Cheshire Calhoun

Responsibility and Reproach

Feminist thinking about moral responsibility for oppressive and sexist behavior illustrates just this kind of confusion. When wrongdoing takes the form of social oppression, the relationship between individuals and their actions shifts in ways that render uncertain our judgments about moral responsibility and, with those, our judgments about the blameworthiness of individuals and our entitlement to reproach them. Part of the uncertainty about how to assign moral responsibility derives from the atypical character of the wrongdoing that feminists critique. Unlike ordinary cases of individual wrongdoing, oppressive wrongdoing often occurs at the level of social practice, where social acceptance of a practice impedes the individuals awareness of wrongdoing. Thus questions about moral responsibility become very difficult questions about how to weigh the social determinants producing moral ignorance against the individuals competence to engage in moral reasoning. The social scale at which oppression occurs complicates thinking about moral responsibility in other ways as well. If we assume, as we often do, that only morally flawed individuals could act oppressively, then we will have to conclude that the number of morally flawed individuals is more vast than we had dreamed and includes individuals whom we would otherwise rank high on scales of moral virtue and goodwill. The oddity of this conclusion forces serious questions about the possibility of morally unflawed individuals committing serious wrongdoing. Finally, when wrongdoing occurs at a social levelthat is, at a level that places whole social groups at risk, and where wrongdoing stands a much greater chance of being perpetuated by its very normalcy-our moral and personal stake in intervening in the pattern is much higher. The question of blame becomes notjust a question about blameworthiness, but more important a question about our entitlement to use moral reproach as a tool for effecting social change. Does the justified use of moral reproach require, as it does in ordinary cases, being

Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet

Separating lesbian theory from feminist theory the gender closet the shape of lesbian and gay subordination defending marriage construction lesbians and gay men as familys outlaws

What Good Is Commitment

That human beings make commitments of various sorts might seem so obviously a good thing that the question “What good is commitment?” might be thought to ask merely after the kind or kinds of good that commitment affords. To that question, one might respond that commitment is good in a variety of ways. Promises and contracts, two prominent types of commitment, have obvious utility as social coordination devices. The affirmation of one’s commitment to another or to bringing about some feature of her welfare promotes trust, something that has both social and moral value. Even personal commitments, such as a commitment to learning or to doing one’s job well, may enhance both the moral good of trust and the social goods of reliance and coordinated planning. Many commitments are good because they are morally required, strongly morally recommended, or constitutive of good moral character—for example, commitment to one’s children’s education or to acting with integrity. Finally, the social world is often so arranged as to quasi-force locking in one’s future via making commitments even when one would not otherwise have chosen to so firmly commit one’s future: others may be unwilling to embark on joint ventures with us on the basis of anything less than a promissory or contractual commitment, and the penalties for a change of plans may be sufficiently steep as to make lack of commitment to a plan unwise, as is the case when costly airline tickets are nonrefundable. In short, commitment has social, moral, and prudential value. In asking, “What good is commitment?” I do not aim to deny that commitment can be good in these ways. My interest is in a particular range of commitments that are often thought to be good because they

Moral aims : essays on the importance of getting it right and practicing morality with others

Acknowledgements Preface Introduction I Critical Morality and Social Norms 1 Moral Failure 2 An Apology for Moral Shame II Reaching, Relying On, and Contesting Social Consensus on Moral Norms 3 The Virtue of Civility 4 Common Decency 5 Standing for Something III Conventionalized Wrongdoing 6 Kant and Compliance with Conventionalized Injustice 7 Responsibility and Reproach IV Telling Moral Stories for Others 8 Emotional Work 9 Changing Ones Heart Bibliography Index

Losing one's self

Contributors Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Practical Identity and Narrative Agency Catriona Mackenzie Part I: Personal Identity and Continuity 2. Staying Alive: Personal Continuation and a Life Worth Having Marya Schechtman 3. Personal Identity: Practical or Metaphysical? Caroline West 4. Narrative Identity and Embodied Continuity Kim Atkins Part II: Practical Identity and Practical Deliberation 5. Personal Identity Management Jan Bransen 6. Imagination, Identity and Self-Transformation Catriona Mackenzie 7. Why Search for Lost Time: Memory, Autonomy, and Practical Reason John Christman Part III: Selfhood and Normative Agency 8. The Way of the Wanton J. David Velleman 9. Losing Ones Self Cheshire Calhoun 10. Normative Agency Jeanette Kennett and Steve Matthews 11. Remorse and Moral Identity Christopher Cordner Part IV: Selfhood, Narrative and Time 12. Shaping a Life: Narrative, Time and Necessity Genevieve Lloyd 13. How to Change the Past Karen Jones

On Being Content with Imperfection

The aim of this essay is to work out an account of contentment as a response to imperfect conditions and to argue that a disposition to contentment, understood as a disposition to appreciate the goods in one’s present condition and to use expectation frames that enable such appreciation, is a virtue. In the first half, I lay out an analysis of what contentment and discontentment are. In the second half, I argue that contentment is a virtue of appreciation and respond to skeptical concerns about recommending a disposition to contentment.

Book ReviewsVirginia Held, .The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global.New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 211.

The overarching aims of this book are to argue that an ethics of care provides a wider moral framework for thinking about morality than do Kantianism, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics; that care is a more fundamental value than justice or utility; and that rights and justice “should not be the central discourse of morality and politics” (145). A subordinate aim running throughout the book, especially in part 2 (Care and Society), is to argue that a care perspective ignores neither the relevance of justice in the private sphere nor the importance of legal protection of rights in the public sphere, nor does its scope exclude civic and global relations and responsibilities. The chapters in part 1 of the book (Care and Moral Theory) provide an extensive overview of care ethics and how it differs from and is preferable to either virtue ethics or versions of an ethics of justice. The chapters work together to defend the idea that developing a fully worked out ethics of care sufficient to provide normative guidance is our best bet for adequately addressing the widest array of moral questions. The book does not, as I read it, aim to supply that fully worked out care ethics. For example, Held’s project is not to establish the “objective standards for the care of children, the safety and health of citizens, and so forth” (74) that we need in order to care adequately for others. Nor does she resolve the question of exactly how to integrate concerns of justice and care, although she raises it as an important question and at various points makes observations about where she thinks considerations of justice are or are not appropriate. Held’s primary aim is to outline the distinguishing features, scope, power, and preferability of an ethics of care and to pave the way for a reconsideration of where moral philosophers ought to expend their philosophical energies. In so doing, Held offers us her own highly reflective assessment of various accounts of care and her own vision of how an ethic of care should be framed. One especially helpful clarification concerns the difference between care ethics and virtue ethics. In Held’s view, virtue ethics is at a basic level an individualist ethic, since it focuses on the states of character of individuals rather than on the relationship between individuals. Thus Held, throughout the book, opposes Kantian, utilitarian, and virtue ethics to the relationship-focused ethics of care. Care ethics, as Held presents it, has a number of distinguishing features, including a conception of persons as interdependent, particular persons located within both chosen and unchosen relationships who are deeply affected by those relationships; an inclusion of emotional and perceptual capacities, such as sympathy, empathy, and sensitivity, among the important epistemic resources for moral knowledge; a prioritization of the values of trust, solidarity, mutual con-

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During the past couple of decades in the United States, new accountability norms have both expanded the opportunities, especially media opportunities, for giving accounts of one’s personal life and imposed new pressures on individuals to be accountable to others for personal choices and behaviors. Consider, for example, workplace regulation of sexualized interaction between employees, media and official demands on public officials for information about their private lives, the trend toward open adoption involving preand sometimes postadoption exchanges between biological and adopting parents, and demands by employers, insurers, and health care providers for personal health information. Consider also that religious, ethnic, and racial groups may hold members accountable to the group for private choices, including most notably choices of out-group intimacies and marriage, and that participation in family life, friendships, and sexual intimacies standardly includes entitlement to demand accountability from and pressure to be accountable to other family members, one’s friends, and one’s intimate partner. We are, in short, richly accountable to each other and are “constantly called upon to report, explain, justify, and otherwise answer to others for the choices we make about our own lives” (4). Noticing both the extent to which we are accountable for personal and nominally private behaviors under our current social, moral, and legal norms as well as the desirability of extensive accountability to both intimates and strangers may not, however, be easy. Liberal political thought attaches high value to privacy and to protecting privacy. Theoretical emphasis on the value of privacy and of freedom of self-regarding behavior in a liberal democracy like the United States may obscure the fact that in practice citizens of a liberal democracy do not regard privacy as everything. While existent accountability norms may, arguably, encroach in illegitimate ways on individual privacy, some set of accountability norms with respect to self-regarding behavior and behavior conventionally labeled “private” is, in fact, desirable. Far from being burdensome, accountability for personal life can promote group solidarity, support trust, express friendship, and facilitate the fulfillment of responsibilities (as, for example, children’s accountability to parents may enable parents to better care for their children). Anita Allen’s Why Privacy Isn’t Everything is, in part, a detailed description of an important set of accountability norms governing personal life. Her aim is to make salient the fact that “accountability for virtually all personal and intimate behavior is the rule rather than the exception in the United States” (3). The book is also, in part, a normative argument for the desirability of some, and the undesirability of other, norms that define the New Accountability. Throughout, the aim is not to pit the value of privacy against the value of accountability but

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This short book contains the three Carus lectures that Annette Baier presented at the meetings of the American Philosophical Association in December 1995, plus an appendix to each of the lectures. Baier sees herself as defending a type of ‘‘social constructionist view of reason, responsibility, and morality’’ (preface). A pertinent question is what this particular social constructionist view amounts to. Lecture 1 is entitled ‘‘Reason.’’ Baier usefully points out that philosophers through the ages have differed as to the scope of reason and reasoning—either defining it narrowly, in terms of inference (as did Locke), or defining it widely, to include reflective conversation suffused with wit and raillery (as did Shaftesbury). Baier’s reasonable suggestion is that these definitions are driven by a sense of what is both valuable and distinctive of humankind. One way of reading her positive argument in this lecture is to see it as a plea for a characterization of reason that values reasoning together over solitary rumination. The solitary ruminations of human beings are, Baier proposes, the outgrowth of interpersonal conversations and transactions. Such conversations and transactions might therefore properly be regarded as the core of reason. Suppose we grant that the inferring that Locke and others privilege is not the core of reason. Is inferring as such ‘‘an essentially social skill’’ (p. 5)? Baier alludes to this question in a passage in which she asks, ‘‘When are we confident that some [stretch of thinking], of which we take ourself to be more or less sole author, really is a piece of reasoning?’’ (p. 5). She answers: ‘‘Usually only when some other reasoner can follow it, and reassure us that commonly accepted standards of reasoning are minimally met’’ (p. 5). Does the practice of asking other people for reassurance help to show that inferring as such is an essentially social skill? Consider a situation in which a philosopher might crave reassurance that something really is a piece of reasoning. In the course of solitary philosophical work, one has come to a surprising conclusion. At the same time, one has one’s doubts. One says to a colleague, ‘‘Have I gone crazy—or does this really follow?’’ Why does one ask a colleague here? Is it because one takes the colleague to represent the community whose socially constructed standards are at issue, or because one hopes the colleague will be able to confirm one’s judgment that one’s inference is valid by seeing that it is? On the face of it, the second answer is the correct one. In any case, Baier’s observation does not point unequivocally in the direction of the social nature of inference. In the first appendix, ‘‘Reason and Revelation,’’ Baier continues the theme of the scope and nature of reasoning, focusing on Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s very diverse attempts to produce a kind of rational theology. She applauds Spinoza’s less politically biased approach to the interpretation of biblical texts and his strong valuation of freedom of speech, as well as freedom of thought. She argues, contra Hobbes, that any use of reasoning in the service of a ‘‘faith, which coerces people into conformity, and goes to war against the infidel’’ is a ‘‘reason-subverting