Ethics Untangled
Ethics Untangled is a series of conversations about the ethical issues that affect all of us, with academics who have spent some time thinking about them. It is brought to you by the IDEA Centre, a specialist unit for teaching, research, training and consultancy in Applied Ethics at the University of Leeds.
Find out more about IDEA, including our Masters programmes in Healthcare Ethics and Applied and Professional Ethics, our PhDs and our consultancy services, here:
ahc.leeds.ac.uk/ethics
Ethics Untangled is edited by Mark Smith at Leeds Media Services.
Music is by Kate Wood.
Ethics Untangled
2. What is a Mother? With Fiona Woollard
For this episode I spoke to Professor Fiona Woollard.
Professor Woollard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. She has research interests in normative ethics, applied ethics, epistemically transformative experiences and the philosophy of sex and pregnancy. She has published on topics including the distinction between doing and allowing harm, climate change and the non-identity problem, the moral significance of numbers, pornography and the norm of monogamy.
Her recent research has led her to ask a question which turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer: what is a mother? Not necessarily, in her view, a woman with a child. In this interview she explains why she doesn't think this is the right way of defining a mother, and what she thinks is a better way. To get there, we tried to get to grips with some vexed questions about gender.
Professor Woollard's page at Southampton is here.
Here's the advert we refer to at the start of the interview.
Some of the books and papers Professor Woollard talks about in the interview:
Ashley, Florence. (forthcoming) ”What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity? Gender Subjectivity and the Phenomenological Constitution of Gender Identity” Mind.
Bettcher, Talia Mae. (2009) “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority” In Laurie Shrage (ed.), You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hays, Sharon. (1998) The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. London: Yale University Press.
Jenkins, Katharine. (forthcoming) Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender and Social Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kukla, Quill and Lance, Mark. (forthcoming) “Telling Gender: The Pragmatics and Ethics of Gender Ascriptions” in ERGO.
Ruddick, S. (1980). "Maternal Thinking". Feminist Studies, 6(2), 342–367.
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
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