THE UNIVERSAL VERSUS THE PARTICULAR IN ECOFEMINIST ETHICS

While not a monolithic movement, ecofeminists are united in their conviction that there are important connections between the exploitation of both women and nature. They are internally divided, however, on the propriety of applying their theoretical claims and activist strategies across social contexts. This paper explores three debates within ecofeminism that largely turn on this universalist versus particularist tension: whether ecofeminist theorizing can adequately account for cultural variation; whether its common usage of essentialist rhetoric is productive or troubling; and whether resources for social activism could legitimately be culled from an assembly of heterogeneous and foreign sources. I conclude that the universalism of the women–nature connection can indeed be justified if perceived in multivalent ways, that “earthcare” or “ecomaternalist” discourse can be helpful in some contexts but harmful in others, and that selective retrieval of other cultures for the purposes of advocacy should not be ruled out as necessarily imperialistic or otherwise inappropriate.     

Choosing Between Capitalisms: Habermas, Ethics and Politics

In Between Facts and Norms Habermas both accepts the place of distinctively ethical considerations about ‘the good’ in political deliberation, and advances a particular view of the nature and justification of ethical judgments. Whilst welcoming the former, this paper criticises the latter, with its focus on issues of identity and self-understanding, and suggests instead a broadly Aristotelian alternative. The argument proceeds, first, through a detailed engagement with Habermas’s theoretical claims about ethical reasoning in politics, in which it is argued that he fails to show how different ethical possibilities can be critically evaluated, and second, through the analysis of a practical example, that of a political choice being made between different kinds of capitalism. Here the paper draws on recent work in comparative political economy on the institutional differences between varieties of capitalism, and uses this to contrast the implications of Habermas’s conception of ethics, according to which what would matter is the congruence between economic institutions and a political community’s historically shaped identity, with those of its preferred alternative, which requires a comparison between the different conceptions of the good that each kind of capitalism institutionally favours, and collective judgments about their respective contributions to human well-being.     

Ecofeminism: What One Needs to Know

Ecofeminism refers to feminist theory and activism informed by ecology. Ecofeminism is concerned with connections between the domination of women and the domination of nature. Although ecofeminism is a diverse movement, ecofeminist theorists share the presuppositions that social transformation is necessary for ecological survival, that intellectual transformation of dominant modes of thought must accompany social transformation, that nature teaches nondualistic and nonhierarchial systems of relation that are models for social transformation of values, and that human and cultural diversity are values in social transformation. Ecofeminist theology, ethics, and religious perspectives are particularly concerned with the integration of science and religion. Examples of religious or spiritual ecofeminisms are North American Christian ecofeminism, North American womanist Christian theology, neopagan Wiccan ecofeminism, Native American ecofeminism, and Third World ecofeminism.     

MAKING ROOM FOR MANY FEMINISMS

There is a pervasive but implicit emphasis on a liberal feminist political agenda within the field of the psychology of women. This perspective is reflected by and inadvertently reproduced in many introductory texts to the psychology of women, although the perspective is usually unacknowledged. I argue that authors need to make their political perspectives explicit and to find ways to include other feminist viewpoints. Greater inclusion of socialist and radical feminist theoretical perspectives will strengthen the discipline of feminist psychology and promote greater inclusion of marginalized groups.     

Political Agency,Citizenship, and Non-human Animals

In this essay I challenge the idea that political agency must be central to the concept of citizenship. I consider this question in relation to whether or not domesticated animals can be understood as our fellow citizens. In recent debates on this topic, both proponents and opponents of animal citizenship have taken political agency to be central to this question. I advance two main arguments against this position. First, I argue against the orthodox view that claims political agency is a requirement of citizenship. This position ignores both how citizenship is understood in practice by modern, liberal democracies, as well as the separate functions of citizenship. Further, there are no plausible ways we can consistently extend citizenship to humans regardless of intellectual ability, while denying it to domesticated animals. Nevertheless, I argue that it is important to distinguish two ways in which citizenship is enacted: Citizenship as Membership and Citizenship as Responsible, Political Agent. Domesticated animals should be understood as citizens, despite the fact that they are not responsible, political agents. Second, I challenge the view, put forward by Donaldson and Kymlicka, that animals are capable of certain forms of political agency. I argue that political agency is not crucial to whether, and how, the preferences of these animals matter for political decision-making. The upshot of my argument is that political agency matters much less to debates about the citizenship of non-human animals than both sides of this debate have been inclined to think.     

Science Communication,Cultural Cognition,and the Pull of Epistemic Paternalism

There is a correlation between positions taken on some scientific questions and political leaning. One way to explain this correlation is the cultural cognition hypothesis (CCH): people's political leanings are causing them to process evidence to maintain fixed answers to the questions, rather than to seek the truth. Another way is the different background belief hypothesis (DBBH): people of different political leanings have different background beliefs which rationalize different positions on these scientific questions. In this article, I argue for two things. I argue that two attempts by proponents of the CCH to discredit the DBBH fail. And I argue that this matters, because while the CCH makes epistemic paternalistic interventions seem called for (as some philosophers have argued compellingly), the DBBH does not. The DBBH makes it much easier to stay closer to an ideal of deliberative democracy.     

Gender and Nature: A Psychological Analysis of Ecofeminist Theory1

For ecofeminists, the logic of domination (Warren, 1990) subserves the interconnected oppressions of patriarchy (i.e., sexism) and the anthropocentric domination of nature (i.e., naturism). Given this premise, it was hypothesized that interconnections would be found across instruments that assessed the following constructs: right-wing authoritarianism, attitudes toward women, social-dominance orientation, and attitudes toward the environment. As predicted, a correlation was found between attitudes toward women and the environment. Regression analyses indicate that authoritarianism reliably predicted sexism in men and women. Authoritarianism also predicted naturism in women. These results are interpreted as an initial rapprochement between psychology and the ecofeminism framework delineating the social attitudes that are inherent in the oppressive systems of sexism and naturism.     

Capitalism, Freedom and Rhetoric: a reply to Tibor R. Machan

ABSTRACT  Tibor R. Machan's 'The virtue of freedom in capitalism', which recently appeared in this journal, seeks to defend the currently fashionable view that capitalism and freedom are closely linked. I concentrate upon three aspects of his argument. First, Machan holds that capitalism is the only system capable of facilitating the exercise of moral responsibility effectively. Against this, I show that his argument rests upon a systematic confusion between two distinct theses. Secondly, I deal with his attempt to rest an argument upon the allegedly 'uncoercive' nature of market exchanges. Thirdly, I show that his analysis of the concept of freedom, which closely follows Hayek, logically cannot be deployed in support of the free market. Machan has a tendency to appeal to 'tradition', and so, in conclusion, I briefly consider his relation to the 'analytic' movement in philosophy.     

Injecting a Woman's Voice: Conservative Women's Organizations,Gender Consciousness,and the Expression of Women's Policy Preferences

Scholars have argued that gender consciousness may be the important link between gender identity and the expression of political interests. Ultimately, however, these studies explain feminist political behavior and leave the impression that only feminist women articulate a woman's perspective on policy issues. In this article I demonstrate the coherence between gender identity and policy preferences for two national conservative women's organizations, the Concerned Women for America and the Independent Women's Forum. I show that conservative women are also gender conscious public-policy advocates. Using data gathered from organizational literature, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with organizational leaders, I show how conservative women have collectively organized as women and framed their policy goals in terms of women's interests. As such, I demonstrate a clear and profound link between gender identity and politicization among conservative women activists, suggesting the need to reconsider how we understand and define gender consciousness and women's policy activism.     

Trust,Reliance, and Democracy

Abstract

From the perspective of philosophy and political science it is often pointed out that trust is of central value for democracy. The paper critically examines this claim and argues that we should not overestimate the role of trust in democracy. In order to do that, I argue for a specific understanding of the notion of trust that appropriately accounts for the distinction between trust and mere reliance. In a second step, I argue that we have no reason to put this kind of trust in our elected officials and representatives, but should instead focus on legislative and institutional ways to make sure that they are reliable in particular respects. After contrasting my suggestion with the position of Hardin, I point to two advantages of my account: (1) The avoidance of political analysis through the lens of trust allows us to react more flexibly to unforeseen circumstances and resist populist attempts to emotionalize public debates; (2) at the same time, diffusing the tension between trust and civic vigilance solves a systematic problem in political philosophy. In a concluding section, I briefly discuss the question whether there is an alternative role for trust to play in the field of politics.     

Women's empowerment: the insights of Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai of Kenya has written about empowerment, practiced it in many ways in her own life, and shared her reflections on it with many other women in the Green Belt Movement. Yet to date, no study has been devoted to her ideas on the topic. This paper will highlight Maathai's insights regarding empowerment, tracing several important themes in her approach, namely, empowerment's relationship to self-esteem, teamwork, and political action, its ambivalent relationship to formal education, and the role of cultural traditions in providing alternatives to colonial-era cultural impositions and current exploitative effects of neo-liberal capitalism. After reviewing Maathai's thoughts on each of these topics, I will briefly draw upon other East African thinkers and Africanists' studies of East African communities to present corroborating evidence for Maathai's views or for challenges to her position. Listening to the perspectives of Maathai and other East Africans provides several important correctives to current popular uses of the term ‘empowerment’.     

Migratory Emotions: The Murder of Jean Charles de Menezes

What does it mean to have empathy within a late capitalist world? What does it mean to practise solidarity in a time of common sense individualism? In this piece, I reflect upon the deeply tragic case of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian immigrant who was brutally murdered by the British police in the wake of the London bombing. Drawing upon concepts from psychoanalysis and critical psychology, I discuss the affective and emotive nature of the case. I argue that the case offers insight into the irrational nature of `terror' used to explain state-led violence in a time of mass Islamophobic paranoia. I further argue that the emotive nature of the political is consistently disavowed in order to consolidate the face of the nation state as a white, western, masculinist, rational one. Finally, I offer thoughts on what this case might tell us about the interrelationship between discourses of `race,' racism, and citizenship within our contemporary political moment. Rather than being used to support succinct political and theoretical categories of identity politics, the death of Jean Charles de Menezes is an example of the urgent necessity for solidarity to be formed between marginalized bodies. The persistence of state-led murders, justified and legislated by the newest `N word' of the decade – `terrorist' – requires theoretical endeavours that transcend disciplinary boundaries and political action that transcends bodies.     

Rejecting Beliefs,or Rejecting Believers? On the Importance and Exclusion of Women in Philosophy

Why has gender equality progressed so much more slowly in philosophy than in other academic disciplines? Here, I address both factual and theoretical matters relating to the causes, effects, and potential redress of the lack of women in philosophy. First, I debunk extant claims that women are more likely than men to disagree with their philosophy professors and male peers; that women are more sensitive to disagreements in the philosophy classroom than men are; and that the gender imbalance in philosophy is no worse than in many cognate disciplines. Second, I discuss ways in which the nature of philosophical inquiry and debate may provide uniquely strong opportunities for person‐perception to hinder progress toward egalitarian treatment of interlocutors. And third, I argue that a diversity of perspectives in philosophy is essential not only for reasons of social justice, but also for philosophical progress. Efforts to improve philosophy should therefore countenance the role of person‐perception in the practice of philosophical debate. For philosophy to become more diverse, the steps the profession takes to achieve that goal will have to go beyond—and not merely match—the steps taken to increase the numbers of women and otherwise underrepresented individuals in other fields.     

Reflections on a Crisis: Political Disenchantment,Moral Desolation,and Political Integrity

Declining levels of political trust and voter turnout, the shift towards populist politics marked by appeals to ‘the people’ and a rejection of ‘politics-as-usual’, are just some of the commonly cited manifestations of our culture of political disaffection. Democratic politics, it is argued, is in crisis. Whilst considerable energy has been expended on the task of lamenting the status of our politics and pondering over recommendations to tackle this perceived crisis, amid this raft of complaints and solutions lurks confusion. This paper seeks to explore the neglected question of what the precise nature of the crisis with which we are confronted involves, and, in so doing, to go some way towards untangling our confusion. Taking my cue from Machiavelli and his value-pluralist heirs, I argue that there is a rift between a morally admirable and a virtuous political life. Failure to appreciate this possibility causes narrations of crisis to misconstrue the moral messiness of politics in ways that lead us to misunderstand how we should respond to disenchantment. Specifically, I suggest that: (i) we think that there is a moral crisis in politics because we have an unsatisfactorily idealistic understanding of political integrity in the first place; and (ii) it is a mistake to imagine that the moral purification of politics is possible or desirable. Put simply, our crisis is not moral per se but primarily philosophical in nature: it relates to the very concepts we employ—the qualities of character and context we presuppose whilst pondering over political integrity.     

COGNITIVE PENETRATION,THE DOWNGRADE PRINCIPLE,AND EXTENDED COGNITION

It has been argued that just as, say, prejudice or wishful thinking can generate ill‐founded beliefs, the same is true of experiences. The idea is that the etiology of cognitively penetrated experiences can downgrade their justificatory force. This view, known as the Downgrade Principle, seems to be compatible with both internalist and externalist conceptions of epistemic justification. An assessment of the credentials of the Downgrade Principle is particularly important in view of the fact that not all cases of cognitive penetration are epistemically malignant. There are good and bad cases of cognitive penetration. I argue that a proper assessment of the Downgrade Principle will have to address two fundamental questions. I identify two general ways of responding to these questions and show why they fail. It will be maintained that an explanationist conception of justification has a better chance of accounting for the distinction between good and bad cases of cognitive penetration. The Downgrade Principle is then discussed in the context of the extended cognition thesis (ECT). In particular, I look at the sensorimotor theory of perception, as a way of broadening the scope of (ECT) to include conscious perceptual experience, that sees senses as ways of exploring the environment mediated by different patterns of sensorimotor contingency. I suggest possible ways in which one could distinguish between good and bad cases of cognitive penetration on such a view compatible with the explanationist view of epistemic justification.     

Muslim Women and the Politics of Religious Identity in a (Post) Secular Society

Women’s bodies, states Benhabib (Dignity in adversity: human rights in troubled times, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011: 168), have become the site of symbolic confrontations between a re-essentialized understanding of religious and cultural differences and the forces of state power, whether in their civic-republican, liberal-democratic or multicultural form. One of the main reasons for the emergence of these confrontations or public debates, says Benhabib (2011: 169), is because of the actual location of ‘political theology’. She asserts that within the context of globalization, the concept of ‘political theology’ is complicated by its unstable location between religion and the public square; between the private and official; and between individual rights to freedom of religion versus state security and public well-being. Ultimately, therefore, the nature of the tension between religion as a political theology and the forces of state power can at best be described as a clash between identities of a collective nature (as envisaged by the nation-state) and identities of an individual nature (as manifested in different religions and cultures). Ongoing attempts to counter the ascendancy of religion, and as will be discussed in this article, specifically the ascendancy and visibility of Islamic identity as practiced by Muslim women, has brought into serious debate the notion of a (post) secular society and its implications for religious rights. What emerges from the state’s insistence that individuals not be allowed to enter the public discourse as religious beings, are, on the one hand, the constraints imposed on Muslim women by liberal democracies, and on the other hand, that Islam, as represented by Muslim women, is not constitutive of democratic citizenship. Will the inclusion and recognition of Muslim women, therefore, necessarily augment a democratic citizenship agenda, and will it lead to an alleviation of the conflict? Then, in exploring a re-articulation of an inclusive citizenship—one which is held accountable by its minimization of social inequality—what ought to be the parameters of inclusion and how should it unfold differently to what is already happening in liberal democracies?     

Sex Under Pressure: Jerks,Boorish Behavior,and Gender Hierarchy

Pressuring someone into having sex would seem to differ in significant ways from pressuring someone into investing in one’s business or buying an expensive bauble. In affirming this claim, I take issue with a recent essay by Sarah Conly (‘Seduction, Rape, and Coercion’, Ethics, October 2004), who thinks that pressuring into sex can be helpfully evaluated by analogy to these other instances of using pressure. Drawing upon work by Alan Wertheimer, the leading theorist of coercion, she argues that so long as pressuring does not amount to coercing someone into having sex, her consent to sex answers the important ethical questions about it. In this essay, I argue that to understand the real significance of pressuring into sex, we need to appeal to background considerations, especially the male-dominant gender hierarchy, which renders sexual pressuring different from its non-sexual analogues. Treating pressure to have sex like any other sort of interpersonal pressure obscures the role such sexual pressure might play in supporting gender hierarchy, and fails to explain why pressure by men against women is more problematic than pressure by women against men. I suggest that men pressuring women to have sex differs from the reverse case because of at least two factors: (1) gendered social institutions which add to the pressures against women, and (2) the greater likelihood that men, not women, will use violence if denied, and the lesser ability of women compared to men to resist such violence without harm. I would like to thank Marcia Baron, Sylvia Berryman, Elizabeth Brake, Dominic McIver Lopes, Jennifer Warriner, Janet Wesselius, two anonymous reviewers for Res Publica and the audiences at the University of British Columbia Feminism and Philosophy Workshop and the Western Canadian Philosophical Association meetings in Winnipeg for helpful discussion and comments.