AMA Announcement: Monday 4/16/18 12PM EDT - Clare Chambers on
contemporary political philosophy
Abstract
The moderators of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA
by Dr Clare Chambers, University Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the
University of Cambridge. This AMA is the sixth in our Spring 2018 AMA
Series; you can find more details on all of this semester’s AMAs with
philosophers by going to the AMA Hub Post. You can find all of our
previous AMAs over the years by going to the AMA wiki. Dr Chambers will
be joining us on Monday April 16th at 12PM EDT to discuss issues in
contemporary political philosophy. Hear it from her: Clare Chambers I am
Clare Chambers, University Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the
University of Cambridge. I am a political philosopher specialising in
contemporary feminist and liberal theory. I’ve been researching and
teaching at Cambridge for twelve years. I was educated in the analytical
tradition of political theory at the University of Oxford, where I did
Politics, Philosophy, and Economics as an undergraduate. After a year
spent as a civil servant I studied for an MSc in Political Theory at the
London School of Economics. At the LSE I continued working on analytical
approaches to political theory in contemporary liberalism, but I also
engaged in a sustained way with feminist thought, and with the work of
Michel Foucault. It seemed obvious that Foucault’s analysis of power and
social construction was of profound relevance to liberal theory, but l
had never read work that engaged both traditions. Wanting to work on
this combination for my doctorate, I returned to Oxford to be supervised
by Prof Lois McNay, who specialises in feminist and post-structural
theory, together with Prof David Miller, who specialises in contemporary
analytical thought. The result was a thesis that later became my first
book: Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (2008). Sex,
Culture, and Justice argues that the fact of social construction
undermines the liberal focus on choice. Liberals treat choice as what I
call a “normative transformer”: something that changes a situation
from unjust to just. If someone is disadvantaged liberals are likely to
criticise that disadvantage as an unjust inequality, but will change
that assessment if the disadvantage results from the individual’s
choice. For example, women may choose to take low-paid jobs, or to
prioritise family over career, or to follow religions that treat them
unequally, or to engage in practices associated with gender inequality.
However, our choices are affected by social construction. Our social
context affects the options that are available to us. It affects whether
those options are generally thought to appropriate for people like us.
And it affects what we want to do. I argue that, if our choices are
socially constructed in these ways, it doesn’t make sense to use them as
the measure for whether our situation or our society is just. Instead we
need to develop the normative resources for critically analysing choice.
Most feminists understand this, and liberals should, too. Feminism is a
movement that seeks to empower women, which in part means giving women
choice, but it is also a movement that recognises the profound
limitations on individual choice, and the way that power, inequality,
and social norms shape our choices. My most recent book also combines
feminist and liberal analysis and tackles a specific question of state
regulation. Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the
Marriage-Free State argues that the state should not recognise marriage.
Even if state-recognised marriage is reformed to include same-sex
marriage, as has happened in many states recently, it still violates
freedom and equality. Traditionally, marriage entrenches sexism and
heterosexism, and this traditional symbolic meaning has not been
destroyed. And all state recognition of marriage treats married and
unmarried people and their children unequally, elevating one way of life
or relationship form above others. The fact that state recognition of
marriage involves endorsing a particular way of life also means that it
undermines liberty, especially as political liberals understand that
idea. Instead of recognising marriage, the state should regulate
relationship practices. Other areas that I work on include
multiculturalism and religion, political liberalism and the work of John
Rawls, beauty and cosmetic surgery, the concept of equality of
opportunity, and varieties of feminism including liberal feminism and
radical feminism. I am about to start a new project on the political
philosophy of the unmodified body. Thank you for joining me here! Links
of Interest: “Marriage as a Violation of Equality” - the first chapter
of Against Marriage (OUP 2017). You can purchase this book with a 30%
discount by going to the OUP site and using promocode AAFLYG6 at
checkout Podcast interview on “The State and Marriage” “The Marriage
Free State” - podcast recording and paper draft “Sex, Culture and
Justice” - interview at 3:AM Magazine Multiculturalism Bites podcast
interview on when intervention in peoples’ lives is justified AMA Please
feel free to post questions for Dr Chambers here. She will look at this
thread before she starts and begin with some questions from here while
the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in
welcoming Dr Clare Chambers to our community!