Social Philosophy Today

The Precautionary Principle is frequently invoked as a guiding principle in environmental policy. In this article, I raise a couple of problems for the application of the Precautionary Principle when it comes to policies concerning Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). First, I argue that if we accept Stephen Gardiner’s sensible conditions under which it is appropriate to employ the Precautionary Principle for emerging technologies, it is unclear that GMOs meet those conditions. In particular, I contend that GM crops hold the potential to provide more than a mere bonus; they hold the (admittedly uncertain) potential to prevent serious harm to millions of people. This means that, if proponents of the Precautionary Principle take prevention of harm as seriously as avoidance of harm, then precaution may tell in favor of GMOs rather than against them. Second, I observe that the use of GM technology in the developing world is likely to be identity-affecting; it will cause people to exist who otherwise would not have. I argue that this undermines Precautionary Principle-based objections to GM technology that appeal to the potentially harmful effects of GMOs on future generations.

Martha Nussbaum offers a robust vision of justice in terms of capability that she contends is capable of handing the most difficult cases. In recent work, she suggests that her capabilities approach supports a range of accommodations to make voting accessible and feasible for citizens with cognitive disabilities, including surrogate voting in the instance of profound cognitive impairment. Although Nussbaum’s call for political surrogacy is noble, I argue that it conflicts with at least three of five commitments that together characterize her capabilities approach to justice. The commitments that characterize her capabilities approach to justice include the commitment to justice in terms of capability, the commitment to an Aristotelian conception of human dignity, the commitment to a universal standard of justice, and the commitment to liberal individualism. In addition, Nussbaum’s approach is a “social minimum” approach to justice. Thus my critique is methodological. I do not contend that political surrogacy is either undesirable or unjustifiable, only that it is incompatible with Nussbaum’s capabilities approach.

Over the course of her career, Jean Harvey argued that as agents engaged in a “life of moral endeavor,” we should understand ourselves and others to be moral works in progress, always possessing the potential to grow beyond and become more than the sum of our past wrongs.In this paper I will follow Harvey and argue that in order to live a life of moral endeavor, it is not enough merely to know about injustice. Instead, we must engage in the difficult and often painful task of overcoming deep-seated cognitive biases that cause us to fail to perceive the ubiquitous injustice that pervades our world. I will conclude by arguing that education, empathy, and love can each help us to increase our perceptual awareness of injustice and so should be recognized to be crucial parts of a life of moral endeavor.

On April 20, 2014, Jean Harvey passed much too soon. Professor of Philosophy at University of Guelph, Harvey was an active member of the North American Society for Social Philosophy and the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy. Her passing has left many people with a profound loss of both an accomplished social and political philosopher who fought for the voiceless and oppressed, as well as a kind professional colleague who helped so many younger scholars thrive. I cannot claim to be anything more than an acquaintance of Jean, who conversed with her by e-mail and met her occasionally at conferences. Academically, Harvey was best known for her book, Civilized Oppression, however she wrote and presented widely on a variety of social justice issues including humor, consumerism, education, and animal-welfare. One of the byproducts of the scholarly life is that one’s insights can continue to contribute to intellectual discussions long after death. As a care ethicist, I would like pay tribute to Jean Harvey’s scholarly career by suggesting paths of intellectual exploration between care theory and Harvey’s work on confronting oppression. Specifically, Harvey’s work can contribute to a political ethic of care through elaborating the role of moral solidarity for those possessing differentiated social power.

In this tribute to Jean Harvey, I take up a project that she left unfinished: the articulation of an account of engaged respect. Building on her discussion of facets of the moral community—namely self-respect, the irreducibly individual nature of civilized oppression and interactional justice, education and empathetic understanding, and moral solidarity—I suggest we can discern a Harveyian conception of engaged respect. Harvey acknowledges the fallibility of human beings, including well-meaning moral actors responding to their moral obligation to ameliorate relations of oppression. This, together with her accounts of “involvement and accountability” and gratitude, guides the development of a concept of engaged respect that captures the attentiveness and support she envisioned for the moral community.

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind is a thoughtful, accessible, philosophically rich look at civic education in U.S. schools. The book’s central claims are, on the whole, quite persuasive. In the interests of fostering further discussion, this essay raises some questions about the book’s accounts of racial microaggressions in schools, the extent of authenticity in student experiences, and the practice of code-switching.

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind addresses how the unequal distribution of economic, cultural, and political power along socioeconomic and racial lines affects civic engagement and democratic participation. In order to address this gap, Levinson develops a critical pedagogy that encourages teachers and students to recognize the ways that identity and ideology are intertwined. After briefly reviewing some of the considerations that frame her book, I suggest that her account of an engaged civic pedagogy could be further strengthened by considering how non-traditional forms of protest make possible new forms of solidarity.

Meira Levinson argues for a robust civics education that models the practices of good citizenship. One of the elements of that civics education is teaching students how to take up the perspectives of others. The question arises: how do we teach students and citizens alike to take up the perspectives of others? Here I argue that we can make sense of perspective-taking by appealing to Rawls’s notion of public reason as an ideal. I conclude by arguing that a commitment to the ideal of public reason can help identify and resist oppression and marginalization.

In No Citizen Left Behind, I argue that the United States suffers from a civic empowerment gap that is predictable, pervasive, shameful, and avoidable. Citizens who are well-educated, middle-class or wealthy, and white are systematically more civically and politically empowered than are citizens who are less well-educated, working class or poor, and non-white. Although these disparities have been well documented for decades, they have been treated as inevitable and as such have failed to generate outrage. This fatalism is normatively inexcusable and empirically unjustified. Schools and districts can and should shrink the civic empowerment gap by revising their history and social studies instruction, civic identity construction, school culture, pedagogical practices, service learning, action civics, and standardized curriculum and assessment policies. I am pleased that Zachary Hoskins, Krista Thomason, and David Leichter find these arguments generally convincing, especially as they come from three somewhat different ideological standpoints. At the same time, I caution against each commentator’s tendency to overgeneralize. In contrast to Hoskins, I argue that schools’ pervasive, intrusive, and excessive regulations over children’s behaviors should be understood as civic microaggressions—and the same is true for adults in many urban communities of color. In response to Thomason, I agree that the state should foster autonomy, but disagree that autonomy requires assumption of new, particularistic identities rather than expansion of one’s current identity to be more inclusive. Finally, I embrace Leichter’s proposed extensions of action civics, but warn that such approaches could be deployed across the political and ideological spectrum.

Agricultural crops developed using the tools of genetic engineering (so-called “GMOs”) have become socially institutionalized in three ways that substantially compromise the inherent potential of plant transformation tools. The first is that when farming depends upon debt finance, farmers find themselves in a competitive situation such that efficiency-enhancing technology fuels a trend of bankruptcy and increasing scale of production. As efficiency increasing tools, GMOs are embedded in controversial processes of social change in rural economies. The United States, at least, has chosen not to undertake policy interventions to slow or reverse this trend. The second institutionalization of GMOs is found in the way that agricultural science has become divided between two camps, one focused on efficiency and total global production, the other focused on maintaining soil and water ecosystems in the face of both population growth and climate change. GMOs have been strongly supported by the first camp and regarded as irrelevant (at best) to the goals of the second. Finally, GMOs have become symbolic markers in the global debate over neoliberal institutions for trade and the protection of intellectual property. While there may be agronomic arguments for favoring GMO technology, the way that it has become situated in each of these social debates insures that it will be subject to strong opposition without regard to its biological risks and potential benefits.

The use of Genetic Modification (GM) in food is the subject of deep political disagreement. Much of the disagreement involves different perceptions of the kinds of risks posed by pursuing GM food, and how these are to be tolerated and regulated. As a result, a primary institutional site of GM food politics is regulatory agencies tasked with risk assessment and regulation. Locating GM food politics in administrative areas of governance regimes produces unique challenges of democratic legitimacy, conventionally secured through legislative channels. In particular, debate over the ends of a society’s policy on GM food inevitably continues in these institutional locations, despite conventional instrumental understandings of administrative legitimacy resting on effective application of ‘ends-means’ norms. This paper assesses the two major regulatory frameworks currently applied to GM food—the ‘precautious’ (associated with European jurisdictions) and ‘proof of harm’ (associated with North American jurisdictions) approaches—and presents their respective limits in securing the procedural and substantive dimensions of the legitimacy of administrative deference in democratic societies. On the basis of these criticisms, a synthesized and emergent approach—‘experiential precaution’—is presented as having the resources to deepen the legitimacy of risk governance institutions in the case of GM food. It is characterized by deepened participatory practices of negotiated rulemaking and inclusion of further substantive requirements in approval criteria.

In “Farming Made Her Stupid,” Lisa Heldke suggests that those who inhabit the metrocentric position participate in the marginalization of rural people and farmers through a process of “stupidification.” Rural people and farmers become “stupid,” a status that, on Heldke’s account, is worse than ignorant because “stupid people” are thought to be constitutionally incapable of knowing the right sorts of things (urban things) because they know the wrong sorts of things (rural things). It seems reasonable, I suggest in this paper, to think that contemporary urban agriculture movements can serve to mitigate the harms which Heldke argues arise from practices of stupidification. However, I argue that, insofar as such movements rely on and perpetuate the image of the Idyllic Farmer—an image constituted by early, romantic versions of agrarianism—they cannot serve this function. This is because the Idyllic Farmer, which is to agricultural ethics as the Ecological Indian is to environmental ethics, is both descriptively and prescriptively problematic. As such, any urban agricultural movement that takes this image as its guide—which, I argue, some important elements of the movement do—will not help to undermine stupidification and the harms it causes.

Despite the minimal attention paid by philosophers to gardening, the activity has a myriad of philosophical implications—aesthetic, ethical, political, and even edible. The same could be said of community food security and struggles for food justice. Two of gardening’s most significant practical benefits are that it generates communal solidarity and provides sustenance for the needy and undernourished during periods of crisis. In the twentieth century, large-scale community gardening in the U.S. and Canada coincided with relief projects during war-time and economic downturn. More recently, small-scale gardening projects have emerged in schools, blighted urban areas, and communities of activists committed to increasing food security and resisting neo-liberal city planning policies. It is therefore surprising that pragmatist philosophers, who typically work at the nexus of theory and practice, have remained relatively silent about the relationship between gardening and food security. If more were to take up the challenge, they would find considerable guidance from several contemporary scholars working in diverse disciplines, from cultural geography to community studies, who explore the topic in a number of non-philosophical, though equally effective and imaginative, ways (e.g., ethnographic and action research). In this paper, I propose a tentative pragmatist model for understanding how gardens make our food system more secure—a model inspired by John Dewey’s writings on school gardening, which I call the pragmatic pyramid.

This paper explores two apparently-unrelated forms of authenticity. One, “restaurant authenticity,” is a subcategory of the larger category of authentic objects, focused specifically on food and especially on ethnic cuisines. “Personal authenticity” refers to a set of traits or qualities in oneself. Contrary to appearances, I argue that the two forms of authenticity intertwine in ways that merit thoughtful attentiveness. I suggest that approaching the question of the authenticity of a cuisine with an attitude of flexibility  and responsiveness can, in turn, constitute an activity that cultivates personal authenticity, understood as “wholehearted living.” As Diana Meyers might put it, it is itself a practice of authenticity.

In this paper, I will consider the moral considerations surrounding our food choices, including whether those choices are sustainable. Sustainability means preserving ecological integrity for current and future generations, and includes cultural sustainability which embodies values like justice and care for current and future generations as well as non-human animals. I will explore the widely accepted view that buying local is morally superior. In considering the moral reasons for buying local, I will investigate Peter Singer’s arguments against buying local, which he supports by our duty to aid those suffering immediate harm. Singer’s arguments force us to examine our duties to aid those in developing nations versus duties to support local economies. I will argue that our duties in regard to food purchases are complex and impinge on multiple values, including supporting local communities, ecological integrity, and concern for fair global food practices.

As popular food writers and activists urge consumers to express their social, political, and ethical commitments through their food choices, the imperative to ‘vote with your fork’ has become a common slogan of emerging food movements in the US. I interrogate the conception of responsibility embedded in this dictate, which has become a de facto model for how to comport ourselves ethically with respect to food. I argue that it implicitly endorses a narrow and problematic understanding of responsibility. To contextualize this claim, I utilize Iris Marion Young’s critique of a “liability model” of responsibility to demonstrate that voting with one’s fork is insufficient as model for taking responsibility for food-related injustices. Instead, I suggest that Young’s social connection model of responsibility is best suited for taking stock of responsibility for food and agriculture related injustices since they are structural and systemic ones. I conclude that although consumer choices and purchases may be important dimensions of our conduct with respect to food and eating, imagining responsibility to be centered on this type of conduct—consumer behavior—is detrimental to attempts to develop a more just food system.

This essay argues, drawing from both philosophical and scientific work on disgust, that since disgust is a universal human emotion with roots in evolutionary adaptation, and since capitalism inevitably produces disgusting food, a critique of capitalism based upon the category of disgust and centered on the food system may be more practically effective than traditional critiques of capitalism. This critique forms the basis of what I call a critical theory of food.

The pairing of “whiskey” and “women” may at times be seen as an instance of what I call conspiratorial vices. Conspiratorial vices, I argue, are phenomena that, when working together, inform each other in a way that sets their content. Taken individually, the elements of the conspiracy are, at best, ambiguous with regard to their moral status. The conjoining of the concepts yields the status as “vice” and points to something deemed a threat to the social fabric. Through the use of two cases, I examine possible ways that this instance of conspiratorial vice might be seen as a multifaceted political tool that both contributes to oppression and creates a site for resistance.