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Serene Khader's book on adaptive preference is a book that should be read by anyone interested in oppression and how to struggle against and overcome it. According to many feminist theories of oppression, a primary problem for overcoming oppression is that the victims become accustomed to their circumstances and even come to prefer them. Their preference for their oppressive conditions then form practical and moral obstacles to changing them, since the oppressed act in ways to further those conditions and it seems cruel or unfair to take from the oppressed what they claim to prefer. Such preferences are called adaptive preferences, and transforming them seems to be an important goal of institutions that aim to improve the lives of the oppressed. This book is about how and why public institutions should intervene in the lives and societies of oppressed persons with adaptive preferences to encourage their flourishing. Although Khader explicitly targets impoverished and oppressed women in the global South, her arguments should apply equally to other contexts of oppression and deprivation.
Khader offers a deliberative perfectionist approach to identifying and responding to adaptive preferences— deprived people's preferences that perpetuate their deprivation.
Decolonizing Universalism argues that feminism can respect cultural and religious differences and acknowledge the legacy of imperialism without surrendering its core ethical commitments. Transcending relativism/ universalism debates that reduce feminism to a Western notion, Serene J. Khader proposes a feminist vision that is sensitive to postcolonial and antiracist concerns. Khader criticizes the false universalism of what she calls 'Enlightenment liberalism, ' a worldview according to which the West is the one true exemplar of gender justice and moral progress is best achieved through economic independence and the abandonment of tradition. She argues that anti-imperialist feminists must rediscover the normative core of feminism and rethink the role of moral ideals in transnational feminist praxis. What emerges is a nonideal universalism that rejects missionary feminisms that treat Western intervention and the spread of Enlightenment liberalism as the path to global gender injustice. The book draws on evidence from transnational women's movements and development practice in addition to arguments from political philosophy and postcolonial and decolonial theory, offering a rich moral vision for twenty-first century feminism.
In this major book Martha Nussbaum, one of the most innovative and influential philosophical voices of our time, proposes a kind of feminism that is genuinely international, argues for an ethical underpinning to all thought about development planning and public policy, and dramatically moves beyond the abstractions of economists and philosophers to embed thought about justice in the concrete reality of the struggles of poor women. Nussbaum argues that international political and economic thought must be sensitive to gender difference as a problem of justice, and that feminist thought must begin to focus on the problems of women in the third world. Taking as her point of departure the predicament of poor women in India, she shows how philosophy should undergird basic constitutional principles that should be respected and implemented by all governments, and used as a comparative measure of quality of life across nations.
This collection of new essays by leading scholars examines philosophical issues at the intersection of feminism and autonomy studies.Contributors advance central debates in autonomy theory by examining basic components, normative commitments and applications of autonomy, with particular attention to issues of gender and oppression.
This volume gathers together previously unpublished articles focusing on the relationship between preference adaptation and autonomy in connection with human enhancement and in the end-of-life context. The value of individual autonomy is a cornerstone of liberal societies. While there are different conceptions of the notion, it is arguable that on any plausible understanding of individual autonomy an autonomous agent needs to take into account the conditions that circumscribe its actions. Yet it has also been suggested that allowing one’s options to affect one’s preferences threatens autonomy. While this phenomenon has received some attention in other areas of moral philosophy, it has seldom been considered in bioethics. This book combines for the first time the topics of preference adaptation, individual autonomy, and choosing to die or to enhance human capacities in a unique and comprehensive volume, filling an important knowledge gap in the contemporary bioethics literature.
The Routledge Handbook of Development Ethics provides readers with insight into the central questions of development ethics, the main approaches to answering them, and areas for future research. Over the past seventy years, it has been argued and increasingly accepted that worthwhile development cannot be reduced to economic growth. Rather, a number of other goals must be realised: Enhancement of people's well-being Equitable sharing in benefits of development Empowerment to participate freely in development Environmental sustainability Promotion of human rights Promotion of cultural freedom, consistent with human rights Responsible conduct, including integrity over corruption Agreement that these are essential goals has also been accompanied by disagreements about how to conceptualize or apply them in different cases or contexts. Using these seven goals as an organizing principle, this handbook presents different approaches to achieving each one, drawing on academic literature, policy documents and practitioner experience. This international and multi-disciplinary handbook will be of great interest to development policy makers and program workers, students and scholars in development studies, public policy, international studies, applied ethics and other related disciplines.
This volume addresses the exercise of personal autonomy in contemporary situations of normative pluralism. In the Western liberal tradition, from a strictly legal and theoretical perspective the social individual has the right to exercise the autonomy of his or her will. In a context of legal plurality, however, personal autonomy becomes more complicated. Can and should personal autonomy be recognized as a legal foundation for protecting a person’s freedom to renounce what others view as his or her fundamental ‘human rights’? This collection develops an interdisciplinary conceptual framework to address these questions and presents empirical studies examining the gap between the principle of personal autonomy and its implementation. In a context of cultural diversity, this gap manifests itself in two particular ways. First, not every culture gives the same pre-eminence to personal autonomy when examining the legal effects of an individual’s acts. Second, in a society characterized by ‘weak pluralism’, the legal assessment of personal autonomy often favours the views of the dominant majority. In highlighting these diverse perspectives and problematizing the so-called ‘guardian function’ of human rights, i.e., purporting to protect weaker parties by limiting their personal autonomy in the name of gender equality, fair trial, etc., this book offers a nuanced approach to the principle of autonomy and addresses the questions of whether it can effectively be deployed in situations of internormativity and what conditions must be met in order to ensure that it is not rendered devoid of all meaning.
Political theory, from antiquity to the present, has been divided over the relationship between the requirements of justice and the limitations of persons and institutions to meet those requirements. Some theorists hold that a theory of justice should be utopian or idealistic--that the derivation of the correct principles of justice should not take into account human and institutional limitations. Others insist on a realist or non-utopian view, according to which feasibility--facts about what is possible given human and institutional limitations--is a constraint on principles of justice. In recent years, the relationship between the ideal and the real has become the subject of renewed scholarly interest. This anthology aims to represent the contemporary state of this classic debate. By and large, contributors to the volume deny that the choice between realism and idealism is binary. Rather, there is a continuum between realism and idealism that locates these extremes of each view at opposite poles. The contributors, therefore, tend to occupy middle positions, only leaning in the ideal or non-ideal direction. Together, their contributions not only represent a wide array of attractive positions in the new literature on the topic, but also collectively advance how we understand the difference between idealism and realism itself.
Political theory, from antiquity to the present, has been divided over the relationship between the requirements of justice and the limitations of persons and institutions to meet those requirements. Some theorists hold that a theory of justice should be utopian or idealistic--that the derivation of the correct principles of justice should not take into account human and institutional limitations. Others insist on a realist or non-utopian view, according to which feasibility--facts about what is possible given human and institutional limitations--is a constraint on principles of justice. In recent years, the relationship between the ideal and the real has become the subject of renewed scholarly interest. This anthology aims to represent the contemporary state of this classic debate. By and large, contributors to the volume deny that the choice between realism and idealism is binary. Rather, there is a continuum between realism and idealism that locates these extremes of each view at opposite poles. The contributors, therefore, tend to occupy middle positions, only leaning in the ideal or non-ideal direction. Together, their contributions not only represent a wide array of attractive positions in the new literature on the topic, but also collectively advance how we understand the difference between idealism and realism itself.