Gender Perception as a Habit of Moral Perception: Implications for Philosophical Methodology and Introductory Curriculum

Evidence is in that philosophy, as a profession, is male-dominated in its membership, and underrepresented groups suggest that systemic and persistent inequities endure.1 One possible measure to rectify the gender imbalance, and perhaps therefore the climate of the profession, is to increase the number of women in philosophy. Recent research suggests that it is after taking introductory classes that undergraduate women's enrollments drop off sharply; ratios of women receiving doctorates in philosophy seem to be, comparatively, more consistent with numbers of women with undergraduate degrees in philosophy.2 The authors add, "This suggests that there is an 'intro-major cliff' that is perpetuated through the hierarchy of academia, culminating in the gender gap that we see at the faculty level," and "also suggests that a promising means of closing the gender gap would be to focus on philosophy at the undergraduate level."3 If future research bears out these findings, then the way we go about designing and teaching our introductory courses may directly influence the gender makeup and the culture of the profession. Solutions to the problem of the intro-major cliff are, on some levels, easily identified. One strategy that feminist philosophers have particularly recommended, to improve introductory curriculum so that courses are more attractive to and retentive of female students, is to include more works by women on syllabi. Especially in "Introduction to Philosophy," our students would benefit because, as Margaret Urban Walker says, "The presence of concerns, texts, and images that acknowledge women within undergraduate classrooms, graduate training, and professional media allow women students to feel that a discipline, literally, comprehends them, that it is a space that they are free to enter and expected to enter."4 Yet objections to the inclusion of women's work on introductory syllabi are raised, which indicate that the solutions to the intro-major cliff are not so easily accomplished. A standard argument against the inclusiveness strategy (as I call it in this article) is that the deliberate effort to include women's work is driven by emotional and political motives that are detrimental to achieving more valuable pedagogical goals, such as fairly and accurately representing the canon, and offering selections on the basis of their philosophical quality rather than the identities of their authors; the assumption that gender is irrelevant to philosophy is usually stated or implied in the course of the objection.5 Conversations in conferences and in online venues regularly reduce to inclusiveness advocates being described as overly preoccupied with affective considerations and biased in favor of women, and inclusiveness critics being described as insensitive and biased against women. In what follows, however, I suggest that participants in debates about inclusiveness would be better served by keeping firmly in view the extent to which all the passionate pedagogues in such debates are emotionally invested in their views. I draw on Peggy DesAutels's analysis of "moral perception," and I apply her insight that different types of moral perceivers connect emotionally with different features of moral situations. Inclusiveness advocates may be mistaken when they suggest that critics are simply insensitive; given the samples of their criticisms below, it appears that critics are very sensitive to what appears morally salient to them. And inclusiveness critics are wrong that advocates are inappropriately attentive to affect or preoccupied with their own emotional states; as I argue, advocates have reasons supported by data for their emotional and political commitments. The extent to which one perceives it important to include women on introductory syllabi may be affected by one's largely unconscious, and unchosen, habits of moral perception. If I am right that most Anglophone philosophers, and most critics of inclusiveness, fit DesAutels's description of abstract moral perceivers, then the extent to which philosophers have (what I call) gender perception is affected by their basic habits of moral perception; abstract moral perceivers tend not to perceive gender matters as morally salient features of the moral landscapes of philosophy and pedagogy. Habits based on such implicit biases can be changed, however, so I conclude with recommendations, whatever one's tendencies as a moral perceiver, as a pedagogue one ought to come around to a more attentive variety of gender perception that responds appreciatively to empirical evidence, outlined below, that women and men are benefited by inclusive curricula and more diverse offerings on syllabi.6 I rely on evidence that biases, once made explicit, are more easily accommodated, and I suggest that philosophers need not dismantle or entirely control our biases in order to develop better habits of gender perception. Given the sorts of benefits that accrue to students of inclusive curricula, including affective engagement and academic achievement, I recommend appealing to abstract moral perceivers with arguments from fairness, impartiality and quality, to best motivate the perception that inclusive curriculum is morally and pedagogically compelling. I begin in Part One with an explication of the ways in which moral theorists tend to describe moral perception; I clarify the relationship of moral perception to implicit bias, and I suggest that while both are dynamic and changeable, biases are not eradicable. In Part Two, I apply DesAutels's distinctions between two types of moral perceivers to the profession of philosophy; I suggest that philosophers tend to be abstract moral perceivers, and that from the point of view of the abstract perceiver, it is possible that gender is not morally salient. The biases informing gender-indifferent perceptions are reflected in the forms that arguments against inclusiveness tend to take; to demonstrate this, I proceed with a characterization of the inclusiveness debate in part three. I advance the case for inclusiveness, emphasizing the evidence of benefits to all students accruing from more diverse curricular offerings. I conclude that the moral and methodological arguments between philosophers have been misconstrued as a conflict of values, rather than as a more fundamental difference in the moral perceptions of advocates and critics, in a profession that selects for analytic capacities and habits of perception. Prioritizing the accommodation of habits of moral perception over changing the moral perceivers who are drawn to the philosophy profession, I recommend differently representing the inclusiveness strategy to analytic moral perceivers. It is out of the scope of this article to explore the many methods of improving moral perception, so I end by noting the possibilities for changing philosophers' habits rather than by providing those solutions here. Philosophical literatures on moral perception and on implicit bias are rich, but philosophers engaged in explicating one of these concepts rarely refer to the other; as so many authors of both concepts tend to argue for broad definitions, the concepts and their interrelation take some sorting out. Charles Starkey offers a widely praised overview of the literature on moral perception, noting that some iterations of it tend to presume that moral perception is normatively correct perception. For example, he notes Gilbert Harman's example of coming upon a group which is attempting to pour gasoline on a cat and light it on fire, the wrongness of which "strikes us immediately and verisimilarly, in the same manner as our other perceptions."7 Starkey suggests that this is perhaps true, but that it permits only a narrow account of moral perception, overemphasizing the content of rightness or wrongness. In contrast, Starkey aims for a comprehensive definition, or as he says, "a unified category," one that comes closer to John McDowell's more "action-guiding" account of moral perception as involving "the relevant notion of salience," that is, "the role of perception in grasping an aspect of a situation" that informs morally relevant choices.8 Starkey therefore describes "moral perception as morally appraisable perceptual apprehension." He adds, "Moral perception is morally appraisable in that it is morally appropriate (or inappropriate) or morally commendatory (or condemnable) perception. A moral perception is a perceptual apprehension in that it is a perceptual taking-in and assessment of what the moral perceiver encounters."9 Importantly for my purposes, Starkey adds that it is not his aim to deny "that some sorts of moral perception are better than others but merely to allow room for multiple and at times incompatible senses of what is important in a situation, which can all have a moral bearing. Indeed, it may be a fault on the perceiver's part to not see the competing moral demands. In addition, failing to perceive can be morally appraisable and is thus a form of moral perception."10 At times, Starkey explicates the capacity for moral perception; at other times, he focuses on moral perception as just the accomplishment of perception on a particular occasion, or as a set of acts: "The category of moral perception is constituted by those perceptions with the property of moral appraisability."11 Of course, moral perception is necessarily ambiguous in just the same way that sight is ambiguous, referring to the capacity at some times (as when I say my sight is diminishing with age) and the act or accomplishment at others (as when I say the sight of a daffodil delights me). And acts of perception are themselves enabling of further perceptive capacities. Relatedly, as Rebecca Kukla points out, "Moral perception . . . is the perception of normatively contoured objects and states of affairs, where that perception enables us to engage in practical reason and judgment concerning those particulars . . . Our perceptual capacities are not static."12 Like Starkey, Kukla develops an account of moral perception as a receptivity to aspects of a situation that hang on what differently positioned agents encounter, allowing for the likelihood of different saliencies to different perceivers: "Thus the inculcated shape of our perceptual capacities will determine not merely how things look to us, but which actual features of the world we are in a position to receive and recognize. Accordingly, if perceptual capacities vary from person to person, then different people will be in a position to be able to recognize different real features of the world."13 Kukla, too, aims to assess the moral perceptions of those whom she appraises as suffering from, or guilty of, "failures of perception." She emphasizes that, as Margaret Little says, "there are indefinitely many things that may be morally relevant in a situation," but she reminds the reader that perceptual capacities "are educable," adding, "We need to take it as a personal moral failing, in need of redress, if our lives are such as to leave us blind to key moral facts about others."14 Kukla does not aim for perfect achievement in perception, explicitly rejecting an aperspectival, objective bird's-eye view of all possible moral features as "an inappropriate ideal."15 Rather, she proposes taking up responsibilities "to negotiate moral discourse on the charitable assumption that any rational agent can be educated into the ability to see any moral fact that is perceptually available" to another.16 Starkey's and Kukla's accounts helpfully situate Peggy DesAutels's attention to "the mental processes used to organize our moral experience as moral perception (as opposed to moral judgment)." DesAutels adds: I stress both the role of immediate perception and the role of perception-like mental processes (e.g., the use of inarticulable, embodied responses and the use of holistic mental structures) in the overall process of determining the moral saliencies of particular situations. . . . Moral perception is a determination arrived at using sensory data and our developed mental structures and capacities. I conceive of a moral perceiver as an agent who notices (either consciously or subliminally) moral features in his or her experience.17 Note the roles of sense data and previously existing mental structures to provide a context for experiences of perceptions: that data include the presence and effects of implicit bias. As other contributors to this volume discuss in greater detail, implicit bias is characterized by "unconscious biases that affect the way we perceive, evaluate, or interact with people from the groups that our biases 'target' "18 and "attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudices in the absence of intention, awareness, deliberation, or effort."19"The power of expectations (based on learned contingencies) to unwittingly affect basic perception, judgment, memory and behavior" is well established, as is "the scientific consensus regarding the importance and ubiquity of nonconscious, highly efficient, and automatized cognition," and "the notion that judgment and decision-making . . . is subject to unintentional biases and shortcomings."20 So the relationship of implicit bias to moral perception is that of the conditions permitting practice to the capacities for practice. Moral perceptions are a subset of perceptions; implicit biases are unconscious associations and biases that affect all sorts of perceptions, including moral perceptions; biases partly constitute the very furniture of moral perception, so it is fortunate that furniture can be moved. As I discuss below, DesAutels argues, similar to Kukla's insight into the "inculcated shape of our perceptual capacities," that habits of moral perception are developed over time into "moral perceptual competencies," typified by how we tend to perceive "as opposed to the type(s) of moral content [we] tend to see or not see (by what[we] tend to perceive."21 Nevertheless, my discussion in the next section of DesAutels's two types of moral perceivers is motivated by my own concern regarding what philosophers tend to see or not see as morally salient to discussions regarding colleagues, students, authors, or illustrative examples in texts: gender as an aspect of the discussion. Feminist philosophers may have raised the profession's awareness of gender as it relates to philosophy and philosophers, but it remains the case that prominent Anglophone philosophers, at least among the large concentration in North America, aver that gender and feminism are largely irrelevant to philosophy. Peggy DesAutels's insights into the psychology of moral perception move me to consider that the perseverance of this widely held view may be owed in part to the sorts of moral perceivers that most philosophers are. Drawing on cognitive science research, DesAutels describes "two types of competencies that agents employ to identify moral saliencies in their day-to-day experience," competencies that are "developed over time," and therefore characterized by habituated processes and longstanding patterns of receptivity.22 First, DesAutels identifies "a competence in using high-level, analytic thought processes for abstract problem solving," and, second, "a competence in using embodied, low-level though processes for responding to concrete, finely grained situations."23 Because the two competencies can be developed quite separately in different individuals, DesAutels distinguishes "two types of moral perceivers:" What I term an abstract moral perceiver, then, is a moral agent who has a highly developed analytic competence . . . and who tends to use this competence to determine moral saliencies in the world around him. An abstract moral perceiver will often use high-level principles to determine the nature of a situation and then reason/deliberate in order to determine the best moral response [, to] determine moral saliencies that . . . easily "plug into" moral rules.24 DesAutels contrasts the abstract moral perceiver with the concrete moral perceiver, one with "a highly developed concrete and embodied competence" who uses interpersonal and related intelligence "to determine the moral saliencies in the world." The concrete "perceiver often deploys 'know-how' rather than high-level cognitive analysis as the means for determining the moral saliencies of a situation."25 DesAutels adds, "It should come as no surprise that many moral philosophers are themselves abstract moral perceivers."26 Although neither she nor I can offer evidence of this, I venture to state that most Anglophone philosophers tend to display analytic ability and to gravitate to the profession of philosophy precisely because it appeals to and selects for analytical reasoners. In the United States, evidence suggests that most philosophers are white males.27 I do not have data sufficient to claim that white males tend to be abstract moral perceivers. But I have some company in averring that white males in philosophy are highly likely to be abstract moral perceivers.28 I suggest that the abstract moral perceptions of philosophers who are largely white and male generate principled and emotional commitments regarding gender in philosophy; relatedly, evidence in education literature notes that "outsider and marginal status facilitates a scholar's receptivity to innovation" and curricular transformation.29 I describe the abstract moral perceiver's commitments as emotional because I am influenced by DesAutels' valuable reminder that both abstract and concrete types of moral perception "involve emotions but in different ways."30 Bearing in mind that emotions inform both types of moral perceivers may valuably redirect arguments about inclusiveness in course design; perhaps it should be obvious that the philosophers engaged in argumentation have emotional investment in their rightness, but in the cases I am discussing in part three, debates about the merits of inclusiveness occur in a context in which concrete moral perceivers, that is, the feminist pedagogues to whom political motives are attributed, are more likely to be described as emotional. They are emotional because their motives are political, and in discussions of course design that will directly affect individual experiences, the political is rightly perceived to be personal. DesAutels promotes a clearer understanding of the inclusiveness debate when she points out that, given varieties of moral perceivers, we can imagine different moral points of view, different reasons for believing one is righteously perceiving. Indeed, even as inclusiveness critics mount arguments in different venues against the emotional motivations of inclusiveness advocates, the critics are quite passionately opposed to attention to gender. In urging attention to priorities including the importance of rigor, fairness, quality, and respect for the canon, priorities that are reminiscent of DesAutels's "high-level principles" and "moral rules," inclusiveness critics endorse the values of that for which they care and demonstrate emotional investment in their commitments to their visions of excellent undergraduate education. Note, in the next section, the connections between the different moral perceptions and gender perception, that is, the perception that gender has any moral salience at all. Philosophers who embrace, and have developed high capacities for, abstract moral perception could understandably be committed to, and emotionally invested in, moral for to considerations of gender. DesAutels's types of moral perception me to about what philosophers' are, and their different moral perceptions regarding the role of gender in philosophy and philosophical such emotional responses when It is to those I Like many at undergraduate I am attentive to conferences and that offer discussion of course design for classes in introductory philosophy. than I have the A or a suggests that it is important to include women among the authors are for an "Introduction to and as to what women to at least one responds that it is not important to include women on introductory that gender does not and that the of the presence of women on introductory syllabi comes at the of other priorities that are more pedagogically compelling. to the deliberate inclusion of women are often by that identities are consider the who in on the Feminist Philosophers that attention to the gender of authors is because does not who is the the to on the not to a of excellent work because its authors are or even because they made a to their overall is possible of as of the same the argument that students feel by an as to women, as it that women are to take at of or to hang with the the of this adds that he is opposed to in the that is, the practice of in this I the ways that the of a implicit biases of its such critics of gender the argument is made that the effort to include women on introductory syllabi is driven by political and emotional by and and that with pedagogical and responsibilities to one's students, including the offering of the authors that are most and most fairly important for students to As one "an introductory should be based on its content rather than on the personal particulars of the authors of that The between advocates and critics of inclusiveness can be and for the inclusion of women in introductory syllabi that the critics care about their students, or about pedagogical priorities such as and affective experiences of in their the advocates overly preoccupied with the affective experiences of their students, as well as overly preoccupied with their own values, feminist values, at the of excellent pedagogy. I to arguments as to how we go about abstract moral perceivers, however, I my reasons for among inclusiveness advocates, reasons not all of which inclusiveness advocates draw but which I suggest we It is well in the of teaching and that benefits to all students in male-dominated accrue from the deliberate offering of curriculum that aims for For the of this I inclusiveness as the deliberate inclusion of of women and at those points in a course curriculum at which such are or The benefits of inclusiveness are in where the male-dominated of the profession has concern for in more that is, in and and data have been in the and have only very been on the benefits of inclusiveness in Nevertheless, regarding philosophy can be drawn from the data that I describe best the benefits of inclusive engagement and the is often a to the second, so benefits in both are of engagement has been by faculty assessment of and of and affective including senses of and with authors or have been by and of or of and moral or more moral Of the benefits to the most is that of a sense of and receptivity on the part of students who previously or out of in a these are usually the sorts of that both inclusiveness advocates and critics have in mind when they debate the of philosophy course the most widely of inclusive curriculum for both men and women is the with in should come as no surprise when we consider that on some the and of by are an part of our these biases to to how we are to a of the this a from or tend to of, and of, the the too, should not surprise as and point out, or engagement in an awareness of one's and of I should that, in as including and of texts, authors, and their I am from accounts of as by on evidence suggests the seem to improve for all students when course are As argues, research suggests that explicitly and attention to their from other and their senses of difference in the presence of the course a but not a for both and in the of he focuses that and attention to that we are with of by which he means not the in the he pedagogues to be and passionate rather a in our to of course as when we students to simply what a about women. the of curricular and more diverse course with in is rarely raised by inclusiveness advocates or critics in inclusiveness I suggest that in such of this benefit to all philosophy students is the of of the data on the benefits of inclusive Of this, more for I to focus our attention on the importance of the that inclusive curriculum has affective and is important to in light of a previously of in the science of for to the entirely within students to an of such a focus that if students would their ways of or their about their in a then they could and should the for their and for improving their own on teaching as to how could offer of but the of the often in the of In light of research the of affective and academic more than one that the processes of and the benefits of inclusive are not to be for by the states of As says, is not in the of individuals, but in the processes of is in of . . . where to is The of practice in philosophy and the of the discipline, include an awareness and

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