Abstract

My project discusses the under-explored secular virtue of Grace. A gracious person forgives those who don’t deserve forgiveness, trusts those who aren’t trustworthy, and loves those who do not merit love. But she doesn’t do so out of naivety. Grace, understood as a disposition to treat people better than they deserve at the cost of giving up salient agent-centred prerogatives, is a relational virtue of investment. In giving grace, one invests in another person’s moral transformation into someone who indeed deserves forgiveness, trust, and love. 

Abstract

Recent work in the standpoint epistemology literature has featured arguments that non-dominant group members cannot have a unique epistemic advantage that dominant group individuals cannot similarly possess. Against these views, this paper presents an argument that non-dominant group members who achieve a standpoint can have a unique epistemic advantage that dominant group members cannot similarly obtain. This argument is based on two premises. The first premise is that if a non-dominant group member achieves a standpoint, then this individual has developed a particular epistemic skill which yields them a unique epistemic advantage. The second premise is that if a non-dominant group member achieves a standpoint, then she will be more likely to avoid believing certain falsehoods than individuals who have not achieved this standpoint.

Abstract

Emancipation did not fail. It succeeded at reorganizing antiblack domination as freedom. Extending Charles Mills’ racial contract, this article theorizes the emancipation contract, a post-slavery compact that makes civic incorporation an instrument of domination rather than its remedy. Where the racial contract secures white supremacy primarily through exclusion, the emancipation contract operates through revocable inclusion by two mechanisms: materially, the lease-and-release of black labor and civic standing; ideologically, the myth of black citizenship. Reading the Black Codes, convict-leasing, and the Reconstruction Amendments’ penal and crime exceptions, it demonstrates how conviction converts contractual breach into civic forfeiture, attributing withdrawn rights to the rights holder’s conduct, so that exclusion becomes the effect of revocable inclusion rather than its cause. Against accounts that treat civic incorporation as the threshold of full democracy, it argues that revocable inclusion is not democratic repair but a form through which liberal democracy reproduces antiblack domination.