CEFISES Seminar: Jade Fletcher, “The Role of Values in Feminist Metaphysics”

Livestream  https://youtube.com/live/2_XRvMl_GQc

Series: Metametaphysics

Speaker: Jade Fletcher (University of St-Andrews)

Title: “The Role of Values in Feminist Metaphysics”

Abstract

This paper concerns an apparent tension between the normative political commitments of feminism and the objective truth-seeking aims of metaphysics. Metaphysical theories are essentially descriptive – they are in the business of giving explanatory and descriptively adequate representations of what the world is like. This isn’t to say that metaphysics is a value neutral enterprise, but the constitutive aim of descriptive accuracy constrains the sorts of values that are admissible: values are admissible to the extent that they increase proximity to truth. By contrast, feminist metaphysics aims to build theories that are supportive of, and conducive to, feminist justice. When giving metaphysical theories about the nature of gender, sexualities, the self, reason, nature, mind and body, etc. feminists metaphysicians claim that traditional metaphysics has either ignored certain kinds of metaphysical questions or has constructed theories which have been influenced by androcentric and patriarchal values. Metaphysical theories can support or hinder emancipatory social projects and feminist metaphysics aims to furnish us with theories which support such efforts. It must therefore incorporate values which go beyond the abstract values which promote descriptive adequacy and truth.

This invites an important methodological question: doesn’t the incorporation of feminist values into the methodological toolkit of metaphysics compromise its status as a descriptive enterprise? We can articulate this worry running in both directions. For feminist metaphysicians, the worry will be that there is a non-contingent hostility from traditional metaphysics to philosophical projects concerned with building theories about the nature of reality which are in the serve of justice. For traditional metaphysicians, the worry will be that taking justice-conduciveness to be a constraint on the construction and acceptability of metaphysical theories mischaracterizes the explanatory, truth-seeking, descriptive nature of metaphysical inquiry.

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, I motivate this apparent tension: we have reason to worry that the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of justice might pull metaphysical theories about the nature of social reality in different directions. Second, I identify two desiderata for any acceptable reconciliation of this putative tension, that are derived from the shortcomings of the pre-existing responses. Previous responses to this tension have either compromised the descriptive ambitions of metaphysics or they have ended up problematically curtailing the force of the relevant feminist commitments. Finally, I articulate a way of dissolving the tension which doesn’t compromise the demands of truth or justice. I offer a methodology for social metaphysics which can explain why we should think that truth and justice do not pull theories in different directions.