It seems that there is at least one sphere where one has almost unlimited control: oneself. If anything is up to one to decide, who one is is up to oneself. I suggest in this paper that even this control is beyond us. There are important ways in which one¡¯s identity¡ªconsidered as true answers to the ¡°who are you?¡± question¡ªis constrained by the larger social context. In particular, I argue that one¡¯s identity is metaphysically determined and existentially constrained by social practices. First, I distinguish between two types of identity: metaphysical identity and existential identity. Metaphysical identity encompasses social categories such as race, gender, and occupation. I argue that metaphysical identity is socially constructed such that societal norms and practices make it the case that one has the traits that constitute metaphysical identity. Existential identity, by contrast, relates to an individual¡¯s deep commitments and values. Although one has much more control over one¡¯s existential identity, this, too, faces socially-imposed limitations. In particular, existential identity is constrained by available hermeneutical resources. I conclude by exploring the ethical implications of this analysis of individual identity.

After his well-known study on Speech Acts, which stands in the tradition of Wittgenstein and Austin, Searle turned to the topic of Intentionality. According to the intersubjetivistic critics of this turn such as Apel and Habermas, he fell back on that former standpoint which had come under suspicion since Wittgenstein and Austin, and which his own speech act theory had helped to overcome; the focus of his thinking is now solitary consciousness. While Searle denies that there is any break between Speech Acts and Intentionality, Schmid suggests that Searle¡¯s path from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind initially only skipped a middle link which he later delivered with his philosophy of the social. Consequently, Searle¡¯s social ontology will decide whether he is able to parry his critics¡¯ reproach of having given away the dimension of the intersubjective. I will argue, however, that a more fine-grade distinction needs to be made here: on one hand, Searle is indeed not able to parry the said reproach, but on the other hand he does not even attempt to do so. Despite or even because of his social ontology, Apel and Habermas are right in their assumption. The concept of the social is not a necessary condition for that of the mental, as can be seen in Searle¡¯s view of individual intentionality, but conversely the concept of the mental is a necessary condition for that of the social. Schmid is therefore wrong; in Searle¡¯s view, individual intentionality is solitary consciousness.

This paper develops an Arendtian-inspired notion of ¡°civic care¡± that offers an alternative normative account of what should bring citizens together politically. Unlike consensual approaches, ¡°civic care¡± stresses that a proper political bond should be able to get citizens to collaborate to solve collective action problems, but without marginalizing the conflictive character of politics. At the same time, ¡°civic care¡± differs from accounts of the political bond that rely on appeals to patriotism, compassion, or love of a ¡°people.¡± By building on Arendt¡¯s notions of amor mundi and ¡°civic friendship,¡± this paper argues that ¡°civic care¡± does not involve any direct or natural connection to fellow citizens. Instead, it entails a worldly type of bond. Likewise, it argues that addressing the question of how we can be bonded across our political differences is crucial in our polarized times because modern democracies face what Arendt understood as the greatest threat: ¡°worldlessness.¡± In the last section, the paper addresses the motivational challenge regarding how citizens can be brought to show ¡°civic care.¡± It argues that the task of reconstituting agonistic polities requires taking into consideration the interdependencies in our behaviors, and specifically, the sources of motivation related to our social nature.

In our lives we regularly give and rely on testimony about other¡¯s moral characters. We might, for example, chat about a visitor¡¯s kindness, or commiserate with friends by admonishing a deceitful politician. In this essay, I provide an account of this social practice which I call moral gatekeeping. The analogy of a gatekeeper highlights how we both bar others from and invite them into the moral community when we gatekeep. I define moral gatekeeping as follows: Communication to at least one member of the moral community of a reason¡ªor reasons¡ªto reconsider or reaffirm their view of the moral character of an individual, group of individuals, or social group, in the moral community. Moral gatekeeping has three fundamental components: a shared reason, a recipient, and a gatekeeper. After describing them, I defend moral gatekeeping against the concern that it stymies moral progress by: (1) highlighting gatekeeping¡¯s intrinsic and instrumental moral value, and (2) arguing that abandoning gatekeeping entails abandoning forgiveness. Moral gatekeeping is a fundamental social practice that cannot be rejected; its ethic concerns not whether, but when and how we gatekeep. I conclude with a brief discussion of when and how we should gatekeep.

This paper explores the relationship between anger and flourishing in light of structural injustice. Even when anger is an appropriate response to structural injustice, it can carry significant personal cost. In non-ideal circumstances, anger may be morally required even though it detracts from personal flourishing. Drawing on Lisa Tessman¡¯s work, I argue that anger at structural injustice, even if we are not among those against whom the injustice is directed, can be a burdened virtue. I extend Tessman¡¯s analysis to show how burdened virtues can arise in response to particularly structural injustices, and explicitly note additional burdens that can arise in such instances.

Many theories of moral responsibility include some sort of knowledge condition. If an agent lacks full knowledge of what they are doing, the harm it is causing, or that what they are doing is wrong, that agent is either excused or in some way less responsible for their wrongdoing. In this paper, I argue that this kind of knowledge condition is not only mistaken but also importantly problematic: it overlooks the ways in which society¡¯s expectations and demands of attention and knowledge are gendered.

Several philosophical accounts of homelessness have emerged in recent years. These include care-based approaches and liberal approaches. Bart van Leeuwen (2018) has argued liberal approaches face what has been called the ¡°minimalist charge,¡± which holds such accounts will fail to justify robust policy responses aimed at addressing homelessness. Katy Wells (2022) raises concerns with care-based approaches, arguing that they fail to respect the autonomy of people experiencing homelessness by assimilating them into a category of people with diminished autonomy. To address the issues with care-based approaches, and to avoid the minimalist concern, Wells introduces her own autonomy-based approach. In this paper, I argue that Wells¡¯s account is subject to the same worries she raises against care-based approaches: ultimately, it fails to properly respect the autonomy of people experiencing homelessness. Because Wells¡¯s view is externalist in nature¡ªmeaning that it makes external conditions necessary for autonomy ascription¡ªthose who lack the required conditions will have diminished autonomy. To support this claim, I draw on recent criticisms of some feminist relational accounts of autonomy, especially ones that incorporate external conditions as necessary for autonomy. I introduce an alternative conception of autonomy that overcomes the theoretical problems with Wells¡¯s account and offers some practical benefits.

This article critically re-examines the concept of belonging, which is central to understanding individual and collective forms of solidarity. Contrary to the claim that belonging to the different groups and communities should necessarily precede, and thus provide the possibility for collective solidarity, I propose revising this paradigm by highlighting the role of asymmetricity, affectivity, and seriality in the constitution of an alternative account of collective solidarity. Additionally, despite separately analyzing and delineating contours of these alternative components of collective solidarity, my argument is that asymmetricity and affectivity are integral parts of serial collective solidarity. If belonging and reciprocity characterize social and civil forms of solidarity, and are embedded in the structure of group identification, a political solidarity presupposes asymmetricity and affective network of dissimilar subjects, which subsequently results in emergence of serial collective solidarity. The purpose of this conceptual clarification is to better understand the nature and structure of solidarity. The article argues that solidarizing, either individually or collectively, does not necessarily require symmetric esteem and group belongingness.

The field of transitional justice¡ªconcerned as it is with the mechanisms of recovery from societal conflict and mass violence¡ªhas long found its de facto home in legal theory. While this is in many respects a natural pairing, I argue that just as transitional justice has expanded in scope from the regime-change paradigm to general situations of human rights violations, so too should our conception of it expand from the purely legalistic to the more explicitly ethical. This paper makes the case that while transitional justice remains undertheorized along ethical dimensions, increased attention to both the ethical underpinnings of justice interventions and the ability of ethical work to center the individual experience might go a great distance towards addressing what Pablo de Greiff has identified as three of the chief challenges facing transitional justice today: insufficient attention to context, formulism, and technocratic tendencies.

Democracies face an epistemic crisis: incentivizing bullshit. Here ¡°bullshit¡±¡ªcoined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt¡ªmeans convincing truth-insensitive statements or claims. This paper focuses on several democratic factors that incentivize bullshit: deliberative transparency, epistemic spillover effects, and rational irrationality. These factors pollute the epistemic commons, decrease institutional trust, and enact epistemic injustice. Unfortunately, it is difficult to separate democratic governance from incentivizing bullshit.

Robert Nozick is most prominently known as the hero of the anti-taxation movement and chief libertarian. However, in his later writings he introduced a rule that could justify estate taxation of up to 100 percent, the subtraction rule. This paper shows that this subtraction rule is not only compatible with the core pillars of his entitlement theory, but also necessary for self-ownership from a strictly libertarian-individualistic point of view. As such, it deals with the compatibility of such estate taxation with the historical non-patternedness of the entitlement theory as well as with the notion of self-ownership as core elements of Nozickian libertarianism. In particular, it is argued that self-ownership requires an intimate bond or explicit consent between the initial creator of an object and the current inheritor because the initial creator has poured a part of herself into the object. Where that explicit or implicit consent is not given, the transgression of the initial creator¡¯s right has to be compensated by the inheritor. That compensation is realized through estate taxation. The subtraction rule could, therefore, help combat the ever-increasing cascading of wealth through generations and provide a useful tool for a more equal distribution of wealth.

This paper¡¯s main aim is to illuminate how climate activism¡ªwhich seeks to address the collective existential crisis that is climate change¡ªuniquely intersects with the individual existential crisis that is one¡¯s own death. Addressing climate change seems to minimally require more cooperation and less environmentally unfriendly behavior. However, in virtue of the way discussions on climate change can make nature¡¯s vulnerability¡ªand, relatedly, our own mortality¡ªpsychologically salient, climate discourse is capable of engendering existential anxiety. This poses problems for climate activism, as attenuating existential anxiety often relies on forms of self-esteem striving capable of undermining cooperation and exacerbating environmentally unfriendly behavior. I take these problems to have implications for a certain style of discourse made famous by Greta Thunberg: climate shaming. Because of shame¡¯s potential to induce moral maturation/motivational revision, some take climate shaming to be a justified strategy for promoting climate activism. Yet empirical research suggests that climate shaming may often catalyze various self-esteem striving behaviors that lead to the exact opposite of climate shaming¡¯s intended effect(s). In my view, this is because of climate shaming¡¯s problematic potential to engender existential anxiety. If so, climate activists have good reason to abandon the climate shaming strategy.

Ibram X. Kendi¡¯s bestselling book How to be an Antiracist (2019) has been enormously influential and deserves the serious attention it has received. It follows his important historical work Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016), which is much more scholarly and won the National Book Award the year it came out. But these books seem to take for granted a fairly simple version of cultural relativism in ethics that is widely regarded by moral philosophers as seriously defective. I want to take these doubts further and show that cultural relativism is a disastrous theoretical choice for an anti-racist like Kendi to make. In Section I I explain the kind of relativism I have in mind: agent-based, cultural, normative ethical relativism. In Section II, using the two books I have mentioned, I give textual support to my attribution of this kind of relativism to Kendi. In Section III I argue for my theoretical-disaster claim and defend it against some Kendi-inspired criticism. In Section IV I address some serious relativist doubts about ethical universalism, the opposite of relativism. Finally, in Section V I offer some brief concluding remarks.

Can agents be duty-bound towards ends that are infeasible? Some scholars have endorsed a ¡°feasibility constraint¡± on justice and answered that we cannot be duty-bound to bring about the infeasible. In this paper, I question whether the feasibility constraint on justice should still be endorsed and whether we are duty-bound to pursue some aims regardless of this constraint. I ask: Can an ethical agent be duty-bound to work towards bringing about a state of affairs that is desirable but infeasible? I consider the climate crisis: climate justice may require us to work towards ends that may be infeasible, such as maintaining global climate warming below 1.5¡ãC or mitigating climate change in a way that treats all people affected fairly. I argue that we may be duty-bound or obliged to work towards some desirable goals when faced with the infeasible and conclude that we should reject feasibility constraints on climate justice.

What would it mean for the institutions of finance to be democratized? I explore this question from a broadly Rawlsian conception of justice. In the first part of the paper I outline Rawls¡¯s theory of justice. In the second part I briefly review what Rawls had to say about justice in the economic sphere. Notably, he thought that his conception of justice can only be realized in either ¡°Property-Owning Democracy¡± or ¡°Liberal Socialism.¡± I briefly explore the nature of these two ¡°regimes,¡± before turning my attention to the institutions of finance, and in particular banking. In the third part I discuss the role of finance in contemporary liberal democracies, the social and political power that private banks are endowed with in such societies, and what problems this engenders from the perspective of justice. In the fourth part I argue that, among other things, the democratization of finance would entail wide dispersal of power and control over decisions about finance and investment. In the fifth and final part of the paper, I argue that there are reasons to believe that both of Rawls¡¯s just economic regimes would fail with respect to the distribution of power and control in the economy.

In this article, we explore two related questions. First, under what conditions, if any, can a Black person trust a white person to be a reliable ally in the context of a society founded on racial slavery? Second, under what conditions, if any, can a Black person trust a white person to be a reliable ally in the context of a white supremacist society? We follow Karen Jones and Nancy Nyquist Potter in arguing that allies must not only be competent, conscientious, and accurately self-assess their epistemic capacities, but they must also signal their trustworthiness in advance to those who would trust them. Furthermore, we argue based on our readings of the slave narratives of Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass that allies must display social awareness of the social context that they share with those who would trust them and the power dynamics involved in that social context.

American media is very quick to ask victims of anti-Black violence if they forgive their victimizers. The media¡¯s nearly reflexive framing is a symptom of the broader, cultural demand that Black victims grant for?giveness for racist violence. Reading Juliet Hooker and Myisha Cherry, this paper links the current preponderance of such demand for forgiveness to a demand for apology in America¡¯s lynching tradition. Drawing from Sonya Renee Taylor, Ida B. Wells, and Frederick Douglass, I give a history to both kinds of normative demands and show how, though they appear as seem?ing contraries, demands for forgiveness and apology function together as methods of anti-Black violence. I then draw from work in transformative justice to differentiate the perspectives of asking, giving, and demanding forgiveness. When understood through the perspective of victims, a cer?tain kind of embodied forgiveness can have liberatory potential. However, observers¡¯ demands for forgiveness too often function as a method of racial oppression.

While the principles of reproductive justice are generally agreed upon in progressive reproductive political circles, other theoretical frameworks such as reparative justice can further foster the goals of the movement. In the literature, however, reparative justice has been insufficiently explored as it relates to reproductive injustice. My concern in this essay is therefore the development of conceptual architecture for understanding reproductive justice as reparative in nature. A reparative approach to reproductive ethics importantly takes up the demand to situate reproduction within ongoing historical and sociopolitical contexts. It makes transpar?ent the harms generated by an oppressive social order and the depths to which conditions must change for reproductive justice to emerge. To construct the relationship between reparative and reproductive justice, I employ Olu?femi Ta?i?wo?¡¯s constructivist view of reparations as an ongoing, generative, and ultimately world-building project. For, if reproductive justice is about developing enabling conditions wherein folks can control their birthing options and parent in safe and healthy environments, then a constructivist reparative approach is necessary¡ªone which takes seriously the accumulative harms of history and their relation to transforming social structures in the present.

Standard accounts of misinformation require that it is either false or misleading, in the sense that it leads people to false beliefs. But many examples of misinformation involve true information that leads people to true beliefs. So, I propose a new theory of misinformation: misinformation is information that is epistemically harmful in the sense that it is disposed to reduce the overall quality of a subject¡¯s epistemic position. This includes not only causing the subject to form a false belief, but also causing the subject to form beliefs that are otherwise epistemically deficient or to abandon or reduce confidence in epistemically good beliefs.This account improves on standard accounts in two ways. First, it more closely matches intuitive judgments about what counts as misinformation, including cases of failed deception and information that is spread without regard for its truth. Second, it provides a natural account of what is wrong with spreading misinformation: it contributes to an epistemically hostile environment in which we are more likely to become epistemically worse off when we gather more information.

Social scientists have observed a sharp rise in affective polar?ization in many societies, particularly the United States. Since it is widely agreed that this poses a threat to democracy, finding solutions to this predicament is essential. One prominent proposal to depolarize the elec?torate holds that citizens need to exercise their capacities for empathy with the political opposition. However, defenders of the empathy response to affective polarization have yet to fully specify the range of mechanisms through which empathy can counteract polarization. Recent proposals focus on empathy¡¯s role in finding common ground and humanizing others. Drawing on the wider empathy literature, we identify several additional ways empathy might counter affective polarization. We show that the resultant account has important implications for the sorts of empathetic engagement with cross-partisans that is likely to reduce polarization. Our aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the potential of different kinds of empathetic engagement to counter polarization as well as the limits of empathy as a response to polarization.

Simone de Beauvoir remarks that women have trouble articulating a ¡°we¡± together; this foible of language is connected to our unwillingness to claim our subjectivity, and to our ability to say ¡°I¡± in ordinary conversation. The corresponding political difficulty is that the ¡°we¡± of a non-exclusionary women¡¯s solidarity and revolution seems almost impossible to imagine. Luce Irigaray¡¯s paradigm of between-women-talk, best designated as talk amongst women and non-cis-men, offers a way of reforming the language required: a Platonic participation where desire beyond purpose is the only qualification, with #MeToo being one imperfect conversational example. Interrogating our reluctance and hesitation at the possibilities of this conversation makes our need for the language of mutually reinforcing subjectivity clear.

The medicalization of mental health remains a point of contention for bioethicists, especially as it concerns the epistemic capabilities of those diagnosed with an illness or disorder. Gosselin (2019) argues that biomedicalization commits epistemic injustices against these persons and consequently entraps them in a ¡°cycle of vulnerability¡±; in response, she proposes principles of justice to defend them from such affronts. This paper builds off of her work and responds particularly to the demand for a ¡°sociocentric view of the self as essentially relational.¡± I present a theory of interdependent agency and affiliation that I contend conceptually bolsters her normative principles. I explain how an expanded use of relational epistemologies, united with a non-ideal theory of mental health, can enrich our hermeneutical resources with respect to those with mental illnesses/disorders. My account introduces normative considerations premised on interdependency, most notably from care theory. Concepts such as vulnerability, relational autonomy, attentiveness, and responsiveness ground a relationally-situated approach that (1) improves the epistemic positionalities of patients, (2) informs more suitable dynamics of care/treatment, and (3) unites groups of mutually interested actors against harm and injustice. I thus use a framework of care to promote affiliations of similarly disadvantaged persons under shared causes and initiatives. I refer to these assemblages as ¡°caring affinity networks.¡±

Epistemic injustice is defined by Miranda Fricker as injustice done to people specifically in their capacities as knowers. Fricker argues that this injustice can be either testimonial or hermeneutical in character. A hearer commits testimonial injustice against a speaker by assigning unfairly little credibility to the speaker¡¯s testimony. Hermeneutical injustice exists in a society when the society lacks the concepts necessary for members of a group to understand their social experiences. We argue that epistemic injustice is necessary to permit the functioning of race-based chattel slavery and that this necessity is illustrated in slave narratives. The testimonies of slave narratives like those of Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Mary Prince identify and transform a culture of race-based epistemic hermeneutic and testimonial injustice. Through telling their stories, these agents establish their capacity as knowers and thus resist the epistemic injustice that undergirds the oppressive system of race-based chattel slavery. The authors of slave narratives not only identify race-based epistemic injustice, but actively fight against it.

The Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA) of harm holds that event e harms subject S when e makes S worse off than S would have been without e occurring. In this paper, I argue that CCA is unattractive because it entails that someone who willingly makes monetary reparations harms himself. I explain why I find this entailment unattractive. I then acknowledge that my intuition about the unattractiveness of this entailment might simply be mistaken, so I offer an argument for the claim that willingly making reparations is not a form of self-harm. I argue that willingly making reparations is not harmful to the person who makes them because losing an unjust advantage does not harm. I then consider some objections against my argument and respond to them. Although I concede that some of these objections do more damage to my argument than others, I conclude that CCA is at least prima facie unattractive for the reasons I give and that, at bare minimum, someone who does not think that willingly making reparations harms the maker and/or that losing an unjust advantage is harmful to the person who loses it could not consistently accept any of the formulations of CCA that I consider in this paper.

Feminists are divided on whether consent should be employed in legal definitions of rape. Catharine MacKinnon has criticized the usefulness of consent in enabling legal systems to recognize and prosecute instances of rape (MacKinnon 1989, 2005, 2016). In a recent article in this journal, Lisa H. Schwartzman defends the use of affirmative consent in rape law against MacKinnon¡¯s critique (Schwartzman 2019). In contrast to MacKinnon, Schwartzman claims our understanding of rape must include both force and consent components. In this paper, I will argue in agreement with Schwartzman and against MacKinnon that the legal definition of rape should include an affirmative consent component. I will take Schwartzman¡¯s discussion as my point of departure and consider whether she has responded adequately to MacKinnon¡¯s criticisms of consent. I will argue that her responses are not fully adequate. In particular, she has not successfully rebutted the argument that an appeal to consent is unnecessary once we have accepted an expanded definition of coercion. I will then provide a more affirmative defense of affirmative consent in response to MacKinnon¡¯s most challenging criticism.

I argue that resistance violence is physical force carried out by members of politically vulnerable groups. It is not reducible to self-defense because it does not always involve protecting the life of the actor but, instead, is an expression of establishing one¡¯s dignity and humanity. Applied to women as a vulnerable class in the face of sexual violence, this article looks at a case study of an enslaved teenager named Celia who killed her owner in order to end his sexual abuse. Various philosophies of epistemic injustices (including Fricker, Pohlhaus, Medina, Dotson, Mills, and Card) establish that socially/politically dominant groups help create a context in which compartmentalization, active ignorance, and inconsistencies contribute to the conditions in which marginalized groups reside in spaces of little to no protection from the state. As such, resistance violence emerges as a legitimate option. Selective epistemic attention that fails to contextualize resistance violence supports unjust systems.

I argue that communities have a moral responsibility to repair and prevent moral damage that some survivors of domestic violence may experience. This responsibility is grounded in those communities¡¯ complicity in domestic violence and the moral damage that may result. Drawing on Claudia Card¡¯s work on domestic violence, I first explain two forms of moral damage that some survivors may experience. These are: 1) normative isolation, or abusive environments that are marked by distorted moral standards about the abuse itself, and 2) coerced self-betrayal, the coercive entrapment of the survivor¡¯s agency, emotions, and beliefs to express the will of the abuser. Though the abuser is always the primary cause of abuse, I argue that survivors¡¯ communities can contribute to a climate that facilitates domestic violence by, for instance, sustaining harmful norms about gender roles, shaming survivors, protecting abusers, and not wanting to interrupt ¡°private matters.¡± When this complicity exists, I argue that communities have a moral responsibility to create structures that repair and prevent moral damage from domestic violence. Finally, I sketch out some practical considerations for building these structures. These involve creating violence-resistant communities that protect survivors, hold abusers accountable, and help survivors reclaim their agencies.

This article is a discussion of the rabble in the context of Hegel¡¯s Philosophy of Right. The article will progress as follows: First, I present how Hegel discusses the formation of a rabble and consider Michael Allen¡¯s and James Bohman¡¯s arguments regarding the domination inherent in Hegel¡¯s theory. Next, I critique Joel Anderson¡¯s ¡°Hegelian¡± solution to the problem of the rabble. Finally, I show that the rabble are precisely the ¡°class¡± that Marx needs to bring about change in the organization of society. Interestingly, there is a surprising similarity between Hegel¡¯s discussion of the rabble and justified disobedience and the Marxism of Huey P. Newton.

This paper traces the history of accelerationism as a political philosophy, from its inception at Warwick University to its deployment by avowed white supremacists. Probing its philosophical commitment to a both a deterministic philosophy of history and a sacrificial logic of politics, I argue that even the initial elaborations of (non-race-based) accelerationism contained the seed of its development into violent white supremacy. The conclusion assesses a politics of deceleration as a strategy for countering accelerationism, ultimately arguing for the superiority of a Benjaminian politics of the emergency brake.

Sally Haslanger offers the following concept of ¡°woman¡±: If one is perceived as being biologically female and, in that context, one is subordinated owing to the background ideology, then one ¡°functions¡± as a woman (2012b, 235). An implication of this account is that if someone is not regarded by others as their self-identified gender, they do not function as that gender socially. Therefore, one objection to this ascriptive account of gender is that it wrongly undermines the gender identities of some trans people. In this paper, I will argue that Haslanger¡¯s definition can be defended against this objection and that her account inevitably aids in liberatory efforts not only for cisgender women, but for all sexual and gender minorities. While Katharine Jenkins¡¯s dual account of gender aims to rectify this objection (2016, 407), I will point out two important problems with her argument: ¡°the inclusion dilemma¡± and ¡°the abolition problem.¡± Finally, I will argue that Haslanger¡¯s account of gender is preferable to Jenkins¡¯s because it outlines the reality of gender as an oppressive, hierarchical system whose categories ought to be dismantled.

In Kate Manne¡¯s theory of misogyny, women¡¯s behavior is surveilled (by men and other women) so that they conform to gendered norms of behavior and care, and they are threatened or punished when they refuse to abide by norms. I seek here to extend her argument about surveillance to norms around masculinity, and to demonstrate the ways in which surveillance actually runs throughout the gendered economy of care. I assess the impacts of this surveillance (particularly on men of color, who identify as gay or trans, or who are immigrants or religious minorities), and argue that misogyny and masculinity are inextricably interlinked and mutually reinforcing phenomena, that must be simultaneously demystified for progress towards gender equity.

I argue that men can be oppressed by virtue of being men; however, our definitions of men and masculinity must be redefined and reclaimed from the dominant white perspective. My claims are: (1) current arguments on the oppression of men simpliciter are misguided as they fail to encompass the experiences of all men; (2) any question regarding the oppression of men must reject the current static and universal definition of men; (3) the oppression of men is an instantiation of structural oppression that allows for men to be both privileged and oppressed in different, forms, degrees, and dimensions; (4) the oppression of Latino men qua Latino men is an example of men being oppressed as men. Therefore, (5) we must redefine and reclaim the definition of ¡°men¡± and ¡°masculinity.¡± Last, (6) this redefinition cannot be done a priori but must use intersectionality as a regulative method to illuminate the oppression of men that remains obscured in other, one-dimensional approaches to the topic of the oppression of men.

This essay treats divergent conceptions of ¡°respectability politics¡± as a question of conceptual ethics. Influential discussions of respectability politics in the public sphere have centered on disagreements about tactics and strategies for liberation. But entwined within this discourse one can find a parallel effort to decide which conception of ¡°respectability politics¡± will best serve the current moment of struggle. Should we accept its newer normative meaning, where it is used to condemn political tactics that ask African-Americans and members of other marginalized groups to seem nonthreatening and morally acceptable to oppressors? Or should stakeholders work to preserve the descriptive meaning of the concept¡ªthe one introduced by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Righteous Discontent, 1993) to identify late-Ninenteeth century tactics of moral self-discipline that were sometimes elitist, but were also often progressive, rebellious, and pro-working class? The conceptual choice invites us to ask which social realities should be picked out by the phrase ¡°respectability politics¡± and how to judge the different ways normative and descriptive conceptions function within our political lives. In this essay I offer criteria for adjudicating between the negative-normative and the complex-descriptive conceptions of respectability politics and I consider the whether or not they can be reconciled.

Most individuals desire a more egalitarian society but figuring out what that would mean and how to get there is unclear. Elizabeth Anderson¡¯s relational egalitarianism is one approach to understanding what building a more egalitarian society would mean; this article will agree with her analysis but will highlight how, in attempting to achieve that goal, some serious issues arise. Specifically, Anderson mentions that a consequence of her view would be the elimination of ¡°outcasts¡± as a status of social groups and how this leads to a tension between promoting social relationships as a primary good and respecting autonomy and privacy. This article will attempt to navigate this tension by providing a close analysis of how outcasts are created and clearly articulating how the elimination of such a group status creates the aforementioned tension. The upshot of the analysis is a sketch of a positive proposal that avoids the tension and makes progress toward the elimination of outcasts as a social group.

In this article I engage Susan Brison¡¯s ¡°What¡¯s Consent Got to Do with It?¡± by offering multiple contributions regarding the limitations of the language and culture of consent. I begin by briefly appreciating what consent reveals to us morally about the harms of nonconsensual sex. I then offer five points regarding the language and culture of consent: (1) Conceptualizing rape as nonconsensual sex hides from view the moral harm of having one¡¯s will subjugated by another. (2) The framework of consent renders women¡¯s desires insignificant and invisible. (3) Epistemic gaslighting represents one major and underappreciated form of epistemic injustice that consent-based views of rape propagate. (4) Consent-centered accounts of sexual violence impede our ability to imagine better sexual futures. And (5) consent not only functions to normalize gender-based violence but also to normalize other forms of violence, such as those that erupt in light of race, ability, nationality, weight, and age.

What are we doing when we see rape as nonconsensual sex? What does this prevent us from seeing¡ªand doing? On my account, the harm of rape¡ªto the victim and to others¡ªis not adequately captured by calling it ¡°sex without consent.¡± If we want, first, to understand how rape harms its direct and its indirect victims and, second, to eradicate rape, or at least change the culture so that rape is less prevalent, the question ¡°Did she consent to his doing this to her on that occasion?¡± may not be the most important question, or even a very helpful question, to ask, and focusing on it exclusively may be counterproductive. Defining rape as ?sex without consent? or ?nonconsensual sex? is, I argue, not only politically ineffective as an anti-rape strategy. It also constitutes an epistemic injustice against rape survivors who attempt to bear witness to the politically significant incessant and ubiquitous occurrence of male gender-based violence against women, which is something much larger than any one thing that was done to any one of them without their consent.

What makes anger an appropriate response to systemic injustice? Let us assume that it cannot merely be its positive effects. That is, sometimes we should be angry even when getting angry is bound to make things worse. What makes such anger appropriate? According to Amia Srinivasan (2017), counterproductive anger is only apt if it passes a necessary condition that I call the Matching Constraint: one¡¯s personal reason for getting angry must match the fact that justifies their anger. When the Matching Constraint is satisfied, anger can be an intrinsically worthwhile way of affectively appreciating injustice. I argue that the Matching Constraint is incorrect. More precisely, I take issue with its status as a necessary condition on apt anger. Anger can be an apt response to injustice even when it fails to be a form of affective appreciation. Often enough, one does not know why they are angry, or one is not angry for the reason that justifies their anger. For all that, it may still be appropriate for them to be angry. After presenting several cases of apt anger that fail the Matching Constraint, I suggest an alternative standard for aptness based on the general function of anger in our psychology. On my view, anger is apt when and because it alerts one, however coarsely or crudely, to threats against one¡¯s values.

In ¡°Communication Breakdown: Probing the Limits of Narrative Medicine and its Discontents¡± (2019), David J. Leichter engages practical experience teaching medical ethics in the college classroom to explore opportunities¡ªand limits¡ªof narrative engagement within medical ethics and clinical practice. Leichter raises concerns regarding potential epistemic harms, both testimonial and hermeneutical, when individuals, or their pain, cannot be adequately recognized through expressive modes traditionally understood as ¡°narrative.¡± While I largely agree with Leichter¡¯s worries about narrative authority and limits, I challenge his characterization of ¡°narrative medicine.¡± In response, I suggest that ¡°narrative medicine¡± is more than merely narrative engagement in medicine. As theorized by Rita Charon (2001, 2006), ¡°narrative medicine¡± involves an inclusive approach to what narrative is, and more than mere mastery of ¡°narrative competency.¡± I argue that at least one way to conceptualize ¡°narrative medicine¡± is as a technical term, which refers to the process of attention, representation, and affiliation Charon develops as the achievement of narrative medicine. When understood in this technical way, narrative medicine can both resist and respond to the kinds of epistemic harms about which Leichter is rightfully worried.

When feminist movements develop intersectional analyses of the problems they are addressing, especially to include race and class as well as other dimensions of society, their analyses of sexism will shift, and their demands will as a result become more structural, systemic, and radical. This paper will focus primarily on sexual harassment, with the understanding that harassment often escalates to coercive sex. I will argue that the future of the #MeToo movement not only should become more radical, but it must in order to achieve its own stated objectives of decreasing sexual harassment, assault and violence, given the significance of their institutional support systems and the fact that the highest incidence of sexual harassment is among low-wage workers. There are important issues of philosophical methodology involved in this shift. Including race and class alongside gender from the start means that considerations of ¡°inclusion¡± cannot come in only after the central concepts and paradigms are created.

In this response to Linda Alcoff, I argue that her theory of power, influenced strongly by Michel Foucault, is central to understanding more clearly the political potential of liberatory social movements, as well as the threats against them. I argue that conceptualizing power as diffuse and ubiquitous is necessary to challenging unjust social structures, and that those defending those structures are invested in a binary conceptualization of power. Refusing such a binary conceptualization allows for an understanding of institutions and movements as both embedded in and potentially challenging power dynamics; it is also a requirement for intersectional analyses such as Alcoff¡¯s.

In this paper, I explore the significance of an intersectional lens when it comes to our conversations surrounding the #MeToo movement, in particular the way that such a lens helps us in recognizing narratives of sexual assault and harassment that are not typically viewed as such. The mainstream discourse on #MeToo in the United States has been quite exclusionary when it comes to women who are non-dominantly situated within societal structures. In particular, this paper looks at how Muslim American women¡¯s issues surrounding sexual assault and harassment are presented as exotic and a function of their religion and culture, further narrowing what is considered worthy of attention within the discourse of the #MeToo movement. I argue that one such instance of sexual harassment that isn¡¯t seen as such, is hijab snatching within particular contexts. Furthermore, I argue that a lack of an intersectional lens results in not only privileging certain harmful voices under the guise of inclusivity, but even when invaluable voices are allowed to enter mainstream discourse, they are often the sort that sidestep issues of Western imperialistic practices, Islamophobia, racialization of Muslims, etc. I highlight the dangers of speaking for others, especially in ways that attribute sexual violence experienced by Muslim women to their cultures and/or their men. I argue that acknowledging these dangers is in itself a crucial part of an inclusive conversation on #MeToo.

Although there is much discussion in scientific and law journals regarding direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTCGT), there is a paucity of philosophical-ethical examination of how such services threaten to repeat the essentialist, racial-projects of the past. On the one hand, testing for ancestry can be cathartic: for those lacking familial history as to when and how they came to be where they are, DTCGT can offer powerful access to their lineage and identity-formation. On the other hand, DTCGT inevitably reinscribes problematic epistemologies of race¡ªeven when the companies claim that their tests can be tools to combat white supremacy. Tracing the roots of biological essentialism back to Aristotle, through the invention of raza as cocreator of modernity, and up to critical race theories today, provides a strong foundation to examine the nascent race-thinking underlying DTCGT. Borrowing heavily from Paul Taylor and Charles Mills, but also enlisting scholars from other disciplines, such as Ifeoma Ajunwa (law), Alondra Nelson (sociology), and Troy Duster (genetics), provides the broad scope necessary for thoughtful, agile engagement of that which is ameliorative, unethical, and even dangerous¡ªfor all of us¡ªin the age of 23andMe.

We have a complicated, sometimes contradictory, perception of the use of political violence. This article discusses the possible legitimacy of a particular kind, referred to as ¡°resistance violence,¡± or violence carried out by vulnerable targeted social groups. After providing distinctions regarding who, when, and why resistance violence happens, this article considers two examples that highlight different factors. By considering the work of various philosophers including Locke, Arendt, Fanon, and Fricker, this article proposes two theses: first, that epistemic contextualization requires that the legitimacy of resistance violence always be evaluated with the understanding that vulnerable social groups often reside outside the parameters of legal/criminal/judicial protection. And, second, that resistance violence is a politically legitimate option and need not promise practical success to be worth pursuing due to the fact that resistance actors often see violence as establishing their dignity and humanity.

This paper argues that liberal states are wrong to forcibly separate through deportation the unauthorized immigrant parents of member children and that states must therefore regularize such unauthorized immigrants. While most arguments for regularization focus on how deportation wrongs the unauthorized immigrants themselves, I ground my argument in how deportation wrongs the state¡¯s members, namely the unauthorized immigrants¡¯ member children. Specifically, forced separation through deportation wrongs affected children by violating a basic right to sustain the intimate relationships with their parents on which they rely for their development into fully autonomous agents.

The term ¡°Native Hawaiian¡± is often used to refer to the indigenous people of the Hawaiian islands; however, the term is itself non-Hawaiian, as is its pronunciation. The K¨¡naka Maoli, the ¡°true or real persons,¡± are the indigenous people of Ka Pae ¡®?ina O Hawai¡®i (the Hawaiian archipelago). After living for centuries in these islands as a sovereign people, with a relationship to the land that is both familial and reciprocal, the last Hawaiian government was overthrown in 1893 with the help of military personnel from the United States of America. Five years after the overthrow the USA annexed the islands, in spite of clear and overwhelming opposition by the K¨¡naka Maoli. In 1959 the majority of non-Hawaiian residents of Hawai¡®i voted in the affirmative for statehood. The aim of this article is to show that the overthrow of the sovereign Hawaiian nation, the annexation of Hawai¡®i by the USA, and the incorporation of these islands into the USA as its fiftieth state, are both illegal and unjust. Moreover, justice requires the restoration of a sovereign Hawaiian nation.

Colorism is an enduring system of discrimination that is responsible for many continuing problems in contemporary society. This social phenomenon which allocates social privilege or lack thereof to individuals based on skin color is often reduced to an extension of racism. The present paper argues that colorism is not always reducible to an extension of racism. I proceed as follows. First, I acknowledge the difficulty of distinguishing between colorism and racism due to their modes of discrimination and the operative concepts which inform them. Next, I explore the instances where colorism appears in the absence of racism. Finally, I underscore the importance of being responsibly critical of our interpretations of the social context through an example of how the social context in Mexico is misinterpreted and leads to a mistaken claim about the colorism appearing interpedently of racism. Our social contexts should shape any efforts to mitigate the effects of these systems of discrimination. Therefore, wrongly interpreting our social context would lead us to deploying inadequate practices which we aim at mitigating the effects of either colorism or racism.

I argue for a conception of moral community as ¡°ethical home,¡± in which home is a hybrid public and private concept, cohered through members¡¯ complicit participation in the formation and endorsement of the community¡¯s values and practices. In this essay I present and defend three premises that comprise my argument for this conception of moral community as an ethical home. First, I make a case for why ¡°home¡± is an apt conception of moral community, defining the features of home relevant to my claim, and clarifying which connotations of home I am abandoning by modifying home to be an ¡°ethical¡± home. Second, I illustrate how when the concept of moral community is conceptualized as an ethical home, it is formed and defined by a community¡¯s practices of moral self-definition, that occur within the ethical home-making process. Third, I claim that the process of ethical home-making, through moral self-definition around cohering values and practices, renders members of an ethical home as both rights holders within the ethical home, and as having shared responsibility for their fellow ethical home members.

People who have mental illness are in particular need of what a home can provide, but they are especially vulnerable to not being in a place with a home-like environment, whether due to homelessness, incarceration, or hospitalization. At any given time, approximately 170,000 people are inpatients in psychiatric units or hospitals (NASMHPD 2017). Psychiatric hospitals are not homes, and they are not designed for long-term stay. The main purpose of the modern psychiatric hospital is to stabilize people in mental health crises, such as those who are psychotic or suicidal; hospitals are best thought of as temporary, transitional dwellings. Even though a person may only reside there for a week or a month, however, it is a crucial period of stabilization and healing. As this paper argues, practices of home-making increase epistemic and moral agency, which enables crisis stabilization, healing, and recovery. This paper examines several functions of home and shows some of the ways that patients in psychiatric hospitals try to replicate these functions in the physical space they have given their many constraints. Because practices of home-making support the goals of hospitalization, the hospital experience should be designed to encourage these practices as much as possible.

Migration often involves leaving one home and trying to build another. Normative issues abound with both aspects, however as we reflect on issues of home and migration, it is hard to go past the thought that the plight of refugees is one of the most pressing. Being a refugee might be the equivalent of being homeless in the international context. And so considering our responsibilities in relation to the homeless in our state system seems especially worthwhile, given the conference theme and the vulnerability associated with being forcibly displaced. Here I focus particularly on the plight of large-scale refugee populations fleeing violent conflict. And I am especially focused on the Syrian case, given that it currently involves the largest displaced population, though other cases will be discussed as well. I explore how we should help refugees in ways that are likely to promote the well-being of many agents that surround refugee crises. Many of these solutions may be described as development oriented. They focus on meeting a wide range of current needs of the displaced populations (such as for autonomy, work, opportunity, and community) while also preparing that population for life after conflict.

David Miller¡¯s defense of a state¡¯s presumptive right to exclude non-refugee immigrants rests on two key distinctions. The first is that immigration controls are ¡°preventative¡± and not ¡°coercive.¡± In other words, when a state enforces its immigration policy it does not coerce noncitizens into doing something as much as it prevents them from doing a very specific thing (e.g., not entering or remaining within the state), while leaving other options open. Second, he makes a distinction between ¡°denying¡± people their human rights and ¡°deterring¡± people from exercising their human rights. On this view, when those assigned to protect or fulfil human rights are also tasked with performing immigration enforcement duties, undocumented immigrants are not being denied their human rights, even when this deters them from exercising those rights. In this article, I argue that Miller¡¯s two distinctions have an implication that he might not have foreseen. Specifically, I argue that these distinctions provide ideological cover for what has come to be known as ¡°crimmigration¡± and that we have strong reasons for wanting our theory of immigration justice to reject this, even when doing so leaves open the possibility for an indirect open-borders argument.

This paper relates human rights to public health ethics and policies by discussing the nature and moral justification of human rights generally, and the right to health in particular. Which features of humanity ground human rights? To answer this question, as an alternative to agency and capabilities approaches, the paper offers the ¡°fundamental conditions approach,¡± according to which human rights protect the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. The fundamental conditions approach identifies ¡°basic health¡±¡ªthe adequate functioning of the various parts of our organism needed for the development and exercise of the fundamental capacities¡ªas the object of a human right. A human right to basic health entails human rights to the essential resources for promoting and maintaining basic health, including adequate nutrition, basic health care, and basic education. Duty bearers include every able person in appropriate circumstances, as well as governments and government agencies, private philanthropic foundations, and transnational corporations.

This paper responds to a recent challenge posed to Claudia Card¡¯s atrocity paradigm by ¡°transmuted goods,¡± or, goods which positively transmute victims of atrocity in ways which are difficult for the paradigm to explain. Whereas the legacy of Card¡¯s atrocity paradigm will surely be its demand that we hold others culpable for allowing and perpetuating systems of harm which threaten our ability to flourish, this paper suggests a way for the paradigm to incorporate transmuted goods in a manner that strengthens the paradigm¡¯s overall goal of holding people responsible for perpetuating atrocious harms. To that end, I will articulate the systematicity and transmutativity conditions of an ¡°atrocity,¡± will demonstrate how ¡°transmuted goods¡± can threaten the transmutativity condition of an atrocity (and, so, the efficacy of the atrocity paradigm as an ethical theory), and will conclude by suggesting a potential integration of transmuted goods into the atrocity paradigm to salvage the transmutativity condition for the paradigm.

This philosophical dialogue explores some of the barriers to an adequate definition of general health, encompassing physical, social, and mental/emotional well-being. Many of the putative obstacles to such a definition¡ªconcerns about subjectivity, cultural difference, marginal cases, etc.¡ªprove to be chimerical once the characters take seriously the Peircean insight that truth-claims methodologically grounded in people¡¯s lives, experiences, and conversations need not be apodictic to be useful. Drawing on Canguilhem and others, the characters critically discuss a proposed definition of health: a dynamic equilibrium by which a human being thrives in relation to its situation. Although they do not manage to resolve all of this definition¡¯s difficulties, or all of their differences, their interaction in some ways models the ongoing task of inquiry.

The childhood platitude, ¡°sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,¡± has become nothing more than wishful thinking as we prepare each new generation for the slew of hurtful words they will inevitably encounter throughout their life. The truth of the matter is, words can hurt. To discuss how this is possible, a recent surge in philosophy of language literature has had the sole focus of analyzing pejorative language, particularly slurs. From semantic content theories to deflationary accounts, there have been numerous attempts to answer the questions ¡°How can words hurt?¡± and ¡°Why do some words hurt?¡± Unfortunately, in the current discourse, the focus has been so heavily on accounting for the features of derogatory words that the accounts skip over providing for even the most basic insult, as an indirect speech act. Using an analysis of insults, I argue that there is a layer of analysis prior to any semantic content that theories regarding speech acts should include and and I present a framework for an ethicist to do such an analysis.

Legal definitions of rape traditionally required proof of both force and nonconsent. Acknowledging the difficulty of demonstrating the conjunction of force and nonconsent, many feminists argue that rape should be defined based on one element or the other. Instead of debating which of these two best defines the crime of rape, I argue that this framework is problematic, and that both force and nonconsent must be situated in a critique of social power structures. Catharine MacKinnon provides such a critique, and she reframes rape as a matter of gender inequality. However, rather than rejecting the force/nonconsent dichotomy, MacKinnon focuses exclusively on force, which she thinks can be reconceived to include inequalities. Considering the #MeToo movement and feminist efforts to use Title IX to address campus rape, I argue that the concept of consent is more flexible than MacKinnon suggests and that ¡°affirmative consent¡± can challenge this liberal model. In requiring active communication, affirmative consent shifts responsibility for rape, opens space for women¡¯s sexual agency, and allows for the transformation of rape culture. Thus, I argue that rape should be defined by the use of force, the lack of affirmative consent, or the presence of both elements.

The turn to narrative in biomedicine has been one of the most important alternatives to traditional approaches to bioethics. Rather than using ethical theories and principles to guide behavior, narrative ethics uses the moral imagination to cultivate and expand one¡¯s capacities for empathy. This paper argues that by themselves narratives do not, and cannot, fully capture the range of the illness experience. But more than that, the emphasis on narrative often obscures how dominant forms of narrative discourse often operate to marginalize those whose narratives fall outside the parameters of traditional narrative forms or whose stories are occluded by structural violence and oppression. Rather, by focusing on forms of embodiment that are irreducible to narrative discursivity, this paper highlights forms of selfhood that exist outside of the narrative self.

Does expertise have a place in ethics? As this question has been raised in moral philosophy and bioethics literatures over the past twenty years, skepticism has been a common theme, whether metaphysical (there is no such thing as ethics expertise), epistemological (we cannot know who has ethics expertise) or social-political (we should not treat anyone as having ethics expertise). Here I identify three common, contestable assumptions about ethics expertise which underwrite skepticism of one form or another: (1) a singular conception of ethics expertise constituted by a core property or unity among multiple properties, (2) equivocation of ethics expertise and ethicists¡¯ expertise, and (3) priority of moral deference as an unavoidable implication of ethics expertise. Taken separately, each assumption can have unpalatable implications for ethics expertise that make skepticism seem more attractive; taken together, the resulting picture of ethics expertise is that much worse. Each of these assumptions is vulnerable to criticism, however, and jettisoning them enables a pluralist approach to ethics expertise less prone to skepticism and better suited for the ranging functions of ethics expertise in healthcare and other contexts.

Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for most federally funded public benefits programs with few exceptions such as emergency medical assistance and nutrition assistance for women and children. This paper defends the view that a liberal society should provide greater access to undocumented immigrants to public benefits programs and responds to an important economic objection that a state should be able to prioritize the needs of its own members who contribute to these programs. This paper specifically addresses empirical and moral versions of this objection. It also distinguishes between two kinds of public benefits. Certain public benefits, such as social security, may reflect an agreed-upon distribution of public goods, to which people are entitled based on their membership or contribution. Other public benefits, such as nutrition assistance, are set aside primarily to help people based on their need. In the latter case, it is not membership or contribution, but need or which need is greater, that supplies justification for the distribution of these benefits even when resources are limited.

Most psychological literature on gaslighting focuses on it as a dyadic phenomenon occurring primarily in marriage and family relationships. In my analysis, I will extend recent fruitful philosophical engagement with gaslighting (Abramson, ¡°Turning up the Lights on Gaslighting¡± [2014]; McKinnon, ¡°Allies Behaving Badly: Gaslighting as Epistemic Injustice¡± [2017]; Ruiz, ¡°Spectral Phenomenologies¡± [2014]) by arguing that gaslighting, particularly gaslighting that occurs in more public spaces like the workplace, relies upon external reinforcement for its success. I will ground this study in an analysis of the film Gaslight, for which the phenomenon is named, and in the course of the analysis will focus on a paradox of this kind of gaslighting: it wreaks significant epistemic and moral damages largely through small, often invisible actions that have power through their accumulation and reinforcement.

This paper analyzes the Security Housing Unit in Pelican Bay State Prison as a form of weaponized architecture for the torture of prisoners and the unmaking of the world. I argue that through collective resistance, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Short Corridor have re-purposed this weaponized architecture as a tool for remaking the world by creating new, resistant and resurgent forms of social life. This collective practice of remaking of the world used the self-destructive tactic of a hunger strike to weaponize their bodies and their lives against the weaponized architecture of solitary confinement. But it also developed less spectacular, everyday practices of communication, self-expression, and community-building within a system that is designed to suppress these practices. By collectively refusing food, and by articulating the meaning and motivation of this refusal in articles, interviews, artwork, and legal documents, prisoners at Pelican Bay reclaimed and expanded their perceptual, cognitive, and expressive capacities for world-making, even in a space of systematic torture.

This paper aims at providing some insights into the philosophical tools that may help solve the huge problems of social (and environmental) justice. For that purpose, I focus on the concept of responsibility, since it could be a suitable catalyst for debate. This paper argues that we must necessarily develop an enhanced notion of responsibility and commit to it both at a social and institutional level. First, I will introduce the relation between ethics and politics¡ªnecessarily rather than contingently intertwined. I will elaborate on the concept of poliethics coined by the Spanish philosopher Francisco Fern¨¢ndez Buey. Second, I will outline certain changes undergone in recent years to the understanding of the concept of responsibility in the field of ethics and politics. Finally, I will argue that a significant extension of the notion of responsibility is still necessary if it is to play a relevant role in the contemporary world. I will therefore contend that there are sufficient reasons why our societies should do the moral stretch exercises suggested by G¨¹nther Anders. For that purpose, I suggest ten tenets that could serve as a basis for this poliethics of enhanced responsibility and for a collective reflection on this issue.

Who has the right to be a full member of a nation-state? Inherited privileges, for reasons of birth or blood, as they are put forward by and , should force us to ask: Why is it that someone cannot become a full member of a society, even if she lives, works, and has her affective relations within the borders of that nation-state? As Ayelet Shachar (¡°Just Membership: Between Ideals and Harsh Realities,¡± 2012) underlines, the place of birth is fundamental in the assignment of political membership. The aim of this article is to examine if we should get rid of the idea of citizenship or if we can just widen the concept in order to think a theory wide enough to include those who now are misrecognized.

Most mainstream feminist anti-rape scholarship and activism may be described as carceral feminism, insofar as it fails to engage with critiques of the criminal punishment system and endorses law-and-order responses to sexual and gendered violence. Mainstream feminist anti-rape scholars and activists often view increased conviction rates and longer sentences as a political goal¡ªor, at the very least, are willing to collaborate with police and lament cases where perpetrators of sexual violence are given ¡°light¡± or non-custodial sentences. Prison abolitionists, on the other hand, have tended to insist that most lawbreakers are non-violent and that the ¡°dangerous¡± are ¡°few¡± (Morris, ¡°But What About the Dangerous Few?¡±; Carrier and Pich¨¦, ¡°Blind Spots of Abolitionist Thought in Academia¡±), thus avoiding serious engagement with the widespread phenomenon of sexual violence (Critical Resistance and INCITE, ¡°Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex¡±). Despite the prevalence of carceral feminism, to my knowledge no feminist scholar has explicitly embraced this label, and the closest I have found to a defense of carceral feminism is feminist legal scholar Lise Gotell¡¯s ¡°critique of the critique of carceral feminism¡± (Gotell, ¡°Reassessing the Place of Criminal Law Reform¡±). For this reason, it is with Gotell¡¯s article that I primarily engage in defending anti-carceral feminism and prison abolitionism even in the difficult case of sexual assault.

Barbara Fried described John Rawls¡¯s response to libertarianism as ¡°the unwritten theory of justice.¡± This paper argues that while there is no need for a new theory of justice to address the libertarian challenge, there is a need for an additional chapter. Taking up Fried¡¯s suggestion that the Rawlsian response would benefit from a revised list of primary goods, I propose to add employment to the list, thus leading to adoption of a full employment principle in the original position that ensures that anyone who wants to work will be able to do so. I argue that although Rawls famously proposed government as employer of last resort, he never integrated that comment into his theory, which lacks a full employment principle and says nothing about the injustice of involuntary unemployment in its ideal theory. I first refute the received view of Rawls¡¯s treatment of employment as required by its importance for citizens¡¯ self-respect, then show that in fact, the full employment assumption is the result of the role of general equilibrium theory in Rawls¡¯s model of a well-ordered society, and indicate why developments in economic theory and economic policy support the proposed revision.

Recent works by feminist and social epistemologists have carefully mapped the contours of epistemic injustice, including gaslighting and prejudicial credibility deficits, prejudicial credibility excesses, willful hermeneutical ignorance, discursive injustices, contributory injustice, and epistemic exploitation. As we look at this burgeoning literature, attention has been concentrated mainly in four areas in descending order of emphasis: (1) phenomena of epistemic injustice themselves, including the nature of wrongdoings involved, (2) attendant consequences and repercussions, (3) individual and structural changes for prevention or mitigation, and (4) restorative, restitutive, or retributive responses. This project urges greater attention to the last of these, and to that end offers a relational approach to epistemic justice drawing upon Margaret Walker¡¯s work on moral repair and reparative justice. In developing and enacting better epistemic practices, how can such practices be made meaningfully restorative: not only recognizing the prospects for epistemic improvement, but responding to the perpetration and experience of epistemic injustice with effective epistemic amelioration?

The two characters in this philosophical dialogue, Russell Steadman and Jules Govier, take up the meaning and significance of David Hume¡¯s famous is-ought gap¡ªthe proscription on inferring a fully moral claim from any number of purely descriptive statements. Building on the recent work of Hilary Putnam and John F. Post (among others), Jules attempts to show that Hume¡¯s rule is of little consequence when discussing matters related to justice or morality as we encounter them in daily life. He derives his conclusion from the observations that all nontrivial human discourse contains, however tacitly, some degree of embedded normativity, and that an overlapping continuum of different types of normativity permits reasonable inference from apparently pure descriptions to fully moral prescriptions. While Russell agrees that moral concepts inevitably make reference to empirical reality, he insists that, precisely in virtue of the tacit normativity of discourse, Hume¡¯s gap persists, rendering fallacious any attempt to fashion an argumentative bridge between the two types of statements. Although the two do not resolve all of their differences, both of their positions shift significantly in response to the other¡¯s insights.

In this paper I explore the way that mental illness stigma impacts epistemic credibility in people who have mental illness. While any kind of stigma has the potential to discredit a person¡¯s epistemic agency, in the case of mental illness the basis for discrediting is in some cases and to some extent justifiable, for impairments in rationality, control, and reality perception can indeed be obstacles to participating appropriately in epistemic activities such as normal conversation and public discourse. People with mental illness are still potentially subject to epistemic injustices, however, especially when we rely on stereotypes and fail to make complicated and nuanced judgments which are more accurate. In this paper, I explain some of the ways that people with mental illness may be subject to epistemic injustices, and I propose some suggestions for how epistemic injustice can be avoided.

Recently, social and political philosophers have shown increased interest in the ideological nature of ideal theory and the importance of non-ideal theory. Charles Mills, who sparked recent critiques of ideal theory, invokes the notion of ¡°non-idealizing abstractions¡± and argues that these are helpful when applying non-ideal theory. In contrast, I argue that the notion of non-idealizing abstractions is not a helpful tool for non-ideal theory. I suspect that it pays insufficient attention to the actual power dynamics of oppression, which significantly influence judgments about whose experiences and interests are worth being reflected by an abstraction. Failing to take account of the power differences among the oppressed, what Mills considers non-idealizing abstractions falls into ideology, which cannot reflect the experiences or interests of less-privileged minorities, and only concerns those of more-privileged minorities. I examine cases in which the concept of ¡°patriarchy,¡± which Mills alleges to be a non-idealizing abstraction, functions as what I refer to as the ¡°Colonialist Concept of Patriarchy¡± that marginalizes Third World women¡¯s experiences of intersectional oppression. I suggest that a more suitable and less ideological way to apply non-ideal theory should avoid asserting that an abstraction is ¡°non-idealizing¡± and should, instead, protect ¡°resignifiability¡± of the abstraction.

The afterlife has been imagined in a diversity of ways, one of which is as a vehicle for vengeance. Upon outlining, via the figures of Tertullian and Sayyid Qutb, a vengeful formulation of afterlife belief, this essay examines Friedrich Nietzsche¡¯s critique of such a belief. The belief is framed as an expression of impotence insofar as believers imagine in the beyond what they cannot achieve in the present, namely, taking vengeance upon their enemies. Nietzsche¡¯s critique leads to the essay¡¯s central question. Is a vengeance-based formulation of afterlife belief an expression of impotence? To respond, this essay will analyze the practices and rhetoric of the Islamic fundamentalist group Boko Haram, while also briefly mentioning Al Qaeda and ISIS. As a result of the analysis, a simplistic and unqualified form of the impotence critique is to be rejected. Nonetheless, the critique remains relevant. Boko Haram¡¯s lack of emphasis on afterlife belief in general and its omission of a vengeance-based formulation in particular highlights the possibility that a radical religious group¡¯s approach to the afterlife is related to the group¡¯s relative strength or weakness. Such a possibility carries practical ramifications when assessing the scope of that group¡¯s aims and its willingness to act.

Jeffrey Brown, Greg Hoskins and Elizabeth Sperry pose questions about three different policy questions that are discussed in From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone: policy interventions to address obesity, welfare guidelines for egg production, and the safety of genetically engineered foods. However all three critiques turn on the question of what we can expect a non-specialist to know, and how much information they can be expected to process in making an ethical decision about what to eat. My response situates each question within literature on so-called ¡°fast¡± and ¡°slow¡± thinking. I argue that while ethical theories appear to have supposed that people are slow thinkers who can be expected to process a great deal of complexity, food ethics must be founded on principles that respect the habitual and heuristic basis of much eating behavior.