Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Non-ideal theories of social categories aspire to capture the ways in which these categories actually shape people’s activities and relationships, and not the ways in which these categories should operate in idealized social contexts. Ásta recently has argued that a commitment to non-idealism about social categories entails what I will call particularism about social categories. On a particularist approach, someone becomes a member of a social category, not because they satisfy the general criteria for membership, but because other people confer membership onto them as particular subjects through their words and actions. According to Ásta, it is through these conferrals that social categories come to “matter socially” by bearing on the “constraints and enablements” that people bear. I argue that Ásta is repeating an error that Jerome Frank committed in the philosophy of law. Frank argued that a commitment to “legal realism” (as opposed to a fanciful idealism that ignores how law actually works) entails a commitment to legal particularism, but HLA Hart demonstrated that legal particularism is untenable. Drawing on Hart, I argue that a non-ideal theory of social categories should not be particularist, but should instead locate social categories within a community’s general evaluative and justificatory practices.
Source: Journal of Social Philosophy
DOI: 10.1111/josp.70005
Author: John Lawless
Institution: Illinois State University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,350
OpenAlex ID: W4412375932