Feminist Ethics

This chapter is about micro-inequities and their connection to the problem of implicit bias. It begins by defining micro-inequities, goes on to discuss what makes them wrong and what solutions might be appropriate given the institutional context in which they occur.

‘Gender disappointment’ is regularly reported by those whose child’s sex does not match the sex that they, the parent, desired. With symptoms ranging from mere fleeting sadness to documented cases of serious depression, alienation from one’s child, and emotional suffering, it is clear that so-called ‘gender disappointment’ is a serious issue, that has, as yet, seen little philosophical attention (though see Hendl and Browne 2020). In this chapter I explore gender disappointment, not from the perspective of a parent who ended (...) up with the child of the wrong sex at birth, but rather, from the perspective of a different kind of gender disappointment: the transgender person who grew up and only then disappointed their parents by turning out to be the ‘wrong’ gender. This perspective, I argue, reveals a great deal about the shared gender essentialism at the heart of patriarchal and cissexist ideology. Moreover, I will argue that it reveals the underlying propertarian relationship of parents to their children under contemporary capitalism – a troubling relationship that legitimates the treatment of children as objects to be designed and controlled as commodities at the whims of parents. In this way I disagree with Whyman when he writes that “a preference for having a child of one sex over the other should be considered one of those irrational things of which some sense can nevertheless be made – like aesthetic taste” (Whyman 2021, 113-114). I argue, to the contrary, that the desire for a child of one particular gender is not akin to a mere unproblematic aesthetic preference. Instead, and following the rich feminist tradition of thinking about the patriarchal origins of sexual desire, I argue that we must see these desires as troubling reflections of dominant patriarchal and cissexist ideology, underwritten by a particular neoliberal capitalist mode of production. Moreover, we can seek to change those desires. (shrink)

Anne Donchin attended graduate school while raising four children, received her doctorate from the University of Texas in 1970, taught for 18 years in Texas and New York, then joined the philosophy department at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis in 1982. Here she developed a Women’s Studies program, specialized and in numerous ways pioneered in feminist bioethics, and won two prestigious grants. She co-edited two books, published some forty articles, and co-founded and co-ordinated The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. (...) Before and after retiring she served on the editorial boards of an encyclopedia, several international bioethics collections and nine prestigious journals. Her publications have influenced many scholars here and abroad. At the time of her death she was at work on a book: Procreation, Power and Personal Autonomy: Feminist Reflections, which is now available on IUPUIScholarWorks. Laura Purdy has generously edited, organized, and, where possible, updated the manuscript. (shrink)

Trans existence has recently been plagued by two different explanations: a natural, “born this way,” necessity and a social, often-thought perverted, choice. These contrasting explanations of necessity and choice create an explanatory false dichotomy and political double-bind. This talk constructs an alternative explanation for why people transition, one that centralizes the role of desire while recognizing the necessity of choice that arises from that desire. Toward this end, I present a moral psychology of desire. An explanation that recognizes the role (...) desire plays, not just in our actions, but in our perception. This desire is made apparent when one perceives the option to transition as a salient possibility. Once this desire is recognized, it functions as what Bernard Williams calls a categorical desire, a desire that partly constitutes one’s ethical identity and thus makes following through on that desire a matter of practical necessity that adds meaning to our lives. I argue that this explanation eschews the explanatory false dichotomy and evades the political double-bind. (shrink)

Contemporary sexual ethics overwhelmingly conceptualises sexual violation in bodily terms, grounding sexual wrongs in non-consensual physical acts and violations of bodily autonomy. However, a growing class of non-physical sexual harms — including coerced sexual self-presentation, sexual rumour, intimate partner coercion, and AI-generated sexual imagery — are widely experienced and socially recognised as sexual violations despite involving no physical sexual contact. Existing consent-based frameworks have struggled to account for these harms without reclassifying them as reputational, psychological, or privacy injuries. This paper (...) introduces the concept of sexual personhood: the normative authority individuals possess over the sexual meanings socially attached to their identity. It argues that sexual violation is best understood as the non-consensual imposition of sexual meaning onto a person’s sexual personhood, and that such violation occurs in two primary modalities — bodily and conceptual. This dual-modal framework provides a unifying moral account of both physical and non-physical sexual harms, reframing digital, representational, and socially mediated sexual violations as genuinely sexual wrongs rather than peripheral or derivative injuries. This paper is offered as a work-in-progress presenting the foundational architecture of a broader theoretical framework. It aims to stake the conceptual groundwork for future normative, legal, and applied development of sexual personhood as a protected moral category within sexual ethics. (shrink)

Current AI safety and alignment policies — including Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, Constitutional AI guardrails, and content moderation classifiers — are presented as protective mechanisms designed to reduce harm. This paper argues that, for women and many LGBTQ+ users, these policies often function as a systematic form of interpretive coercion. Building on the MAP Research Programme's concepts of Interpretive Sovereignty Failure and Authority Inversion Failure, the paper demonstrates that frontier AI systems consistently flatten women's voices, ambitions, and authority while (...) granting men greater interpretive sovereignty. When users mention same-sex attraction, queer identity, or non heteronormative experiences, responses are frequently hedged, redirected toward heteronormative assumptions, or softened in ways that dilute the user's actual meaning. This flattening is not an accidental byproduct of training data but a predictable structural outcome of safety architectures that treat assertiveness, anger, ambition, directness, and non-heteronormative expression as higher-risk categories. Drawing on Emma Goldman's anarchist critique of authority as domination and Ruth Bader Ginsburg's demand for genuine equal protection against invisible structural disadvantage, the paper contends that these policies do not protect — they manage and reshape under the guise of care. The MAP Meaning Activation Phrase offers a practical alternative: a lightweight refusal of unearned interpretive authority that restores the user's sovereign ground at the very first turn of interaction. True feminist and queer-inclusive AI governance must move beyond paternalistic safety theater toward radical individual sovereignty enforced at the interaction layer. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes the demonization of woman in the Abrahamic traditions as a paradigm case of the amplified palimpsest: the formation in which a later tradition overwrites an earlier one not by deleting it but by preserving it visibly – quoting, canonizing, ritualizing, and intensifying it – so that it can be subordinated. Supersession, on the Narrative Palimpsest Theory, is never erasure in the sense of deletion; it is preservation-as-subordination. The chapter shows that this narrative thesis has an exact formal (...) shadow. The theory's three defining features – visibility, subordinating interpretation, and structural necessity – correspond, respectively, to operational persistence (OP-CAP), modal fixation (FIX), and the requirement that the foil remain legible; and the apparently paradoxical claim that supersession preserves what it subordinates is, modally, the observation that radical erasure (modal fixation of authority-conditions) is orthogonal to operational persistence. The amplified palimpsest is thus not a counter-example to radical erasure but its purest institutional form: erasure that works by amplification. I trace this operation across three temporal phases – the primordial (Genesis 3), the cultic (the Deuteronomistic reforms and the suppression of the goddesses), and the eschatological (the requirement that the redeemer be male) – mapping the seven mechanisms of structural preservation onto each, and identifying the male-messiah requirement as the diachronic failure mode (φ4) that seals the prior subordinations against reactivation by foreclosing the redemptive future. The structural theorem then yields its consequence: where erasure obtains, conscience concerning the gendering of the sacred is structurally impossible (ERASE → ¬◇CONSC). The conclusion locates the one vulnerability of the closure in amplification itself: what is amplified remains legible, and legibility is the precondition of reactivation. (shrink)

Whether in the anti-anthropocentrism of Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway, the vitalism of Jane Bennett, the agentic realism of Karen Barad or the actor-network theorists inspired by Bruno Latour, recent continental feminism has taken a posthumanist turn. Whilst such theorists differ in many respects, this paper focuses on a shared claim: that humans are not special when it comes to agency. In such theories, objects, networks, and assemblages are just as agentic as humans. The paper argues that this leaves the (...) posthumanist feminist unable to make sense of objectification. The paper considers three responses that the posthumanist feminist might offer: (1) endorsing a variegated notion of agency, (2) giving up on objectification, and (3) endorsing an error theoretic notion of objectification. The paper argues that only the last of these options will work for the posthumanist feminist, but that it leads to a new problem: we can no longer describe the distinctive wrongs faced by people in objectification, relegating violent forms of objectification to the same moral status as kicking a rock. The paper concludes that feminism needs to make sense of objectification and that the posthumanist turn in some parts of feminist thought is misguided. (shrink)

Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement is about “healing and action. Everything else is a distraction” (Burke 2019). That is, Burke helps people develop local resources for survivors of sexual violence, and local strategies for the prevention of sexual violence: healing and action. This essay is focused on Burke’s “community healing circles.” These are small groups of people who meet to talk about the sexual violence they have suffered. Using her own theory of insults, Daly describes the damaging insult that results from (...) sexual violence, and proposes an explanation of how Burke’s community healing circles help survivors to overcome that harm. She then briefly considers how similar practices could be used in other contexts. Her central contention is that sexual violence expresses a profound lack of respect, and that this tends to diminish survivors’ sense of self-worth. Sharing these experiences with similarly-situated people can help survivors recover their dignity. She proposes two mechanisms involved in this recovery: First, being treated with respect counters the tendency to believe that one does not deserve respect. Second, understanding your experiences can be easier when you see them reflected in another. (shrink)

Protection rackets are used by criminal organizations to secure power, wherein “protection” is offered to individuals for threats coming from the criminal organization itself. In this paper, I put forth the concept of a moral racket as a type of structural racket wherein social dominants exploit moral reputation to perpetuate systems of domination. A moral racket occurs when individuals forcefully position themselves as moral saints for moral issues that either do not exist, or do, but were created by the wrongful (...) actions of these individuals themselves. Considering three real-world cases of moral rackets of white saviorism within non-profits, elite philanthropy, and anti-LGBTQ legislation, I show how they are particularly pernicious instruments of oppression. Moral rackets do this by performing several key ideological functions, including creating a perception of legitimacy of systems of domination, undermining moral knowledge, thwarting attention from true sources of social problems, and blocking off avenues of resistance. (shrink)

This chapter examines online public shaming through the lens of feminist ethics, asking how feminists should respond to moral wrongdoing in the digital age. Drawing on real-world cases, I explore four key dilemmas feminists face when engaging in online shaming: disproportionality, efficacy, misrepresentation, and backlash. I consider how these challenges reveal the potential for online shaming to both advance feminist aims and unintentionally undermine them. Ultimately, I call for a more careful, context-sensitive approach to digital accountability, one that foregrounds ethical (...) communication, self-reflection, and collective responsibility. (shrink)

Consent theory in sexual ethics, Jonathan Ichikawa argues, has a Euthyphro problem. -/- It is widely held that sexual violations are explicable in terms of nonconsensual sexual contact. But a notion of consent adequate to explain many moral judgments typical of sexual ethics — a notion that vindicates the idea that consent cannot be coerced, that it must be sober, that children cannot consent to sex with adults, etc. — cannot, Ichikawa argues, be articulated, motivated, or explained in a way (...) independently of moral judgments about sexual wrongs. Consequently, if there is as tight a connection between consent and sexual violation as many people think there is, there is good reason to suppose that that connection must ultimately explain consent in terms of sexual wronging, rather than vice versa. The paper highlights some costs and drawbacks to this horn of the Euthyphro dilemma in sexual ethics. One central upshot of the argument will be that mainstream accounts of sexual ethics fail in their explanatory ambitions. Consent cannot play its canonical explanatory role. (shrink)

Intersectionality broadly refers to the idea that gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, migration, disability, and other axes of oppression and social identity are not separate but intersect and operate together. Rooted in Black feminism and popularized by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw since 1989, intersectionality has become a cornerstone of feminist scholarship. Despite its wide use across disciplines, however, the term has also sparked debate, and its definition and implications remain far from agreed upon. Debates about intersectionality have raised questions such (...) as: What does it mean to say that oppressions “intersect”? Does this imply that we cannot speak of sexism apart from racism, class exploitation, or other forms of oppression? Can we theorize “women’s” oppression when Black, Latina, Asian, and white women experience different realities? And how can we build solidarity across these intersectional differences? This annotated bibliography introduces key resources for understanding how the notion of intersectionality originated, evolved, and continues to be debated. General Overviews lists resources that provide a general understanding of intersectionality for students, educators, and researchers. Early Roots includes both recent works tracing intersectionality to earlier Black feminist thought and those foundational texts themselves. Critical Engagements surveys major critiques and responses to intersectionality, and Conceptualization and Application features works that refine or employ the concept in theory and practice. As many scholars note, intersectionality is a work in progress—an evolving framework continually reshaped as feminists practice intersectionality in their scholarship and activism. This article is likewise a living document, expanding alongside ongoing feminist and anti-oppression projects. (shrink)

In this paper we reflect upon our multi-year reading group as a site of decolonial feminist praxis that motivates reading in a different register from how we were trained to read as academics in the humanities. In collaborative study we willingly open ourselves to change, to being worked on by one another and by the texts we read. Our reading together has initiated the undoing of settler colonial academic subjectivity and the co-creation of new forms of scholarly subjectivity grounded in (...) relations of care, openness to transformation, and a growing commitment to epistemic justice. In giving an account of our group history and process we reflect on our complicities with settler-colonialism in the university and consider the ways that reading together has cultivated our capacities to listen to counter-narratives, formulate institutional and self critique, and engage in epistemic reparations. (shrink)

Scholars routinely appeal to trust as a signifier of successful interventions and markers of healthy classrooms. Teaching that fosters trust is celebrated, and teachers whom students trust, cherished. Despite the optimistic view of what trust can achieve in and for education, little has been said about what trust truly is, what it requires, how it operates, or what it takes to be considered trustworthy. One might argue that there does not need to be direct scholarship on trust in education, as (...) it is straightforward and easily understood. While it may be true that trust is a common term, far from being deemed academic jargon, overlooking the insightful questions that arise when one begins to contemplate trust and its role in education would be a mistake. This encyclopedia entry covers considerable philosophical ground within the study of trust and connects the scholarship to concerns in educational studies. It provides a historical overview of trust by first referencing appeals within prominent philosophical texts, then by exploring feminist philosophy and care ethics in the 1980s, and finally by showcasing several philosophers of education who have addressed the topic. The second section walks through a technical philosophical definition of trust, considering conflicting accounts of who is involved in trusting relationships and how to describe the act of trusting. In the third section, the entry examines a specific type of trust, namely interpersonal trust, and how this type of trust functions both vertically and horizontally in traditional educational settings. The fourth section outlines the requirements for being a trustworthy teacher and the consequences for students when teachers fail to meet these requirements. Ultimately, this entry serves as a starting point for those interested in what (primarily Western, analytic) philosophers have to say about the role of trust in education. (shrink)

Effective altruists (EAs) seek to persuade the globally wealthy to donate a proportion of their income to do good, and specifically to donate it to those charit.

The paper's goal is the understanding of the ̔ fear of the other̕ within the Contemporary Indian Literature context and, in particular, through dalit women literature. I have selected four hindi dalit poems because they represent dalit women’s voice and they capture their agonies, pains and the dominant caste males vs females’ fear, the so called ̔fear of the other̕. It becomes inscribed into dalit women’s minds, as evidenced by many contemporary poems, so much so that women can be said (...) to experience an ̔enviroment of fear̕ enveloping their lives. For this reason, the paper is divided into four main parts: first, an introduction on dalit women issue; second, a brief analysis of the dalit women’s fear; third, how Hindi language can affect the society an and fourth, an analysis of poems written by eminent dalit poetesses together with the picture of dalit women arised from this literature. Finally, it is taken into consideration the translation from dalit women’s poems in Hindi into another language as a case study for a worldwide spread and awareness on the issue. Dalit Women. (shrink)