Abstract

Feminist philosophy has often succeeded in breaking new philosophical ground because it takes its paradigm examples from the lives of marginalized people. It then seeks to construct philosophical views that are adequate to those lives. Artless Integrity is, in this sense, a work in feminist philosophy. Susan Babbitt focuses on the lives of those at "moral risk." A person is at moral risk if social expectations undermine her options for self-realization, and if her choice to redirect her life toward more humanly worthy possibilities is not socially intelligible as meaningful or rational. For those at moral risk, practical deliberation about options does not conform to familiar philosophical pictures of practical deliberation and rational justification. Babbitt's book is an attempt to explain why deliberation and justification cannot take the expected form. She also constructs a model of the form that deliberation and justification must take. One of the most intriguing and fruitful features of this book is that it allows us to think quite differently about practical rationality.