Extending the Knapsack: Using the White Privilege Analysis to Examine Conferred Advantage and Disadvantage

This article describes a self-awareness activity that utilizes a directed reading on privilege and a small-group discussion format to examine unearned disadvantage and unearned advantage in one’s life. This exercise can help clinicians to better understand systemic and individual sources of power and privilege in society. Beginning with my previous work on white privilege, students can extend this analysis to other domains of privilege, including, for example, gender, class, sexuality, age, nationality, and physical ability, to name a few. The primary goals of this reflective exercise are to help clinicians understand how clients’ lives are influenced by societal disadvantages and advantages, to encourage a new understanding of oneself, and to increase empathy towards clients.     

The moral status of a human fetus: a response to Lee.

It is an undeniable empirical fact that a human fetus is a member of the species homo sapiens from the moment of conception. There is thus an important sense in which it is a human being in itself, and not simply part of a pregnant woman's body, despite what defenders of abortion on demand might want us to think. It is also reasonable to suppose that all human beings, and thus human fetuses, are persons, with all that entails, but this is a metaphysical presupposition as opposed to an empirical fact, and is thus contentious. It is argued, however, that this should be of little comfort to the defenders of abortion, because the mere fact that human fetuses have an inherent tendency to become persons is sufficient reason to confer a moral status upon them, which renders abortion morally problematic at best.     

Siding with Euthyphro: Response-Dependence and Conferred Properties

Abstract: I argue that a response-dependence account of a concept can yield metaphysical results, and not merely epistemological or semantical results, which has been a prevalent view in the literature on response-dependence. In particular, I show how one can argue for a conferralist account of a certain property by arguing that the concept of the property is response-dependent, if certain assumptions are made.