Using relations of solidarity in global contexts, this article explores some of the debates about what constitutes solidarity. Three primary forms of solidarity are discussed, with particular attention to the different nature of the solidaristic relations and their moral obligations.'Solidarity' originated in French legal history as 'collective liability', and although it rarely means that in contemporary parlance, the emphasis on the collective remains (Metz 1999;Stjernø 2005). In everyday usage, the term connotes numerous things ranging from activist responses to political injustice to sympathetic expressions in reaction to tragedy. Descriptive and normative literature in moral, social, and political philosophy on solidarity has ballooned in the last decade, in part because of the public adoption of the term in global activist campaigns and in part because of a renewed philosophical interest in collective responsibility.As a description, solidarity refers to the cohesion of a particular community and may or may not imply obligations among solidaristic members. As a normative concept, solidarity refers to the obligations of a moral relation. The normative force, as I will discuss subsequently, may be basic or aspirational; but solidarity incorporates a class of duties sometimes seen as distinct from or augmenting individual obligations of justice within social and moral relations. This is in part because solidarity is a collective relation that mediates between the individual and the community (or, according to some accounts, between individual interests and the communal good); solidarity marks a unity that neither subsumes the individual nor represents solely the community. Importantly, solidarity entails positive duties or commitments to action. One participates in solidarity with others in order to do something -one must act (not just refrain from acting). A recurring aspect of solidarity is its focus on the poor, the vulnerable, the oppressed, and victims of violence or tyranny, although that focus does not appear in all accounts of solidarity.These factors suggest that 'solidarity' may be a leftist concept; although there is no question that historically the idea of solidarity has found a more conducive home in socialist theory and politics, it may also be found within conservative political agendas as well as nationalist and racist campaigns. Understanding solidarity, then, requires an analysis of the context in which it is used as well as the background social, political, metaphysical, and epistemic assumptions at work in its invocation. A look at some contemporary global solidarities provides interesting exemplars of various forms of solidary relations as well as some of the underlying controversies that make this central concept of social philosophy so intriguing. Although the new tools of global communication and the new relations of globalization may indicate a resurgence in the number of appeals to solidarity, it actually has a longer history in social, political, and economic thought. I begin with a...
Simone de Beauvoir offers one of the most interesting philosophical accounts of childhood, and, as numerous scholars have argued, it is one of the most important contributions that she made to existentialism. Beauvoir stressed the importance of childhood on one's ability to assume one's freedom. This radically changed how freedom was construed for existentialism. Rather than positing an adult subjectivity that tries to flee freedom through bad faith, Beauvoir's account forces a recognition of a situated freedom that itself is also developmentally achieved. In this article, I explore the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. By reading Beauvoir through Rousseau—who was one of her favorite authors—we see not just one but two accounts of childhood in Beauvoir's philosophical work. On the one hand is the idealistic childhood wherein the child is an apprentice to freedom. On the other is the constrained childhood whose product is apprenticed to the serious. I begin with a brief summary of Rousseau's Emile. Next, I offer some justification for reading Beauvoir alongside Rousseau before offering an account of Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. I end by exploring some of the implications of my reading for freedom.
We criticize a view of maternity that equates the natural with the genetic and biological and show how such a practice overdetermines the maternal body and the maternal experience for women who are mothers through adoption and ART (Assisted Reproductive Technologies). As an alternative, we propose a new framework designed to rethink maternal bodies through the lens of feminist embodiment. Feminist embodied maternity, as we call it, stresses the particularity of experience through subjective embodiment. A feminist embodied maternity emphasizes the physical relations of the subjective lived-body rather than the genetic or biological connections. Instead of universalizing claims about the maternal body, embodied maternity looks to communicable experiences and empathetic understanding.
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