Beyond Moral Judgment

by Alice Crary
Harvard University Press, 2007

What is moral thought and what kinds of demands does it impose? Alice Crary's book Beyond Moral Judgment claims that even the most perceptive contemporary answers to these questions offer no more than partial illumination, owing to an overly narrow focus on judgments that apply moral concepts and a corresponding failure to register that moral thinking includes more than such judgments. Her argument incorporates insights from Wittgenstein, Austin, McDowell, Wiggins, Diamond, Cavell, and Murdoch and integrates examples from feminist theory as well as from literature, including works by Austen, Forster, Tolstoy, James, and Fontane. The result is a powerful case for transforming our understanding of the difficulty of moral reflection and of the scope of our ethical concerns.

edited by Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo
McGraw-Hill, 2007

Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender

by Ellen K. Feder
Oxford University Press, 2007

Family Bonds Genealogies of Race and Gender is a timely contribution to feminist and critical race theorists’ efforts to think gender and race together. It explicates and puts to work Foucault’s method to argue that gender is best understood primarily as a function of “disciplinary” power operating within the family, while race is primarily a function of a “regulatory” power acting upon the family.

Genocide's Aftermath: Responsibility and Repair

edited by Claudia Card and Armen T Marsoobian
Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007

Genocide's Aftermath takes up the hard moral dilemmas that have a risen in the wake of genocide and crimes against humanity, from questions of guilt to the reconsideration of reconciliation and reparations. This volume of 14 essays expands a special issue of Metaphilosophy to include an introduction by the coeditors, an epilogue by Marsoobian, and
a reprint of Card's "Genocide and Social Death.

edited by Mechthild Nagel and Seth N. Asumah
Africa World Press, 2007

Theorizing punishment and state violence from philosophical perspectives involves an analysis of the meaning of doing time and of a just desert theory in punishment in addition to probing the concept of just mercy from a feminist ethics of care. From their politics of location behind bars, students of philosophy also unlock the embodied existence of the imprisoned self.

by Cressida J. Heyes
Oxford University Press, 2007

In Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies, Heyes argues that pictures of the self can hold us captive when they are being read from the outer self – the body – rather than the inner self, and we can express our inner self by working on our outer body to conform. The subject of normalization and its relationship to sex/gender is a major one in feminist theory; Heyes’ book is unique in her masterful use of Foucault; its clarity, and its sophisticated mix of the theoretical and the anecdotal.

by Margaret Urban Walker
Oxford University Press, 2007

In Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics(Second Edition), Walker proposes a view of morality and an approach to ethical theory which uses the critical insights of feminism and race theory to rethink the epistemological and moral position of the ethical theorist, and how moral theory is inescapably shaped by culture and history. This second, revised edition contains a new preface, a substantive postscript to Chapter 1 about “the subject of moral philosophy”; the addition of a new chapter on the importance of emotion in practices of responsibility; and the addition of an afterward, which responds to critics of the book.

by Sarah Song
Cambridge University Press, 2007

Justice, Gender and the Politics of Multiculturalism explores the tensions that arise when culturally diverse democratic states pursue both justice for religious and cultural minorities and justice for women. Sarah Song provides a distinctive argument about the circumstances under which egalitarian justice requires special accommodations for cultural minorities while emphasizing the value of gender equality as an important limit on cultural accommodation. Drawing on detailed case studies of gendered cultural conflicts, including conflicts over the ‘cultural defense’ in criminal law, aboriginal membership rules and polygamy, Song offers a fresh perspective on multicultural politics by examining the role of intercultural interactions in shaping such conflicts. In particular, she demonstrates the different ways that majority institutions have reinforced gender inequality in minority communities and, in light of this, argues in favour of resolving gendered cultural dilemmas through intercultural democratic dialogue.