In Defence of Conceptual Ethics: Amelioration and the Metaphysics of Gender and Race

"In Defence of Conceptual Ethics: Amelioration and the Metaphysics of Gender and Race"

Abstract: Sally Haslanger has distinguished between descriptive projects and ameliorative projects in philosophy. The main idea is this: philosophers engaged in a descriptive project aim to reveal the operative concept, that is, the objective type that our usage of a certain term tracks (if any), whereas philosophers engaged in an ameliorative project aim to reveal the target concept, that is, the concept that we should be using, given our purposes and goals in that inquiry. The questions pertaining to ameliorative projects are the following: what is the point of having this concept? Which concept would serve these purposes best?

In her (2000) paper, Haslanger offered a social constructivist analysis of gender and race, and argued that those analyses are not intended to capture our ordinary concepts of gender and race, but her aim was rather to figure out the target concepts, that is, the concepts of gender and race that would be most useful in order to achieve social justice. However, in more recent work (2005, 2006), she has argued that her social constructivist accounts of gender and race could also be seen as trying to capture the operative concept that we actually associate with our terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’.

This important distinction gives rise to the following question: should philosophers of gender and race engage in the descriptive project, or in the ameliorative project? It could be argued that these are two independent projects and that they are both useful. But if they are both useful, we can still ask: useful for what purposes, and under what conditions? In this paper I would like to discuss this important question. In particular, I want to examine the nature and the prospects of both the descriptive and the ameliorative project regarding the metaphysics of gender and race.

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