Abstract
I argue in this paper that the work of Keith Lehrer, especially in his book Self-Trust has applications to feminist ethics; specifically care ethics, which has become the leading form of normative sentimentalist ethics. I extend Lehrer’s ideas concerning reason and justification of belief beyond what he says by applying the notion of evaluation central to his account of acceptance to the need for evaluation of emotions. The inability to evaluate and attain justification of one’s emotions is an epistemic failure that leads one not to act on one’s own aspirations and desires and treat those desires as if they did not exist. I argue that this is a common condition among women in patriarchal societies because patriarchy can cause women to believe that they are not worthy of their trust concerning what they accept, specifically acceptance of their anger over their own mistreatment. As a result, many women are unable to realize the self-protective role of their anger. All of this reflects a lack of what I shall call epistemic personhood, a concept based on Lehrer’s theory concerning the keystone role of self-trust in the epistemic arch of rationality, justification and knowledge. Lastly, I use this concept of epistemic personhood to develop a care ethical account of self-respect that counters the Kantian account.
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Notes
I’m not claiming that all self-sacrifice is based on epistemic selflessness; as, for example, the secure self-assertion of someone like Gandhi makes clear.
This is more of a hypothesis than something backed by empirical research.
I am developing Lehrer’s ideas concerning reason and justification of belief beyond what he says by applying the notion of evaluation to his epistemology, specifically the need for evaluation of emotions.
Robin Dillon (1992) proposes a feminist conception of self-respect that sounds very similar to the one I am sketching, but there are subtle differences in our accounts that I discuss in my larger project.
This does not rule out the possibility of supererogation so long as one considers reasons for preferring one’s own wellbeing and chooses, autonomously, confronting the pressure to be selfless, to go above and beyond the call of duty by putting others before oneself. A lot more needs to be said about this, but I will have to save that for another time.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Philosophy Department, College of Arts and Sciences, and Graduate Activity Fee Allocation Committee of the University of Miami; as well as to the Department of Arts and Philosophy at Miami Dade College for their support. I am also grateful to Michael Slote and the referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I want to especially thank Keith Lehrer for his philosophical inspiration and guidance, and for appreciating different voices within the discipline.
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Borgwald, K. Women’s anger, epistemic personhood, and self-respect: an application of Lehrer’s work on self-trust. Philos Stud 161, 69–76 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9932-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9932-5