This book is a philosophical exploration of disorientation and its significance for action. Disorientations are human experiences of losing one's bearings, such that life is disrupted and it is not clear how to go on. In the face of life experiences like trauma, grief, illness, migration, education, queer identification, and consciousness raising, individuals can be deeply disoriented. These and other disorientations are not rare. Although disorientations can be common and powerful parts of individuals' lives, they remain uncharacterized by Western philosophers, (...) and overlooked by ethicists.Disorientations can paralyze, overwhelm, embitter, and misdirect moral agents, and moral philosophy and motivational psychology have important insights to offer into why this is. More perplexing are the ways disorientations may prompt improved moral action.Ami Harbin draws on first person accounts, philosophical texts, and qualitative and quantitative research to show that in some cases of disorientation, individuals gain new forms of awareness of political complexity and social norms, and new habits of relating to others and an unpredictable moral landscape. She then argues for the moral and political promise of these gains. A major contention of the book is that disorientations have 'non-resolutionary effects': they can help us act without first helping us resolve what to do. In exploring these possibilities, Disorientation and Moral Life contributes to philosophy of emotions, moral philosophy, and political thought from a distinctly feminist perspective. It makes the case for seeing disorientations as having the power to motivate profound and long-term shifts in moral and political action. A feminist re-envisioning of moral psychology provides the framework for understanding how they do so. (shrink)

Neglect of the moral promise of disorientation is a persistent gap in even the most sophisticated philosophies of embodiment. In this article, I begin to correct this neglect by expanding our sense of the range and nature of disoriented experience and proposing new visions of disorientation as benefiting moral agency. Disorientations are experienced through complex interactions of corporeal, affective, and cognitive processes, and are characterized by feelings of shock, surprise, unease, and discomfort; felt disorientations almost always make us unsure of (...) how to go on. I argue that experiences of disorientation can strengthen the moral agency of individuals. I begin by clarifying experiences of felt ease and orientation. I then characterize disoriented embodiment by investigating select experiences that often involve or accompany disorientation, focusing throughout on how disorientation prompts changes in motivation and action. I conclude by charting how disoriented embodiments can help individuals become better moral agents overall, in part by challenging norms that restrict embodiment and undermining dualistic conceptions of the self. (shrink)

As a text in use by mental health practitioners, policy makers, and ordinary individuals, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) categorizes a variety of mental, psychological, and emotional experiences on a wide spectrum of disorders. Many common experiences are described there as symptoms, chiefly for the purposes of identifying, diagnosing, and treating disorders. “Disorientations” are not (yet) categorized as a stand-alone disorder in the DSM, but involve a cluster of experiences that border on and overlap with experiences (...) already categorized as symptoms of other disorders. Where experiences of disorientation appear in the DSM, they are, for the most part, still understood as.. (shrink)

Accounts of human beings as essentially social have had a long history in philosophy as reflected in the Ancient Greeks; in African and Asian philosophy; in Modern European thinkers such as Mary Wo...

This paper draws on findings from qualitative interviews with queer and trans patients and with physicians providing care to queer and trans patients in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to explore how routine practices of health care can perpetuate or challenge the marginalization of queers. One of the most common “measures” of improved cultural competence in health care practice is self-reported increases in confidence and comfort, though it seems unlikely that an increase in physician comfort levels with queer and trans patients (...) will necessarily mean better health care for queers. More attention to current felt discomfort in patient–provider encounters is required. Policies and practices that avoid discomfort at all costs are not always helpful for care, and experiences of shared discomfort in queer health contexts are not always harmful. (shrink)

One branch of bioethics assumes that mainly agents of the state are responsible for public health. Following Susan Sherwin’s relational ethics, we suggest moving away from a “state-centered” approach toward a more thoroughly relational approach. Indeed, certain agents must be reconstituted in and through shifting relations with others, complicating discussions of responsibility for public health. Drawing on two case studies—the health politics and activism of the Black Panther Party and the work of the Common Ground Collective in post-Katrina New Orleans—we (...) argue for the need to attend more carefully to the limitations of states and state-driven public health programs. (shrink)

Against the background of the exclusion of many feminist methodologies from mainstream philosophy, and in light of the methodological challenges of providing accounts of experience responsive to the lives of agents, in this paper I return to early feminist philosophers of emotion to highlight how they anticipate and respond to methodological criticisms. Sue Campbell (1956–2011) was one philosopher who used methodological quandaries to strengthen her account of the formation and expression of feelings (Campbell ). By rereading selected texts together intentionally (...) for their structural and methodological strategies, I emphasize the power of formal characteristics to make insightful claims about experience possible. I consider how feminist philosophers of “experienced agency” can put these strategies to use in facing ongoing methodological criticisms, taking as a case study an account of how it can feel to act responsibly against injustice. (shrink)

This paper offers an ethical consideration of how fear can be a tool of agents, used to deliberately shift people away from existing beliefs, commitments, or habits, or towards new ones. It contends that properly understanding the ethical dimensions of such uses of fear depends in part on a clear understanding of the dynamics of disorientation that can be involved in such uses. Section two begins with a clarification of the connections between fear, orientation, and disorientation. It suggests that experiences (...) of fear are in some cases either orienting or disorienting, and that the disorienting aspects of fear are in need of more attention. Section three shows how experiences of fear can be tools—they can be cultivated and wielded by agents deliberately for multiple reasons, including sometimes in order to disorient or re-orient others. Section four turns to a moral evaluation of these uses of fear, attending specifically to why the dynamics of disorientation and orientation often involved in experiences of fear are important for understanding the moral status of uses of fear. (shrink)

In Disorientation and Moral Life, I consider disorientations as experiences of not knowing how to go on following serious life events and experiences like those involved in traumas, grief, illness, education, consciousness raising, and migration. I challenge a history of moral philosophy that I claim has been preoccupied by a focus on the best moral agents as those who are most decisive, wholehearted, and clear about how they ought to act. In this piece, I respond to three commentaries on Disorientation (...) and Moral Life. In particular, I offer reflections on how disorientations might be useful in contexts of disability studies, prison abolitionism, professional philosophy, anti-racist action, and political organizing. (shrink)

In this article, I consider how fear in contexts of crisis shapes and is shaped by agents’ relationships. I survey a number of approaches to understanding fearing at the intersection of empirical psychology and philosophy, highlighting the extent to which interpersonal relationships are positioned as involved in processes of fearing, and establish what I take to insufficient attention paid by these approaches to the ways interpersonal relations shape the emotions we come to have. Contexts of acute crisis and uncertainty can (...) involve rapidly adjusting practices of fearing in response to other agents, both those we trust and those we do not. I call for the development of a model of ‘relational calibration’ for understanding the complex interpersonal dynamics of fearing during crises, including in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

In the development of new vaccines, many trials use age de-escalation: after establishing safety and efficacy in adult populations, progressively younger cohorts are enrolled and studied. Age de-escalation promotes many values. The responsibility to protect children from potential risks of experimental vaccines is significant, not only given increased risks of adverse effects but also because parents and medical professionals have a moral responsibility to protect children from harms associated with novel, uncertain interventions. Further, given that young children cannot provide informed (...) consent, acceptable risks for research requiring proxy consent are lower than for adults making decisions for themselves. Although age de-escalation approaches are widely used in vaccine trials, including notably in the recent development of pediatric COVID-19 vaccines, ethicists have not addressed the benefits and risks of these approaches. Their benefits are largely assumed and unstated, while their potential risks are usually overlooked. There are no official ethics guidelines for the use of age de-escalation in clinical research. In this paper, we provide a systematic account of key moral factors to consider when employing age de-escalation. Analyzing pediatric COVID-19 vaccine development as our key case study, we clarify the benefits, risks, and trade-offs involved in age de-escalation approaches and call for the development of evidence-based best practice guidelines to identify when age de-escalation is likely to be an ethical strategy in vaccine development. (shrink)

For several years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting Emergency Management. In this essay, we focus on how community groups in Detroit and Flint advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, particularly during the period of 2014 to 2016. We explore how, through a series of direct interventions – including public meetings and international gatherings, independent journalism and social media, community-based research projects, and citizen-led policy initiatives – these groups contributed (...) to challenging neoliberal governance, to undermining the legitimacy of state officials and their policies, and to shifting public consciousness around the human right to water. (shrink)

Fearing is a central part of how we relate to each other and the unpredictable world. Fearing badly is a key part of many of our moral failures, and fearing better a central part of our moral repair. We might think that fearing is undesirable and should be avoided whenever possible. In fact, Fearing Together shows that the avoidance of fear causes some of our greatest threats. By understanding fear as a relational practice, we see that our relationships with other (...) fearers shape what we fear, what fear feels like, how we identify and understand our fears, and how we cope with them. Growing as moral agents involves coming to grips with what kinds of fearers we want to be and become, and with what we owe each other when facing what we cannot control. At the heart of this book are the moral quandaries and complexities of relational fearing: the ethics of fearing together. (shrink)

This chapter examines the death of prisoners from illness in prison. It brings together first-person accounts and other research on the experiences of aging, being ill, and dying in prison, with and without formal hospice care, and the experiences of those working in hospice, caring for other prisoners at end of life. It considers these accounts, emphasizing Butler's analysis of livability and asking the question: what makes life, death, and grief in prison livable? It argues that adequately considering the complexity (...) of prison hospice programs means attending not just to how, where, and with whom prisoners are dying but also to who is most likely to be imprisoned, how their relationships are likely to be constrained, and how their lives and deaths are most likely to be perceived. Formal and informal hospice programs are important not only for the way prisoners provide basic care to each other within them but for the way they also allow for recognizing and mourning those who die in prison, as significant, remembered, and grievable. (shrink)

This article introduces questions in psychiatric ethics regarding the substantial field of qualitative and quantitative research into ‘posttraumatic growth’, which investigates how, after devastating experiences, individuals can come to feel that they have developed warmer relationships, increased spirituality, or a clearer vision of their priorities. In one area of this research, researchers of posttraumatic growth outline strategies for clinicians interested in assisting their patients in achieving such growth. In this article, I articulate two ethical concerns about this account of posttraumatic (...) growth and the practice of growth-oriented therapy. The first is a concern about the status and effects of the ideal of posttraumatic health implicit in their account, and the second a concern about the ethical implications of the clinical recommendations for the post-trauma patient. I argue for the need for more attention to the hazardous implications of relating to patients as though they are on their way to, and themselves largely in control of, their own posttraumatic growth. (shrink)

This paper considers an area of research in clinical psychology that focuses on the resilience of members of marginalized groups who have experienced traumas directly related to their social identities. The paper describes these as social group-based traumas and outlines three effects of social group-based traumas that can make the experiences of them, as well as experiences of recovery following them, distinct from those involved in other kinds of traumas. In cases where resilience frameworks are useful for understanding such recoveries, (...) the paper proposes three methodological strategies for designing research to address the characteristics of social group-based trauma. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Dans cet article, je m’intéresse à l’éthique de l’agentivité sexuelle courante. Il s’agit, plus particulièrement, des questions morales concernant quand, comment et pourquoi nous nous identifions à un type donné d’agent sexuel. Comme l’auto-identification met en jeux une combinaison complexe de processus individuels et sociaux, un cadre conceptuel qui rend justice à ces processus permettrait une analyse de l’éthique de l’auto-identification sexuelle. Je présente le concept de l’authenticité sexuelle comme étant utile dans les contextes où elle comporte deux aspects (...) principaux : l’adoption d’une identité sexuelle qui nous est propre et l’explication que nous en donnons à et avec d’autres personnes. (shrink)

Lisa Tessman's When Doing the Right Thing is Impossible offers an engaging and accessible exploration of the complex philosophical issues surrounding moral dilemmas and moral failure. Are there genuine moral conflicts? Is it true that in some situations a moral agent cannot help but fail? Tessman offers her own answer–yes, in some situations, moral failure is unavoidable–while guiding readers through the debates surrounding these questions, clarifying the various positions sympathetically and carefully.Part of what makes the book so immediately gripping is (...) the case study it begins with in Chapter One: Tessman focuses on the case Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. During the storm, the... (shrink)

Over the past five years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting emergency management. In this essay, we explore how community groups in Detroit and Flint have advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, offering an account of activism that has directly confronted neoliberalism across the state. We analyze how solidarity has been forged through community organizing, interventions into mainstream media portrayals of the water crises, and the articulation of counternarratives that (...) center the experiences, needs, and collective power of those most directly affected. While our rootedness in Detroit leads us to focus primarily on the experiences of activists based there rather than in Flint, we insist throughout that the experiences, resistance, and aspirations of these communities are best understood as interconnected and mutually empowering. (shrink)

In "Public Health and Precarity," Michael Doan and Ami Harbin have done important work extending Sherwin's concept of relational autonomy to encompass relational agency—including agents such as communities and states. This opens up new ways of thinking about responsibility for public health in long-standing debates about the role of the state in public health.The case studies Doan and Harbin analyze are also important for thinking of the account of relational solidarity that Sherwin developed together with Baylis and Kenny, (...) one element of relational public health. The discussion may even open the space for a reformulation of relational solidarity. I will use the... (shrink)

Health is created and lived by people within the settings of their everyday life; where they learn, work, play and love. Health is created by caring for oneself and others, by being able to take decisions and have control over one's life circumstances, and by ensuring that the society one lives in creates conditions that allow the attainment of health by all its members.To begin, I largely agree with Doan and Harbin's argument in "Public Health and Precarity," and by (...) extension I largely agree with Sherwin's relational approach to public health. Since this is a commentary on Doan and Harbin's piece, I will keep this relatively short work focused on their paper, rather than... (shrink)

Sue Sherwin was among the first feminist bioethicists to insist that bioethics needed to become much more richly contextual and relational than traditional approaches to the discipline were ready to acknowledge. Targeting clinical bioethics and its central notion of patient autonomy, feminist bioethics focused on how broader social inequalities were likely to manifest themselves within clinical encounters among patients, family members, and healthcare professionals. The general idea was that by attending to how more general social inequalities might be affecting clinical (...) encounters, an explicitly feminist bioethics could play a crucial role in developing institutional pathways for empowering patients to make more... (shrink)

While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School--Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst--have persistently defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like? Amy Allen fractures (...) critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a political imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resouce we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future. (shrink)

Empathy has for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century, been seen as centrally important in relation to our capacity to gain a grasp of the content of other people's minds, and predict and explain what they will think, feel, and do; and in relation to our capacity to respond to others ethically. In addition, empathy is seen as having a central role in aesthetics, in the understanding of our engagement with works of art and with fictional characters. (...) A fuller understanding of empathy is now offered by the interaction of research in science and the humanities. This volume draws together nineteen original chapters by leading researchers across several disciplines, together with an extensive Introduction by the editors. The individual chapters reveal how important it is, in a wide range of fields of enquiry, to bring to bear an understanding of the role of empathy in its various guises. It offers the ideal starting-point for the exploration of this intriguing aspect of human life. (shrink)

Imagination is celebrated as our vehicle for escape from the mundane here and now. It transports us to distant lands of magic and make-believe, and provides us with diversions during boring meetings or long bus rides. Yet the focus on imagination as a means of escape from the real world minimizes the fact that imagination seems also to furnish us with knowledge about it. Imagination seems an essential component in our endeavor to learn about the world in which we live--whether (...) we're planning for the future, aiming to understand other people, or figuring out whether two puzzle pieces fit together. But how can the same mental power that allows us to escape the world as it currently is also inform us about the world as it currently is? Ten original essays grapple with this neglected question; in doing so, they present a diverse array of positions ranging from cautious optimism to deep-seated pessimism. Blending perspectives from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, Knowledge Through Imagination sheds new light on the epistemic role of imagination. (shrink)

Opponents of abortion sometimes hold that it is impermissible because fetuses are persons from the moment of conception. But miscarriage, which ends up to 89 % of pregnancies, is much deadlier than abortion. That means that if opponents of abortion are right, then miscarriage is the biggest public-health crisis of our time. Yet they pay hardly any attention to miscarriage, especially very early miscarriage. Attempts to resolve this inconsistency by adverting to the distinction between killing and letting die or to (...) the difficulty of preventing miscarriage fail, leaving a dilemma. Opponents of abortion should either advocate a substantial shift in our political and medical priorities or else give up the view that fetuses are persons from the moment of conception. (shrink)

To what extent are countability distinctions subject to systematic semantic variation? Could there be a language with no countability distinctions—in particular, one where all nouns are count? I argue that the answer is no: even in a language where all NPs have the core morphosyntactic properties of English count NPs, such as combining with numerals directly and showing singular/plural contrasts, countability distinctions still emerge on close inspection. I divide these distinctions into those related to sums and those related to parts. (...) In the Sahaptian language Nez Perce, evidence can be found for both types of distinction, in spite of the absence of anything like a traditional mass–count division in noun morphosyntax. I propose an extension of the Nez Perce analysis to Yudja, analyzed by Lima as lacking any countability distinctions. More generally, I suggest that at least one countability distinction may be universal and that languages without any countability distinctions may be unlearnable. (shrink)

The effective altruism movement (EA) is one of the most influential philosophically savvy movements to emerge in recent years. Effective Altruism has historically been dedicated to finding out what charitable giving is the most overall-effective, that is, the most effective at promoting or maximizing the impartial good. But some members of EA want the movement to be more inclusive, allowing its members to give in the way that most effectively promotes their values, even when doing so isn’t overall-effective. When we (...) examine what it means to give according to one’s values, I argue, we will see that this is both inconsistent with what EA is like now and inconsistent with its central philosophical commitment to an objective standard that can be used to critically analyze one’s giving. While EA is not merely synonymous with act utilitarianism, it cannot be much more inclusive than it is right now. (shrink)

In recent analytic metaphysics, the view that ‘ordinary inanimate objects such as sticks and stones, tables and chairs, simply do not exist’ has been defended by some noteworthy writers. Thomasson opposes such revisionary ontology in favour of an ontology that is conservative with respect to common sense. The book is written in a straightforward, methodical and down-to-earth style. It is also relatively non-specialized, enabling the author and her readers to approach problems that are often dealt with in isolation in a (...) more unified way.Thomasson's arguments are mainly counter-attacks on six ‘eliminativist’ arguments against ordinary objects. A causal redundancy argument espoused by Trenton Merricks holds that to suppose that there are ordinary objects is to suppose that these objects have distinctive causal powers. However, the casual efficacy of a baseball, for example, is exhausted by that of some suitably arranged …. (shrink)

Creations of the Mind: Essays on Artifacts and their Representation, ed. Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Introduction : the politics of our selves -- Foucault, subjectivity, and the enlightenment : a critical reappraisal -- The impurity of practical reason : power and autonomy in Foucault -- Dependency, subordination, and recognition : Butler on subjection -- Empowering the lifeworld? autonomy and power in Habermas -- Contextualizing critical theory -- Engendering critical theory.