Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests include democratic theory, egalitarianism, race and gender inequality, pragmatism, feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, social epistemology, value theory, and theories of rationality and social norms.
She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard UP, 1993), The Imperative of Integration (Princeton UP, 2010), and numerous articles in journals of philosophy, law, and economics. Her current project is a history of egalitarianism from the Levellers to the present.
She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Abstract
During the 19th century, the belief that individuals have a right against being enslaved became a nearly worldwide consensus. Most people today believe that this change in moral convictions was a case of moral learning. How we can know this, or similar claims about moral progress, without begging the question in favor of our current beliefs? I answer this question by developing a naturalized, pragmatist moral epistemology through case studies of moral lessons people have drawn from the history of abolition and emancipation. I argue that processes of contention, in which participants challenge existing moral and legal principles governing interpersonal relationships, play critical roles in moral learning. Contention may take the form of argument, but takes many other forms as well, including litigation, protest, and revolution.
