Papers by Samantha Brennan
This chapter has two parts, the first part conceptual and the second applied. The conceptual focu... more This chapter has two parts, the first part conceptual and the second applied. The conceptual focus of the chapter outlines the nature and content of the responsibilities that adult members of a society have toward children. The subsequent applied part of the chapter looks at the issues of responsibility for children in the context of parental smoking. We are interested in two questions. First, what responsibilities do we have toward children given their status as bearers of rights? Second, does a commitment to children's rights entail a ...
IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 2016
This special issue of IJFAB starts from the premise that fitness is a feminist issue, and, more s... more This special issue of IJFAB starts from the premise that fitness is a feminist issue, and, more specifically, it is an issue that ought to be of concern to feminists interested in bioethics. While a neglected concept in feminist bioethics, fitness is of key importance to women's health and well-being. Not only that, it is also an area of women's lives that invites unwelcome policing and advice from friends, family members, medical practitioners, and even strangers. People have a difficult time prying apart the idea of fitness from that of weight loss. Most women who embark on a fitness routine have weight loss among their primary goals. Since late 2011, we and a host of guest authors have been exploring the connections between women's bodies, the medicalization of women's health, and the multimillion dollar fitness industry in our blog Fit Is a Feminist Issue (Brennan and Isaacs n.d.). Feminist engagement with women's fitness has typically focused on the oppressive dimensions of dieting and the quest for thinness as an ideal of normative femininity (Bordo 2004; Chernin 1994). More recently, feminists have engaged with the rhetoric of fitness as well (Brabazon 2006), taking up a variety of issues that challenge dominant assumptions in the popular and medical notions of physical fitness. For example, while physical activity itself is positively associated with increases in women's subjective well-being (Ferguson et al. 2012), scholarship and popular and social media
Two features are said to characterize commonsense morality: rights and options. We can think abou... more Two features are said to characterize commonsense morality: rights and options. We can think about these features as responses to two of the ways in which consequentialist ethics is said to go wrong-consequentialism goes wrong in allowing some actions which ought to be forbidden and requiring other actions which ought to be merely permissible. Rights impose constraints on the behavior of moral agents and protect those who have them from certain actions. Suppose that we can bring about some good by taking Fred's car (say by borrowing it to drive an elderly friend to the mall) and Fred has a property right in his car. We may not take Fred's car without his permission even though the act of taking Fred's car would best promote the good. The existence of rights means that moral agents are sometimes forbidden from performing the action that would bring about the most good overall. Thus, rights bar us from promoting the good in some cases. Options have a different effect. Options are that feature of commonsense morality that gives us a break from promoting the good. 1 Even if it would be nice of me to offer drives to the mall to elderly strangers, I need not always do so even though that course of action might better promote the good than the course of action I had otherwise planned. Of course, not just any plan of mine is morally permissible. I cannot spend the afternoon running down elderly strangers rather than driving them to the mall. Given the existence of rights or constraints, that course of action is morally forbidden. This demonstrates a connection between options and rights. A moral theory that includes options needs an account of rights or constraints if it is not to offend the 2 most basic of our shared intuitions about morality's demands. Before I begin I need to clarify how options relate to rights. Rights and options are connected in several ways, some of which are more interesting than others. Any moral theory which includes rights, or other forms of deontological constraints, will include options automatically because at least in circumstances which involve rights, agents will be forbidden from bringing amount the most good, if that action involves the infringing of a right and there is not enough at stake to override the right. If an agent is forbidden from bringing about the most good, it is trivially true that s/he is permitted not to bring about the most good. Hence, rights entail options. Of course, the more interesting question concerns the relationship between rights and options concerns options other than those associated with rights. My focus in this paper is on options not to bring about the most good. Let me say just a few words about the kind of options I will be talking about. I will begin with an example. I could at this very moment stop working on my paper to go and help some students who are working on theirs. I could also continue with my own work. Suppose that all of my professional obligations to my students have been met. Both plans bring about some good but if we assume that I do more good helping the students-if this seems implausible suppose it is a large group of highly motivated students-most of us still do not think I do anything morally wrong by continuing to work on my own paper even though that brings about less good overall. In this case we want to say that the non-maximizing plan is permitted. I have the option to act on either of these plans. But options of this sort are not limitless. I could not, for example, continue working on my paper while a student stands at my door choking to death on a piece of food. This paper will assume that both rights and options have thresholds. That is to say, I
Feminist Icon Talk about Miss Piggy to women of a certain age and many of us will smile. There we... more Feminist Icon Talk about Miss Piggy to women of a certain age and many of us will smile. There weren't a lot of strong female characters on television in the 70s-the Bionic Woman, Charlie's Angels, the girls and women of the Brady Bunch, and of course, Three's Company-but for some reason Miss Piggy stood out. Now as an adult, there's rather a lot Miss Piggy and I have in common. We're big, strong women with a love of martial arts. Miss Piggy karate chops her way around back stage at the Muppet Theatre and I try to blend my practise of the martial art of Aikido with days spent in the ivory tower. I aspire to her level of glamour and self-confidence. As a woman in a very male dominated field, the academic study of philosophy, I am often like Miss Piggy, noticeable as the only woman in the room. And while I lack her acting skills and stage presence, in front of large classes I've been known to channel my inner Pig. Some women didn't connect with the character of Miss Piggy at the time but came to appreciate her virtues later. She really was written for women, not girls. On Thought Catalog, Sarah Pacella writes, "When I was a kid, like many children of the 1970s and 1980s, I loved the Muppets. My favourite characters were Gonzo, Animal and Rowlf the Dog. Although I enjoyed the show I somehow felt that there was always something missing from my Muppet experience: I longed for a female character that I could relate to and the two most prominent female leads annoyed me. I couldn't quite articulate why I was neither Team Janice or Team Piggy. I mean really, was I supposed to embrace the burn out hippy or the overbearing boar who isn't complete without her man? Miss Piggy really got under my skin in a way that Janice was just incapable of…she was bossy, overbearing, desperate, loud, aggressive and self-centred: everything that little girls aren't supposed to be. And the faux French, come on!I soon came to the conclusion that Miss Piggy wasn't written for little girls, she was written for women everywhere, flaws and all, because she's real, maybe even in a Carrie Bradshaw kind of way. Sure she can be misguided and desperate at times (she still makes me cringe a little), and there are some rage issues, but nobody's perfect." (Pacella, 2014) I think of Miss Piggy as a feminist icon of her day, though I know that's a controversial claim. She is certainly a feminist icon from my youth. In many ways Miss Piggy is an unlikely feminist icon. First, she's over the top feminine in her self-presentation: heels, fancy hats, a lot of lipstick, and a lot of pink. Often even a feather boa or two. Second, she's one of very few women, most often the only, in a male dominated cast. Feminists sometimes call heavily male workplaces and events, veritable 'sausage fests.' Of course, that's just a bad metaphor in this case. Third, she's romantically attached to the lead male character of the Muppets, Kermit the frog, though she's anything but his dutiful sidekick. I'm with the feminist science blogger Skepchick. In "Listen to the Pig" Skepchick writes, "As far as I am concerned, Ms. Piggy is one of the strongest female characters in popular culture in the past 50-odd years. Piggy proves, time and again, that she is a strong, confident woman who can go toe-to-toe.. or snout-to-snout with anyone else." (Skepchick 2011) The character of Miss Piggy is that of a show biz career woman in a time when women's role in society, particularly in the workplace and in romantic relationships, was changing fast. She is a beacon of bright, brash, outspoken femininity amid a sea of almost entirely male Muppets. She is also the dominant personality in her relationship with the Kermit the Frog. But then there's the "Miss" factor and that her main role is that of the love interest of the main male character. This chapter argues that
Feminist ethics is that branch of ethics that is concerned first and foremost with understanding ... more Feminist ethics is that branch of ethics that is concerned first and foremost with understanding the oppression of women and developing a normative analysis of its wrongness. Analytical feminist ethics uses the tools and techniques of analytical philosophy, such as conceptual analysis, to further understand the injustices revealed by feminist approaches to ethics. The chapter surveys analytic themes, trends, and tendencies within feminist ethics taking a broad lens on what counts. The chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in analytic feminist philosophical engagements with ethics, reflection on examples of important contributions to this discussion, a discussion the extent to which feminist work has changed or entered the mainstream of the field, and current and future directions in analytic feminist ethics.
A Question of Values, 1997
Published as a book chapter in: A Question of Values: New Canadian Perspectives in Ethics and Pol... more Published as a book chapter in: A Question of Values: New Canadian Perspectives in Ethics and Political Philosophy. Samantha Brennan, Tracy Isaacs, and Michael Milde. (Eds.). The book is not available online here. If you are affiliated with The University of Western Ontario, please use the Shared Library Catalogue's Advanced Search to check whether the book is available in Western Libraries. If you are not affiliated with The University of Western Ontario, search WorldCat to find out where you can get access to the book.
Journal of Medical Ethics, 2020
This paper argues that a major contribution to women’s under-representation and the gender pay ga... more This paper argues that a major contribution to women’s under-representation and the gender pay gap in surgery is the interaction and aggregation of many small wrongs, or as they have come to be called in the literature, microinequities. Further, the paper argues that existing strategies do not adequately address the problems faced by women surgeons and cannot do so without an understanding of those wrongs as microinequities. Insights from the literature on ethics and microinequities are thought to be able to inform new strategies.1 The study identifies four different kinds of gender bias: workplace discrimination, epistemic injustice, stereotyped roles and objectification. The different kinds of gender bias interact with one another and add up in ways that pose serious setbacks to the careers of women surgeons. In addition to being small wrongs, microinequities share other features. They are cumulative; they interact with one other; they are often invisible; and they are implicit or unintended. My comments are going to focus on the response to microinequities, …
Contemporary Ethical Challenges, 2014
What Needs to Change?, 2013
The small man thinks that small acts of goodness are of no benefit, and does not do them; and tha... more The small man thinks that small acts of goodness are of no benefit, and does not do them; and that small deeds of evil do no harm, and does not refrain from them. Hence, his wickedness becomes so great that it cannot be concealed, and his guilt so great that it cannot be pardoned.
Theory and Research in Education, 2015
Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research, 2014
This suggestion resonates with Rousseau's prescriptions for Emile. 6 This image of the child in d... more This suggestion resonates with Rousseau's prescriptions for Emile. 6 This image of the child in danger and in need of protection, and of the threat posed to childhood by sexuality, is explicit in Postman 1982. 7 Daniel Monk concurs writing that "the traditional construction of the child as a non-sexual innocent" is often protected by "excluding the sexual child from the category of childhood itself" this time in using a medical model of childhood. (Monk 2000, 187) 10
Dialogue, 2014
In light of recent legal decisions affording more than two parents to Canadian children, we consi... more In light of recent legal decisions affording more than two parents to Canadian children, we consider whether there is any moral reason for limiting the number of parents a child can have to two. We look at several traditional arguments for this position and find that they fail to justify it. We also consider an argument inspired by Brighouse and Swift’s work on the goods of parenting and find that while it brings up important points, it is not strong enough to support a limit of just two parents. We conclude with some thoughts about how else the notion of parenthood could be helpfully separated from traditional notions.
Social Theory and Practice, 1997
Definition d'un fondement philosophique pour la pensee commune et la pensee juridique du stat... more Definition d'un fondement philosophique pour la pensee commune et la pensee juridique du statut moral de l'enfant et d'une theorie philosophique pour justifier nos convictions morales et la politique publique en matiere de parente, d'adoption et d'education. Reconciliant la these de la consideration et du traitement egaux de l'enfant et l'adulte, d'une part, avec la these d'un droit parental limite, d'autre part, l'A. developpe une approche de l'enfant fondee sur ses droits et sur le respect de sa personne
The Philosophical Review, 1994
This book examines the central questions concerning the duty to obey the law: the meaning of this... more This book examines the central questions concerning the duty to obey the law: the meaning of this duty; whether and where it should be acknowledged; whether and when it should be disregarded. Many contemporary philosophers deny the very existence of this duty, but ...
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Papers by Samantha Brennan