CARD, CLAUDIA
(1940–)

Claudia Card, an American philosopher, has published work on a wide range of philosophical topics but is best known for her contributions to ethics and feminist philosophy. Card began her academic career at Harvard University, where she received a PhD for her dissertation on theories of punishment. Currently the Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Card has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison since 1966. Card is also an affiliate professor in women's studies, environmental studies, Jewish studies, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered studies. Extraordinarily active in various philosophical societies, Card was named the Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the Year in 1996 by the Eastern Society for Women in Philosophy. The author of numerous scholarly books and journal articles, Card has also given a number of media interviews and served on many editorial boards. Her research interests include feminist philosophy, lesbian ethics, and evil.

Card's work is striking not just for the range of areas of philosophy to which it makes a contribution but also for the connections it draws between them. In ethics Card's work is notable for showing how questions in mainstream moral philosophy are tied to pressing political issues. In The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck (1996), for example, Card defends the concept of moral luck and explores how a person's opportunity to act morally is affected by such variables as gender, race, social class, and sexual identity. Card asks about the implications of moral luck for attributions of moral responsibility and in the course of her examination discusses the problems faced by survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Another notable feature of Card's contribution to philosophy is her attraction to difficult, troubling, and important questions. Her work on moral luck falls into this category, as does her later work on evil. Card's monograph The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (2004) explores the relationship between evil and other concepts/practices such as forgiveness, toleration, and hate. Card asks what distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs. The theory of evil developed in the book is applied to such practices as war rape and violence against intimates. She also addresses the moral "gray zone," in which persons can occupy the dual role of the victim and the perpetrator of evil.

Within feminist philosophy Card argues that feminism is not a single, unified worldview, but rather a lively debate characterized by the belief that women's subordination is wrong and that one should pay close attention to women's lived experiences. She stresses the importance of enabling women to describe their experiences in their own terms and cautions against the tendency to gloss over the unique experiences of nonwhite and poor women. Card's work urges one to be alert to the dangers of internalized oppression and adaptive preferences, and, in particular, to the ways in which oppression can compromise the integrity of its victims. Under oppressive circumstances victims are often motivated to ease their burdens by collaborating with their oppressors and/or uncritically adopting oppressive practices. In such cases, she contends that the oppressed cannot elude all responsibility; bad luck, for Card, does not necessarily subvert moral culpability and she advises that "[w]e need to be alert to the dangers of becoming what we despise" (1991, p. 26).

Card believes that opposition to real evils, such as, for example, domestic violence, should be given priority to opposition to gender inequalities, such as pay equity for tenured professors. Equality feminism, she says, trivializes the feminist movement and takes attention away from the graver problems that women face. On its own, Card thinks that care ethics is ill equipped to handle real evils. She also impugns care ethics for the way in which it dichotomizes the values of justice and care. Justice, she says, is not only about impartiality and universal principles of fairness, but also about giving people what they deserve, including compassionate, caring responses such as gratitude, trust, loyalty, and forgiveness.

Rejecting the idea that there is an essential lesbian identity, Card believes that there are, nonetheless, some historical commonalities among the experiences of lesbians. In Lesbian Choices (1995) Card attempts to articulate a lesbian ethics, understood as a ethics that grows of out the histories and experiences of lesbians and draws on paradigms and archetypes common in lesbian culture.

See also Ethics; Feminist Ethics; Feminist Philosophy.

Bibliography

Card, Claudia, and Robert R. Ammerman, eds. Religious Commitment and Salvation: Readings in Secular and Theistic Religion. Columbus, OH: Merrill Press, 1974.

works by card

Feminist Ethics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Adventures in Lesbian Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Lesbian Choices. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

On Feminist Ethics and Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999.

The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Amanda Porter (2005)

Samantha Brennan (2005)