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I respond to this report here https://jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com/p/on-the-philosophical-muddle-that
For what it’s worth, I agree. I have, with some trepidation, given it a bunch of my papers and asked…
Looking at some of the AI-amplified cranks on philpeople, it is hard to agree with the assessment of this article.…
Perhaps a useful distinction here is between replacing philosophers and changing the conditions under which philosophical work gets done. LLMs…
Conditional on the hypothesis that journal editors sometimes desk reject high-quality papers written and commended by world experts on a…
Some users seem to have conflicting impressions about the (absolute level of) abilities of current iterations of the LLMs. But…
One thing I appreciate about Greco’s piece is the very helpful distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value, which he lays…
Professor Held, who was emerita at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was best-known for her influential work on the ethics of care, but wrote widely in political and feminist philosophy. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Held or for those who would like to comment on the significance of her work.
(Thanks to Dan Kaufman for the information.)
Over the years I have found Virginia Held’s work especially valuable for thinking about Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolence, not because she was a historical source for King, but because her ethics of care can help clarify something crucial that later accounts of his position sometimes flatten. Nonviolence, for King, was not merely a tactic, a theory of protest, or a religiously inflected liberalism, but a public ethic grounded in the dignity and moral vulnerability of persons, including enemies, and in the refusal to sever justice from love. Held’s critique of contractual individualism is especially useful here: on her account, moral life does not begin with isolated agents bargaining from self-interest, but with dependency, relation, vulnerability, responsibility, and the concrete claims persons make upon one another. That, in my view, is close to what King’s agapic nonviolence presupposes: the opponent is not merely an obstacle to be defeated, exposed, or humiliated, but, wherever possible, someone still morally addressable. On this reading, Held’s work gives later normative precision to a structure already present in King’s personalism: nonviolence appears as justice disciplined by care, and care, in turn, is enlarged beyond private sentiment into public, political, and even global responsibility. This does not domesticate the radical King; it helps clarify the severity of his position. Justice requires unyielding resistance to domination without reproducing domination’s self-justifying logic. See especially Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12–13, 138; and Virginia Held, “Civil Disobedience and Public Policy,” in Revolution and the Rule of Law, ed. Edward Kent (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 92–111.
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