Can our epistemic environments render us closed-minded? This paper argues that they can. Drawing insights from feminist character theory, I examine two ways in which our epistemic environments can render us closed-minded. First, they can cause us to develop the intrinsic dispositions necessary for closed-mindedness. Our environments and their structures of power and our social locations in them can cause us to be unwilling or constitutionally unable to engage seriously with relevant alternatives to our beliefs. Second, closed-mindedness can also be relational: whether a person is closed-minded will partly depend on extrinsic features of her environment—on whether or not her environment supplies relevant intellectual options with which to engage. Drawing on relational accounts of autonomy and agency, I argue that just as one won’t have autonomy or agency in an environment that severely restricts freedom and opportunity, one won’t be open-minded in an environment that severely restricts intellectual options (e.g., an echo chamber). The absence of intellectual options renders one closed-minded, even when one has the intrinsic dispositions necessary for open-mindedness. Overall closed-mindedness (CMER) is an unwillingness or inability to engage seriously with relevant intellectual options or to revise one’s beliefs.
This paper considers whether apparently non-essentialist accounts of biological sex can avoid sex-essentialist uptake when expressed via generics. Recent work in philosophy of biology has defended realist accounts grounded in anisogamy as both empirically robust and compatible with diversity. I argue that Paul E. Griffiths' sex concept is the most compelling of these views and is not vulnerable to sex essentialism in itself. However, the generics literature shows that generic statements expressing biological generalisations can nonetheless have sex-essentialist uptakes. Drawing on Sterken's account of quantificational force and Leslie's cognitive mechanisms—characteristic dimensions and counterexample resistance—I argue that even Griffiths' carefully non-essentialist account gets processed as an absolute generic, erasing the nuance that distinguishes it from traditional gametic essentialism. Once essentialised at the level of cognition, these generics feed into broader social consequences: the assumption that biological sex determines behavioural dispositions, emotional capacities, and social roles. Generic expressions about behavioural dispositions, emotional capacities, and social roles inherit their apparent biological authority from realist sex concepts, lending scientific legitimacy to stereotypes that Griffiths' metaphysics was never designed to support. Ultimately, I argue that sex-essentialist uptake places significant constraints on the ability of realist accounts of sex to remain non-essentialist in practice.
This paper proposes a novel account of the conditions for moral virtue centered on an important but overlooked notion: appreciation. I begin by challenging an intellectualist tradition in the literature, which I call the Cognitive Requirement Thesis (CRT): that moral virtue requires the cognitive ability to explain why one’s action is right (Hursthouse 1999; Annas 2011; Hills 2009, 2015). Targeting Hills’s version in particular, I argue that CRT sets the cognitive bar too high, and propose instead the Moral Appreciation View: one is morally virtuous when and because one is able to appreciate the relevant moral features of a situation. By appreciation, I mean a distinctive kind of sensitivity manifested in three dimensions: (i) perceptual sensitivity: recognizing the presence of a morally relevant feature in a situation, (ii) normative sensitivity: capturing that feature’s normative significance, and (iii) affective sensitivity: being affectively moved and motivated in a way that is responsive to that feature. I further distinguish appreciation from knowledge and understanding, suggesting that it entails neither, and argue that it is necessary for virtue: an agent who appreciates the right-making features of situations is thereby disposed to perform right action in a reliable, non-lucky manner across a range of cases.
Andrea Dworkin (1946 – 2005) is perhaps best remembered as the militant feminist who, in 1983—alongside feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon—drafted an ordinance defining pornography as ‘a violation of women’s civil rights’ for the City of Minneapolis. Though this ordinance was vetoed, Dworkin’s reputation as a porn-opposing, (cis-hetero) sex-negative feminist never died. Dworkin saw woman-hating everywhere, and she saw pornography—and intercourse more broadly—as a central site where this hate was realised. But does Dworkin’s opposition to pornography really rightfully earn her a ‘sex-negative’ reputation? This project proposes to undertake a close study of Dworkin’s oeuvre in order to reveal the contours of her views about sex. In bringing the nuances of her views about sex to light, I will argue that Dworkin’s observations may be central for an emancipatory feminist sexual ethics in the present.
