculinity of the invisible subject of the philosophical mainstream. Epistemologically, the position she opposes presages Karl Popper’s efforts to eliminate the knowing subject in his “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject,” in order to affirm and preserve its putatively asocial and apolitical - hence maximally objective - nature. Calkins would have opposed such a project as vigorously as she opposed efforts to expel the self-aware experiencing subject from experimental psychology. In a response to sex-difference research which anticipates the challenge Carol Gilligan presented to Lawrence Kohlberg in the 1970s and 1980s, Calkins charged that experimental “results” represent male-female differences in observations and understandings that are more the products of environmental than of “natural” differences: that the gender specificity in cognitive abilities sex difference researchers claim to have demonstrated is discerned on the basis of a failure to take the constitutive effects of social-cultural-environmental factors into account in experimental design: factors that silently prompt certain responses in women, and others in men, and tell in favour of stereotype-confirming readings of the results. Had the selves/subjectivities and the constitutive parts played by their “situations”, in Donna Haraway’s sense, been more visible in their multiple modalities, the conclusions might also have been different, rather as the moral judgements of Gilligan’s subjects were opened to reassessment with respect to the levels of moral maturity they evinced once she began to engage critically with the research apparatus that informed the context of discovery, and to reexamine the presuppositions that had contributed to the design of the Kohlberg scale as a putatively impartial measure of moral maturity. My intention is not to conflate Calkins’s reclaiming recognition for “the self” with current feminist commitments to taking subjectivity into account. Yet her “self-psychology” is animated by a realization specific to her time that, as she puts it, “The self is bowed out of psychology on the ground that scientific introspection has failed to discover it”. It is this eradication of the self that she seeks to reverse. Hence, I will read her arguments for “the self” together with Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking about self and subjectivity, and in light of Michèle Le Dœuff’s insistence that “there is no intellectual activity that is not grounded in an imaginary”, where she emphasizes the power of an instituted imaginary to legitimate or silence certain readings of empirical “data” in diagnostic-genealogical investigations - for example - of how an entrenched conception of the male-female distinction has functioned in shaping understandings of selves, subjectivities, and relative intellectual and moral competence. Research into sex-gender differences, like most other research, is to a great extent (borrowing Foucault’s terms) “a function of what a given society defines as thinkable”. Calkins’s work was of her time and place, and shaped by what her society defined as thinkable; but in significant ways she broke away from those confines to open the way to innovative and provocative inquiry. She was both of and ahead of her time