Allison Jaggar Feminist Philosophy

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Allison Jaggar Feminist Philosophy

• Eija Sumner

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Alison Jaggar

• 1990 to present, Professor of Philosophy and
  Women and Gender Studies at the University of
  Colorado at Boulder
• BA from University of London, 1961-64
• M. Litt. from University of Edinburgh, 1965-67
• Ph.D. from State University of New York at
  Buffalo,1967-70
• 1995 SWIP Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the
  Year

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Jaggars Interests Current Work

• Contemporary social, moral and political
  philosophy, often from a feminist perspective.
  She is also interested in moral epistemology,
  especially in how to justify social criticism in
  contexts of inequality and cultural difference.
  More recently, she has been working on some
  gendered aspects of global justice.
• Current Works and Works in Progress
• Abortion Three Perspectives
• Pogge and his Critics
• Ethics Across Borders
• Global Gender Justice

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Fun Facts on Jaggar

• Founding member of the Society for Women in
  Philosophy in 1971
• She gave a lecture at WSU in 1979
• She is listed in the book, The Professors The
  101 Most Dangerous Academics in America written
  by conservative David Horowitz

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Feminist Ethics Philosophy

• I have consistently preferred to define it in
  terms that are broad rather than narrow, weak
  rather than strong, inclusive rather than
  exclusive (Jaggar on Feminist Ethics)
• Commitment to ending womens subordination
• Feminists seek out and challenge male biases
  within mainstream traditions of philosophical
  ethics, investigating ways in which these may
  have participated in subordinating women or in
  rationalizing their subordination.

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Issues with Mainstream Philosophical thought

• Generally, a functionalist view of women (by
  Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel,
  Nietzsche)
• In Western tradition, women are often represented
  as being less rational than men, also leading to
  thought that womens sense of reason is inferior
  to mens.

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Living with Contradictions

• The issues about which feminists disagree are
  highly charged emotionally as well as morally,
  and they are politically complex. Usually they
  cannot be reduced to simple pro and con
  positions because they have many more than two
  sides. These issues may involve conflicts of
  interest and loyalty among overlapping social
  groups, incompatibilities among important
  feminist values or principles, desires thought to
  be unfeminist, or perceived needs to utilize
  political means that are in contradiction with
  socially desirable ends.

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Ethics

• Practical moral and political issues cannot be
  resolved through the simple application of
  general moral principles.
• The assumption that what people ought to do in
  specific situations may somehow be deduced from
  independently validated ethical principles is
  regarded as increasingly as mistaken, resting on
  a misleading positivist model or moral
  justification.
• Normative ethical relativism? Subjectivism?

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Naturalism

• Naturalism in this sense denies the existence of
  a pure realm of reason, to be studied by methods
  that are distinctly philosophical. Instead, it
  advocates multidisciplinary approaches to
  understanding human knowledge, utilizing the
  findings and methods of a range of disciplines
  with special reliance on the empirical sciences.
  (ethical concepts occur with collaboration with
  psychology, economics, and the social sciences)

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Questions?