Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters to Feminism has its virtues. The book is well written, and compared to the levels of vicious vitriol normally accompanying work on transgender issues, it is generally even handed and fair minded, if a bit sharp and sarcastic at times. As one of the most visible and beleaguered defenders of the ‘gender critical’ take on transgenderism, Stock is known for wading into the most contentious online debates imaginable and she had been the occasion for some appalling attacks on academic freedom as result. In Material Girls Stock laudably tries to defuse things as she plays the analytic philosopher of her training, arguing with rigor and restraint, considering her opponents’ arguments with care, and searching for as much common ground as possible. Keep reading…

The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex by Hida Viloria and Maria Nieto purports to show it is unscientific to believe there are only two biological sexes, that believing this is of a piece with bad things like eugenics, and that the world needs to do much better in how it thinks about and treated intersex people. In the first two of these goals I think the book fails. Oddly, it barely argues for the “spectrum” of its title, and the authors never explain what they think it would mean for biological sex to be a spectrum. While it repeatedly claims intersex constitutes a third sex category, its most impressive parts work against that conclusion. The authors also regularly abandon their project for the much more modest and less controversial goal of showing sexual expression—in physical traits and in gender—falls along a spectrum. For their part, the moral and political parts are mostly unsupported assertions even if its renunciation of mistreatment of intersex people is obviously sound.

That’s the bad news…Keep Reading.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—And Why This Harms Everybody, Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay.

This book had little chance of succeeding. It is too ambitious, trying at once to be a history of postmodern thought, an account of its influence on contemporary political and legal discourse, a refutation of its philosophical underpinnings, and a defense of the liberalism it challenges. Its authors also made their names provoking and antagonizing the corners of the political and academic worlds they target here. Most readers will pick up this book already loving or hating it. 

I went into it with my own bias: there is, I think, is a lot wrong with what the book calls ‘Theory’ and what they identify as its contemporary political offsprings, but I’ve found Lindsay especially to be strident and superficial in the online polemics for which he is now mostly known. I expected a book that I would sometimes agree with, but which would be drearily reliant on caricatures and stereotypes. Perhaps because Pluckrose’s more moderate demeanor prevailed, the book is more fair minded than I expected, and reasonably if unevenly well documented and substantive in its arguments…Keep Reading

Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works starts with a plausible and succinct definition of fascism—“ultranationalism of some variety…with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.” It then identifies the features of “fascist politics”, or “fascist tactics as a mechanism to achieve power.” These “strategies” are “the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, appeals to the heartland, and a dismantling of public welfare and unity.” Fascists deploy these tactics, Stanley suggests, to exploit existing or manufactured insecurities about or fears of parts of a country’s population in order to justify oppressive policies targeting political opponents and troublesome political minorities so that they can take control. Each of these is the focus of a chapter, followed by a brief Epilogue. Keep reading…

Kate Manne’s Gone Girl has a lot to recommend it. Among its merits is a direct and accessible style and Manne’s original and insightful takes on a number of topics, including some we might have thought were pretty shopworn by now. Manne is also an insightful reader of fiction and a writer who moves between literature, philosophy, and politics with agility. Overall though, the book is an uneven work in my view, and frequently frustrating...Keep reading.

There has been a lot of talk of late about whether or not chimpanzees are, or should be counted as, persons. The most immediate occasion concerns a legal maneuver on the part of the Nonhuman Rights Project to get two chimpanzees to be recognized in law as persons. A group of philosophers and others have submitted an amicus brief in support of this motion, and a fortiori in support of the contention that no legally plausible understanding of “personhood” excludes chimpanzees.

I have a lot of sympathy for the practical aims of the HNRP in this case. Given what we know about chimpanzees and the facts of the case at hand it seems likely that the two chimpanzees are being harmed and this should be rectified. However, I find the arguments of the amicus brief unpersuasive and a largely beside the point. Overall they display the penchant of philosophers to confuse the kinds of questions that interest philosophers with questions that are relevant to legal proceedings. I’ll say a few things here about a couple of examples. (Read more)

So here’s an argument we’ve all heard:

It would be wrong of me to choose not to help a child in peril in order protect some kind of material good—a fancy car, expensive clothes, etc. Each of us, however, is in a morally comparable position every day, able to help a needy child at the cost of relatively modest amount of money. Specifically, modulo some plausible calculations, by donating $200 or so to an effective charity we can extend the life of a child living in extreme poverty. So, by choosing not to donate the $200, each of us who are in a position to do so are as morally culpable as the person who allows a child to perish for the sake of a car.

Now, versions of this argument—offered most famously by Peter Unger and Peter Singer in various places over the years—have probably done a whole lot of good, certainly more than most philosophical arguments. And I would hardly want to discourage people from donating to the likes of Oxfam. Still, it is a transparently bad argument, or so it seems to me. Keep Reading…

It seems “a bit” by my blog’s standards isn’t a particularly brief amount of time. Apologies if anyone was waiting on pins and needles for this follow up.

What I am playing around with is something like this. We’re supposing that in the first instance a moral judgment to the effect ‘x is wrong’ is a statement of a social fact. Specifically it points to the fact that x violates a norm recognized by the relevant community and incorporated into its practices. As noted in the previous post, one way to avoid the worry of ethical relativism is to appeal to a trans-cultural good which can be used to adjudicate competing such norms accepted by different communities. If we define what counts as human flourishing in a way that doesn’t depend on the particular values of any one community, or which can be recognized and accepted across diverse communities, we can use that to judge how conducive a given community’s norms are of human flourishing. In a rough way this would capture the strategies of Aristotelian virtue ethics and the Natural Law Theory as understood by Aquinas, but in a way that acknowledges and accommodates the fundamentally social nature of morality as well as the fact of moral diversity. Together these point in the direction of the less metaphysically loaded but still Aristotelianish Capabilities Approach of Martha Nussbaum….Continue