Suchergebnisse

"The way society is organised means that we all get made into members of various types of people, such as judges, wives, or women. These 'human social kinds' may be brought into being by oppressive social arrangements, and people may suffer oppression in virtue of being made into a member of a certain human social kind. This book argues that we should pay attention to the ways in which the very fact of being made into a member of a certain human social kind can be oppressive in and of itself. For example, someone who becomes a wife under circumstances where husbands have unjust powers over their wives has suffered a wrong, even if her husband never in fact exercises these powers. The book argues that social movements against racial and gendered oppression, including efforts to advance trans liberation, must get to grips with this phenomenon, and supplies the conceptual tools needed to do so. The first tool is an analysis of this general form of wrong, termed 'ontic injustice'. The second tool is an account of 'ontic oppression', a particular kind of ontic injustice in which the wrong amounts to a form of oppression, in the sense of being structural and pervasive. The third tool is a pluralist account of race and gender kinds, according to which there is no single social kind that corresponds to a gender category such as 'woman', but rather, various different social kinds, each of which is explanatory for different purposes"--

Abstract
The conferralist account of social properties that Ásta develops and defends in Categories We Live By is persuasive in many ways. Conferralism could however do better, by its own lights, at handling the phenomenon of intersectionality. This paper first suggests a friendly amendment to the schema for conferrals that Asta offers. This helps to explain the difficulty concerning intersectionality. Finally, the paper suggests a way of developing the conferralist account that would resolve this difficulty.

AbstractThis paper explores and and questions the distinction between friendship and romantic love, as these two types of relationship are usually understood. We argue that the search for an essential and necessary distinction between them is misguided, since the distinction is most plausibly viewed as being based solely on a cluster of contingent social norms. Furthermore, we seek to show that there are good reasons for not drawing this distinction, such that we should try to change our social norms in this regard. The friendship-romantic relationship binary, we argue, is unhelpful for the flourishing of both friendships and romantic relationships, and unnecessarily limits access to certain goods, notably affectionate touch. Furthermore, this binary raises specifically feminist concerns: that it prioritizes cross-gender relationships over relationships between women, that it imposes limits on intimacy between men, and that it is implicated in problems concerning sexual consent. Our romantic relationships, our friendships, and our gender politics would therefore benefit from dissolving this socially-created distinction. Finally, in service of responding to a potential objection, we offer a preliminary sketch of a positive proposal for how our relationships might be structured in the absence of a friendship/romantic relationship binary, according to which relationships are structured around shared projects. On this proposal, the projects we engage in with other people can function to give definition to our relationships to them, but it is up to us which projects we want to engage in and with whom. Most importantly, this should be negotiated on an individual basis rather than being governed by social norms restricting us to either romantic relationships or friendships.