Journal of Moral Philosophy 

About: Journal of Moral Philosophy is an academic journal published by Brill. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Morality. It has an ISSN identifier of 1740-4681. Over the lifetime, 534 publications have been published receiving 4244 citations.

The Integration of Immigrants

Abstract: This paper considers normative questions about the integration of legally resident immigrants into contemporary liberal democratic states. First, I ask to what extent immigrants should enjoy the same rights as citizens and on what terms they should have access to citizenship itself. I defend two general principles: (1) differential treatment requires justi.cation; (2) the longer immigrants have lived in the receiving society, the stronger their claim to equal rights and eventually to full citizenship. Second, I explore additional forms of economic, cultural, social, and political integration. I argue that the integration of immigrants depends upon a process of mutual, but asymmetrical adaptation and that it is precisely because the immigrants have to adapt more that the receiving society bears a greater responsibility to take steps to promote equality between the immigrants and the existing population.

Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy.

Abstract: This paper revisits the ethical and political questions raised by feminist debates over essentialism. Reviewing these seemingly disparate debates, I identify in them a coherent history of engagement with 'essentialism' understood, in a relatively unified sense, as the belief that there are properties essential to women and which all women share. Feminists' widespread rejection of essentialism posed a well-known problem: it undermined feminist politics by denying women any shared characteristics which might motivate them into collective action. Re-evaluating two responses to this problem - 'strategic' essentialism and Iris Marion Young's idea that women are not a unified group but an internally diverse 'series' - I argue that are both are unsatisfactory, tacitly retaining essentialism as a descriptive claim about the social reality of women's lives. However, building on Young's idea that women should be reconceived as a non-unified sort of social group, I argue for understanding women to have a genealogy. Based on a reading of Nietzsche's concept of genealogy, I suggest that women always acquire femininity by appropriating and reworking existing cultural interpretations of femininity, with the result that all women become situated within a history of overlapping chains of interpretation. Because all women are located within this complex history, they are identifiable as belonging to a determinate social group, even though they do not share any common understanding or experience of femininity. I conclude that the idea that women have a genealogy can allow feminists to reconcile anti-essentialism with commitment to a coalitional politics.

Against Public Reason Liberalism's Accessibility Requirement

Abstract: Public reason liberals typically defend an accessibility requirement for reasons offered in public political dialog. The accessibility requirement holds that public reasons must be amenable to criticism, evaluable by reasonable persons, and the like. Public reason liberals are therefore hostile to the public use of reasons that appear inaccessible, especially religious reasons. This hostility has provoked strong reactions from public reason liberalism's religion-friendly critics. But public reason liberals and their religion-friendly critics need not be at odds because the accessibility requirement is implausible. In fact, the accessibility requirement is ambiguous between two interpretations, one of which is too stringent and the other too loose. Depending upon the interpretation, accessibility either restricts the use of too many secular reasons or permits appeal to a wide range of religious reasons. The accessibility requirement should therefore be rejected.