Chapters and Journal Articles by Caleb Ward
The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory, 2024
Despite the growing attention to oppression and resistance in social and political philosophy as ... more Despite the growing attention to oppression and resistance in social and political philosophy as well as ethics, philosophers continue to struggle to describe and appropriately attribute agency under non-ideal circumstances of oppression and structural injustice. This chapter identifies some features of new accounts of non-ideal agency and then examines a particular problem for such theories, what Serene Khader has called the agency dilemma. Under the agency dilemma, attempts to articulate the agency of subjects living under oppression must on the one hand avoid overemphasizing constraints on agency, and thereby producing paternalistic theories that "deny agency" for oppressed subjects, and on the other hand avoid failing to fully appreciate the effects of oppression on agency, thereby missing crucial features of how oppression unjustly shapes a person's lived possibilities. This chapter traces this dilemma to a preoccupation with ascribing agency, which produces problematic descriptive and political effects for theorizing agency under oppression: what the author calls an asymmetry problem and a disenfranchisement problem. Finally, the chapter proposes that the agency dilemma might be ameliorated if theorists scrutinize more closely how moral, epistemic, and political agency interact and overlap in life under oppression.
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Hypatia, 2023
Audre Lorde's account of the erotic is one of her most widely celebrated contributions to politic... more Audre Lorde's account of the erotic is one of her most widely celebrated contributions to political theory and feminist activism, but her explanation of the term in her brief essay "Uses of the Erotic" is famously oblique and ambiguous. This article develops a detailed, textually grounded interpretation of Lorde's erotic, based on an analysis of how Lorde's essay brings together commitments expressed across her work. I describe four integral elements of Lorde's erotic: feeling, knowledge, power, and concerted action. The erotic is a way of feeling in the work a person does, which makes possible new knowledge about the self and the social environmentparticularly to counteract epistemic oppression imposed by an unjust society. The erotic is a source of power by providing vision and energy for actions integrating a person's multiple commitments and political interests. It facilitates concerted action and coalition by enhancing a person's appreciation of their interests and values, while fostering embodied, personal connections that build trust on the basis of shared vulnerability. Thus, the erotic helps build coalitions where genuine differences of perspective and experience can be examined, in resistance against an oppressive society's epistemic distortions.
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The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics, 2022
Discussions of sexual ethics often focus on the wrong of treating another as a mere object instea... more Discussions of sexual ethics often focus on the wrong of treating another as a mere object instead of as a person worthy of respect. On this view, the task of sexual ethics becomes putting the other’s subjectivity above their status as erotic object so as to avoid the harms of objectification. Ward and Anderson argue that such a view disregards the crucial, moral role that erotic objecthood plays in sexual encounters. Important moral features of intimacy are disclosed through the experience of being an erotic object for another, as well as in perceiving another as an erotic object. Drawing on phenomenology, especially the insights of Simone de Beauvoir, Ward and Anderson argue that erotic encounters are shaped by the human condition of ambiguity, where being an object for others is intertwined with bodily agency. Because sexual agency is complex in this way, theories of sexual ethics and responsibility must widen their focus beyond transparent communication and authoritative expressions of will.
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Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2020
Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression d... more Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde's thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls "the erotic" within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the implications of taking seriously Lorde's account, particularly for theorists examining ethics and epistemology under nonideal social conditions. For situations of sexual intimacy, for example, Lorde's account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners. I argue that obligations to solicit consent and respect refusal are not sufficient to acknowledge the value of agency in intimate encounters when agency is oppositional in the way Lorde describes.
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Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, 2017
Conventional ethical positions on how humans should eat often ignore that human life is itself a ... more Conventional ethical positions on how humans should eat often ignore that human life is itself a form of organic activity. Using Henri Bergson’s notions of intellect and intuition, this chapter brings a wider perspective of the human organism to the ethical question of how humans appropriate life for nutriment. The intellect’s tendency to instrumentalize living things as though they were inert material seems to subtend the moral failures evident in practices such as industrial animal agriculture. With a critique of Temple Grandin’s sympathetic cattle technologies as a case study, this chapter moves beyond animal welfare concerns to see how food ethics might be grounded on the phenomenal character of food as itself produced by organic life.
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Books by Caleb Ward
Routledge, 2017
Cross-disciplinary collection of 40 chapters addressing food ethics issues through lenses of phen... more Cross-disciplinary collection of 40 chapters addressing food ethics issues through lenses of phenomenology, gender, cultural diversity, health and food policy, the environment, animal agriculture, and food sovereignty and justice. Contributors include Gary Francione, David Fraser, David M. Kaplan, Michiel Korthals, Bernard Rollin, Paul B. Thompson, John Vandermeer, and Kyle Powys Whyte.
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Book Reviews by Caleb Ward
APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, 2020
Review published in APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy of a book exploring the roles of te... more Review published in APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy of a book exploring the roles of temporality and racialization in the development of femininity, using Simon de Beauvoir and critical phenomenology.
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APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, 2019
Review published in APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy of a book developing a social theor... more Review published in APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy of a book developing a social theory and conceptual analysis of rape.
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Conference Presentations by Caleb Ward
philoSOPHIA Annual Conference, St. John's, NL, Canada, 2019
Despite its sometimes-legalistic contemporary forms, the norm of sexual consent originally develo... more Despite its sometimes-legalistic contemporary forms, the norm of sexual consent originally developed from the basic feminist commitment to valorizing women’s agency in sexual encounters. Through analysis of unjust social structures, feminist critical theorists have argued that the concept of consent fails irrecoverably in this goal. Is the concept of consent irredeemable, or is it rather a certain conception of consent—such as consent-as-contract—that must be guarded against, while the deeper concept remains useful? Resolving this conflict between abolitionism and reformism is necessary to develop any consistent feminist account of responsibility to a sexual partner. I argue that the moral relevance people attribute to their own consent—not absolute, but persistent—indicates that consent and structural context are both relevant for responsibility to a sexual partner. I propose that we acknowledge both these aspects of sexual ethics by understanding a partner’s consent as one moment within an ongoing ethical relation. This requires everyday acts of consenting to be recognized as producing time-bound and contingent ethical claims on a sexual partner. I argue that integral to responsibility to a partner is how one responds to a partner’s consent, particularly whether one’s actions valorize the agency of a partner by acknowledging the relevance of their experience and will in the encounter.
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Special Session of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love, APA Eastern Annual Conference, 2019
This paper argues that the standard account of sexual consent, which takes it to be a moral power... more This paper argues that the standard account of sexual consent, which takes it to be a moral power of giving permission, overlooks a fundamental effect of sexual consent on responsibility to a sexual partner. I hold that, while sexual refusal unilaterally produces an obligation to end a sexual encounter, practices that express positive consent enact a more complex change to responsibility. Rather than simply release a partner from an obligation, as the standard view assumes, I claim that consent requires a certain kind of response from one’s partner to produce the fully salutary moral effect we describe when we refer to "consensual sex." In the absence of this response to a consenting partner, that partner is wronged even if they have expressed what the standard view takes to be valid consent to an action. This corrects the failure of the norm of consent to adequately address the wrongs done in encounters that are not coerced, but nonetheless experienced as violation.
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European Feminist Research Conference, 2018
This paper draws on Sara Ahmed's account of intimate encounters as on the one hand historically a... more This paper draws on Sara Ahmed's account of intimate encounters as on the one hand historically and socially produced and on the other hand sites of immediate contact between bodies. Using her notions of oblique angles of contact, I see possibilities for rethinking responsibility to a sexual partner in a way that resists the "straightening device" of normative heterosexual devaluation of the consent of one's partner.
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Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 2018
Contemporary feminist discussions of sexual consent grapple with a longstanding ethical challenge... more Contemporary feminist discussions of sexual consent grapple with a longstanding ethical challenge: how can action driven by sexual desire avoid treating another person as an object? Most modern sexual ethics use a norm of consent-as-reciprocity to condemn the moral harm of sexual objectification. However, Emmanuel Levinas’s insight into the origin of ethics in the Other’s transcendence suggests limitations of reciprocity as a guide for action. The implications for sexual ethics are obscured by Levinas’s disappointing phenomenology of Eros, but Audre Lorde’s description of the erotic can provide an alternative path for an ethics of alterity to respond to sexual objectification.
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Papers by Caleb Ward
Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2020
Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression d... more Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde's thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls ‘the erotic’ within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the implications of taking seriously Lorde's account, particularly for theorists examining ethics and epistemology under nonideal social conditions. For situations of sexual intimacy, for example, Lorde's account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners. I argue that obligations to solicit consent and respect refusal are not sufficient to acknowledge the value of agency in intimate encou...
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Chapters and Journal Articles by Caleb Ward
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