Philosophy in the Contemporary World

This paper sketches the history of unethical behavior of Homo sapiens to other forms of life on planet Earth. I ask, and sketch responses to, the question: How and why is it that we, the so-called “ethical animal,” have been the worst of all animals in relation to other life-forms on our planet? In response to the answers to this question, I claim that we know, and have known for a very long time, what it means to be morally good. But in light of the natural bases of our behavior, I wonder if it will ever be possible for us, as a species, to become so.

PCW Editors’ Comments: In this volume we are privileged to publish a special edition on mothering from the margins. The guest editors Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie Mann have collected a range of submissions representing original and insightful perspectives on motherhood.

This paper is about the experience of Mexican women deported to Tijuana, especially those who are mothers, and how they live the forced separation from their family. First, the phenomenon of family separation in migration is explained and then contrasted with the separation due to deportation and the moral harm produced in mothers in both cases; then there is a closer look to the meanings deported women give to the separation and finally I will posit that motherhood as they know it, suffers a fracture, a dislocation that leaves them with barely no resources to resignify it. A third discussion goes deeper in their options of family reunification; and finally a characterization of Transnational Motherhood in Deportation is given, in order to highlight an understanding of this non-normative mothering perspective. Along the way, testimonies of some of the women I encountered in my visits will support the arguments.

This essay explores different versions of motherhood in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle, in which the protagonist, Lina, is exposed to, influenced by, and recruited into arguably nationalist and global forms as she navigates the fictionalized filming of Apocalypse Now in the 1970s Philippines. But upon deciding to leave the film set and the nation to go to the U.S., Lina derives insight from alternative sources that enable her to reimagine a diasporic maternal position, one that negotiates her relationship to her child and the Philippines while placing nationalist and global motherhood under erasure.

The author is a lesbian poet, novelist, and essayist who chose to give up the daily parenting of her three-year-old son in 1973 and who has written about the experience over the decades. She is also a woman who reads philosophy. Now, from the perspective of her older years and in the light of philosophy, she once again considers her relationship to motherhood. This is a personal essay: descriptive, meditative, and creative.

In this article, I examine transracial adoption in which the parents are white and gay or lesbian in the context of an America coming to tolerate, accept, embrace, and even celebrate gay family life, while increasingly retreating from basic aspirations to race-based equality and fairness. It is about the narratives of whiteness that accompany transracial adoption, and that claim families in ways that cause harm. It is also about patriotic nationalism in post 9/11 USA, and the story of sexual progressiveness that has infused our national imaginary in complex and paradoxical ways over the last decade. We are called on to account for the costs of allowing our commitments to justice in relation to race and sexuality to become fragmented.

In 2008, over 400 children living on the Yearning for Zion Ranch, a rural Texas polygamist community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), were forcibly removed from their mothers’ care by State troopers responding to allegations of child abuse. This essay examines the role of neoliberal ideologies and, more specifically, what some queer theorists have identified as ‘metronormativity’ in solidifying a widespread caricature of FLDS mothers as ‘bad’ mothers. The intersections of these ideologies with neocolonialist discourses, I argue, positions the FLDS mother as a subaltern subject unable to effectively speak in her own defense.

Through a philosophical engagement with “Arju” (communal dormitories for children/adolescents among the Ao tribe, India), we develop a distinct conceptualization of it as “caring space, in-between”. In its various ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions, Arju becomes a space for mothering of Ao children and of caring for the tribe at large. It provides a basis for developing a notion of “caring space” within a philosophy of care. Finally, while theorizing its “in-between” character, we argue that Arju resists mapping onto dominant Western spatial binaries such as private/public, home/world, etc. This essay is not only an articulation of a non-dominant group’s philosophy of “mothering” and “care”, but also aims to create an alternative theoretical space from which to engage with the dominantly Western feminist philosophies of care.

Considerations of justice and rights are assumed to present problems for the idea that we should do that which we take to be supererogatory. I argue that careful consideration of how we think of justice and rights lead to the conclusion that "supererogatory" actions are actually better grouped within the class of acts we identify as moral requirements. My argument is based on our common understanding of justice as being incompatible with free-riding. Additionally, I focus attention on our implicit assumption that we possess the right to benefit by that which, we agree, is made possible from the willingness of others to go beyond perceived moral requirements. Thus, I conclude we should re-tihink where we draw the line demarcating the required from the saintly.

What if popular discourses of recognition and identity tend to rely, in whole or in part, on underlying conceptions of reproduction -- specifically, the desire to reproduce one's own self-consciousness in the beliefs and behaviors of others? I argue for the importance of diagnosing a recognition/reproduction paradigm in which foreground discourses of recognition obfuscate an underlying evangelical desire for reproduction of one's own self-image. To do so, I revisit G.W.F. Hegel's allegory of the lord/bondsman (master/slave), arguably the decisive source of modem and contemporary conceptions of recognition. I show that scholars typically mislabel and misunderstand the logic behind Hegel's descriptions of recognition, and I then argue that what theorists typically interpret as recognition we should instead interpret as a paradigm of recognition co-valent with reproduction. More relevant to contemporary activists and scholars, I then illustrate how the desire for reproduction likely remains the dominant, normative paradigm in problematic forms of liberal identity politics and international relations in an era of neoliberal globalization. As a hermeneutical intervention, treating the desire for recognition as co-valent with a desire reproduction may help to distinguish hegemonic uses of identity from liberatory, perhaps even dignifying, forms of mutualism and regard.

As a recent addition to the editorial board for the journal of Philosophy in the Contemporary World, I wanted to revisit a practice from past editions of the journal—interviewing philosophers who engage philosophical practice that reflects the mission of PCW. In this interview, a model for what I hope will continue to be a regular feature, I have a dialogue with the philosopher Burcu Gurkan. Professor Gurkan currently lives and works in Turkey while I live in work in the central US, so what follows is edited from an email exchange.—Taine Duncan

Beginning from an analysis of what factors disqualify a person from complaining about a given moral breach, I show that the prima facie presumption that a complaint is justified in the face of non-moral offense in the context of a business transaction must be balanced against the potential consequences to the object of the complaint, especially given the particular realities of popular employment practices. In particular, I will identify three cases in which complamts are justified, presuming unjust employment arrangements, as a way of showing that complaints in other situations should be, contrary to naive intuition, considered inappropriate.

Human well-being is a core global issue and a challenge for individual citizens, governments, and intemational organizations world-wide. It is a future-oriented concept that cannot be narrowly defined. In this paper, it is argued that retrieving the wisdom of Aristotle provides a thmking way forward. His is a philosophy that can be meaningfully directed and usefully applied across multiple dimensions to our current world, its state of being, and the pursuit of human, psychological, and ecological well-bemg.

The United States has rejected climate reparations requests from other nations by claiming historical ignorance of the global effects of anthropogenic climate change. This objection to climate reparations, called the epistemic objection in this paper, appeals to a concept of fairness concerning moral responsibility which can be traced back to Aristotle's distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions. However, on closer examination, the epistemic objection fails to fulfill Aristotle's criteria for excusable involuntary actions, and therefore the authors of this paper conclude that claims of ignorance concerning climate change do not provide a substantial objection to climate reparation requests.

Within this working context, this paper exammes how philosophy is situated within the horizon of circulated knowledge. Using Alain Badiou's discussion about the fate of philosophy after Hegel, this paper highlights three distinct phenomena: the end of philosophy, the linguistic turn, and the suture of philosophy to other disciplines. This paper argues that these three signal a paradigm shift in philosophizing, namely, the shift of orientation from the metaphysical to the finite. After the discussion about contemporary philosophy, this paper argues in the spirit of Badiou that philosophy's current form is incapable of addressing one of the most alarmmg crises in the world today, the crisis of subjectivity.

"Sex Robots and Solipsism" presents and reflects upon rapidly evolving developments in human-robot relations. It argues that psychological, phenomenological and neuro-physiological evidence suggests that our new media-saturated environment is eroding the human capacity for deep and prolonged concentration, empathy and attachment. As machines become more human-like, humans become more machine-like. This sets the stage for diminished relations between humans - shallow relations that are increasingly capable of being replaced by relations with artificially intelligent (and sexy) machines.

Perhaps not wholly unrelatedly to the message of the first Obama presidential campaign, the concept of hope has been receiving increased philosophical attention in recent years. A good bit has been written on honing a definition of hope, and investigating the morally relevant territory. After a brief summary of that literature, I situate myself amongst those who advocate for hope—at its best—as a virtue, and I then suggest that hope seems to have a unique status amongst the virtues insofar as it appears to be foundational for moral progress. I want to suggest that virtue generally can be seen as having an infectious quality, and that along with hope's foundational status, this infectiousness is particularly crucial as regards the development of hope for working on solutions to structural injustice.

A complete sense of the world is an alternative normative ethical standard utilizing aesthetic integration. The temporary nature of aesthetic integration renders it a more useful tool for understanding human experience than does any philosophical or religious system containing allegedly permanent truths. The aesthetic integration of theatre provides a basis for discussion of the cognitive content of choice in action. I show that theatre reflects ethics. Then I turn to Jean-Paul Sartre's and Karl Marx's notions of "reciprocal freedom" as an example ethic. A consequence of reciprocal freedom is that the needs of others must be taken into account. I contend that a life lived in pursuit of aesthetic integration can indeed be an ethical life—and even serve as a model for an ethical life. This is not an idea generally embraced in Western culture, particularly when it is contrasted with military meaning-visions