Beauvoir's distinction between romantic and authentic love offers us an opportunity for thinking through the complex relations among philosophy, reading, and love. If we accept her account of romantic love as a flawed, dependent mode of being, and her suggestion that an authentic love—one that engages maturely with the other—is possible, then we might take the risk of thinking of reading in these terms.

Comparing the typologies of human activities developed by Beauvoir and Arendt, I argue that these philosophers share the same concept of labor as well as a similar insight that labor cannot provide a justification or evaluative measure for human life. But Beauvoir and Arendt think differently about work (as contrasted with labor), and Arendt alone illuminates the inability of constructive work to provide non-utilitarian value for human existence. Beauvoir, on the other hand, exceeds Arendt in examining the ethical implications of our existential need for a plurality of free peers in a public realm.

How ought we to respond to strangers in imminent need? Many people suggest that we need justice to temper the partiality of care. In this paper I argue that neither care nor justice adequately motivates attention to the suffering of strangers. Rather, a different virtue, compassion grounded in equanimity, is required. I demonstrate that the virtue of compassion allows the agent to sustain her engagement with suffering strangers without sacrificing her own flourishing.

This paper will examine the experience of and drive for bodily invisibility in women through the theoretical approaches of phenomenology and social constructionism. An examination of the social disruptions of bodily invisibility and the compulsive avoidance of such instances, particularly with respect to the fastidious maintenance of body comportment and appearance within the narrow parameters afforded by social norms, will lead to an exploration of the conflation of biomedicine with the beauty industry.

Implicit in feminist and other critiques of ideal theorizing is a particular view of what normative theory should be like. Although I agree with the rejection of ideal theorizing that oppression theorists (and other theorists of justice) have advocated, the proposed alternative of nonideal theorizing is also problematic. Nonideal theorizing permits one to address oppression by first describing (nonideal) oppressive conditions, and then prescribing the best action that is possible or feasible given the conditions. Borrowing an insight from the “moral dilemmas debate”—namely that moral wrongdoing or failure can be unavoidable—I suggest that offering (only) action-guidance under nonideal conditions obscures the presence and significance of unavoidable moral failure. An adequate normative theory should be able to issue a further, non-action-guiding evaluative claim, namely that the best that is possible under oppressive conditions is not good enough, and may constitute a moral failure. I find exclusively action-guiding nonideal theory to be both insufficiently nonidealizing (because it idealizes the moral agent by falsely characterizing the agent as always able to avoid moral wrongdoing) and meanwhile too strongly adapted to the nonideal (because normative expectations are lowered and detrimentally adapted to options that, while the best possible, are still unacceptable).

This paper develops a new account of Beauvoir's “Hegelianism” and argues that the strand of contemporary interpretation of Beauvoir that seeks to represent her thought in isolation from that of Jean-Paul Sartre constitutes a betrayal of the philosophy of recognition that she derives from Hegel. It underscores the extent to which Beauvoir influenced Sartre's Being and Nothingness and shows that Sartre and Beauvoir both adapted Hegel's ideas and agreed in rejecting his optimism.

Ethicists of care have objected to traditional moral philosophy's reliance upon abstract universal principles. They claim that the use of abstraction renders traditional theories incapable of capturing morally relevant, particular features of situations. I argue that this objection sometimes conflates two different levels of moral thinking: the level of justification and the level of deliberation. Specifically, I claim that abstraction or attention to context at the level of justification does not entail, as some critics seem to think, a commitment to abstraction or attention to context at the level of deliberation. It follows that critics who reject a theory's use of abstraction at the level of justification have not shown that the theory recommends abstraction at the level of deliberation. It follows that critics who reject a theory's use of abstraction at the level of justification have not shown that the theory recommends abstraction at the level of deliberation and that it, therefore, compels the deliberating agent to overlook morally salient details.

This paper treats the political and ethical issues associated with the new caretaking technologies. Given the number of feminists who have raised serious concerns about the future of care work in the United States, and who have been critical of the degree to which society “free rides” on women's caretaking labor, I consider whether technology may provide a solution to this problem. Certainly, if we can create machines and robots to take on particular tasks, we may lighten the care burden that women currently face, much of which is heavy and repetitious, and which results in injury and care “burnout” for many female caretakers. Yet, in some contexts, I argue that high-tech robotic care may undermine social relationships, cutting individuals off from the possibility of social connectedness with others.

In the early 1990s, Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking was criticized for harboring a latent ethnocentrism. Ruddick responded to these critiques in the 1995 edition of her book, but her response has not yet been addressed in the feminist philosophical literature. This essay addresses this lacuna in the scholarship on Ruddick. In the last installment of this critique, Alison Bailey and Patrice DiQuinzio suggested that the only way for Ruddick to avoid the ethnocentrism charge would require her near-universalistic claims about mothering to be rejected in favor of “particularized, localized accounts of mothering.” In this essay I'll show that this claim goes too far. After reviewing Lugones's and Bailey's critiques of Ruddick, along with Ruddick's response, I propose a “modified universalism” that addresses the concerns raised by Ruddick's critics while preserving key elements of her theory.

Simone de Beauvoir offers one of the most interesting philosophical accounts of childhood, and, as numerous scholars have argued, it is one of the most important contributions that she made to existentialism. Beauvoir stressed the importance of childhood on one's ability to assume one's freedom. This radically changed how freedom was construed for existentialism. Rather than positing an adult subjectivity that tries to flee freedom through bad faith, Beauvoir's account forces a recognition of a situated freedom that itself is also developmentally achieved. In this article, I explore the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. By reading Beauvoir through Rousseau—who was one of her favorite authors—we see not just one but two accounts of childhood in Beauvoir's philosophical work. On the one hand is the idealistic childhood wherein the child is an apprentice to freedom. On the other is the constrained childhood whose product is apprenticed to the serious. I begin with a brief summary of Rousseau's Emile. Next, I offer some justification for reading Beauvoir alongside Rousseau before offering an account of Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. I end by exploring some of the implications of my reading for freedom.

Care ethicists have long insisted that Kantian moral theory fails to capture the partiality that ought to be present in our personal relationships. In her most recent book, Virginia Held claims that, unlike impartial moral theories, care ethics guides us in how we should act toward friends and family. Because these actions are performed out of care, they have moral value for a care ethicist. The same actions, Held claims, would not have moral worth for a Kantian because of the requirement of impartiality. Although Kantian moral theory is an impartial theory, I argue that the categorical imperative in the Formulation of Humanity as an End and the duty of respect require that we give special treatment to friends and family because of their relationships with us. Therefore, this treatment does have moral value for a Kantian.

Antigone fascinates G. W. F. Hegel and Luce Irigaray, both of whom turn to her in their explorations and articulations of ethics. Hegel and Irigaray make these re-turns to Antigone through the double and related lenses of nature and sexual difference. This essay investigates these figures of Antigone and the accompanying ethical accounts of nature and sexual difference as a way of examining Irigaray's complex relation to and creative uses of Hegel's thought.

This essay assesses the compatibility of Eva Kittay's dependency critique with Rawlsian political liberalism. I argue for the inclusion of a modified version of Kittay's revisions within Rawlsian theory in order to yield a theory that supports much of dependency work. Beyond these selected changes, however, I argue that Kittay's other proposed changes should not be included because they are incompatible with Rawls, and furthermore, their incorporation does not yield a theory that includes utter dependents.

This paper offers a genealogy of anti-polygamy sentiment in North America, elucidating certain racist and nationalist formations that are implicit in the historical valorization and enforcement of heterosexual monogamy. It tracks the white supremacist and heteronormative logic that conditions the widespread disdain toward polygamy, and that renders it fundamentally different from familial configurations that are associated with national identity. Relating political and philosophical doctrines to the archival documentation and insights of contemporary legal and cultural historians of anti-polygamy sentiment, it elucidates the racial Anglo-Saxonism of Hegel's ruminations on marriage and on the state, and highlights its reverberation within the political philosophy that justified the criminalization of polygamy and its supporting institutions in the nineteenth century and in contemporary immigration policy and same-sex marriage advocacy in Canada and the United States.

The logical empiricists often appear as a foil for feminist theories. Their emphasis on the individualistic nature of knowledge and on the value-neutrality of science seems directly opposed to most feminist concerns. However, several recent works have highlighted aspects of Carnap's views that make him seem like much less of a straightforwardly positivist thinker. Certain of these aspects lend themselves to feminist concerns much more than the stereotypical picture would imply.

Hume is usually taken to have an evidentialist account of testimonial belief: one is justified in believing what someone says if one has empirical evidence that they have been reliable in the past. This account is impartialist: such evidence is required no matter who the person is, or what relations she may have to you. I, however, argue that Hume has another account of testimony, one grounded in sympathy. This account is partialist, in that empirical evidence is not required in order for one to be justified in believing some of the assertions of one's friends.