Paul Taylor, "'The White People Are Melting': Fools Rush In And Shadows of Citizenship" (Thursday, 5:00 - 6:30 pm)

In the 1997 film, Fools Rush In (Columbia, Andy Tennant, Director), Selma Hayek plays a young Chicana who marries, divorces, and remarries an Anglo businessman (played by Matthew Perry). As the film moves its central pair toward remarriage, it also raises crucial questions about the study and the reality of citizenship. In The White People are Melting, I'll provide a reading of the film that identifies and contemplates its interest in these questions, with a special emphasis on cultural and shadow citizenship.

About Paul Taylor: Professor Taylor is a professor of philosophy at Temple University working in the areas of aesthetics, philosophy of culture, Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, social and political philosophy, and pragmatism in the United States. His current project connects John Dewey's aesthetic theory to Africana political philosophy. He writings include Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity - Blackwell, 2004).

 Jeffrey Reiman, "Democracy and the Rights of Felons" (Friday, 9:00 - 10:30 am)

In the United States today, 4.7 million citizens--more than two percent of the adult population--are deprived of the right to vote because they have been convicted of a felony. Bear in mind, that a felony is simply a crime subject to a penalty of a year or more in prison. Approximately 1.4 million of these convicted felons are currently in prison. Of those who are not in prison, some 1.7 million have completed their sentences and are no longer under any form of criminal justice supervision. Arguments about felony disenfranchisement are often framed along the lines of classical liberal and classical republican theories of citizenship, and I will follow this practice. The most important classical liberal argument for disenfranchis! ement of convicted felons is that criminals violate the social contract, and thus forfeit the political rights to which the contract entitles them. I will argue that social contract theory does not have this implication and that, in fact, social contract theory shows quite strikingly how important voting is and thus implies that it is wrong to deny the vote to felons who have completed their punishment. The classical republican argument for disenfranchisement is that convicted felons lack the civic virtue needed for proper exercise of the vote. I will argue that this claim is a non sequitur and that a concern for civic virtue--of criminals and non-criminals--supports granting voting rights to felons, even those who are still in prison. In short, I will make a liberal argument for enfranchising felons who have completed their punishments, and a republican argument for enfranchising all felons. I regard these two arguments, not as alternatives, but as cumulative in their force.

About Jeffrey Reiman: Jeffrey Reiman is the William Fraser McDowell Professor of Philosophy at American University in Washington, D.C. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Queens College in 1963, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Pennsylvania State University in 1968. He was a Fulbright Scholar in India during 1966-67. He joined the American University faculty in 1970, in the Center for the Administration of Justice (now called the Department of Justice, Law and Society of the School of Public Affairs). After several years of holding a joint appointment in the Justice program and the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Dr. Reiman joined the Department of Philosophy and Religion full-time in 1988, becoming Director of the Master's Program in Philosophy and Social Policy. He was named William Fraser McDowell Professor of Philosophy in 1990. He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies, and past president of the American University Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Dr. Reiman is the author of In Defense of Political Philosophy (1972), Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy (1990), Critical Moral Liberalism: Theory and Practice (1997), The Death Penalty: For and Against (with Louis P. Pojman, 1998), Abortion and the Ways We Value Human Life (1999), The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice (7th edition, 2004), and more than fifty articles in philosophy and criminal justice journals and anthologies. He is co-editor (with Paul Leighton) of Criminal Justice Ethics (2001).

 Annette Dula, "Whitewashing Health Disparities" (Friday, 10:45 - 12:15 pm)

In 1998, the US department of health and human services developed the "Initiative to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health." The goal is to reduce disparities by 2010. As concern for health disparities continue to mount and other initiatives emerge to address the problem, a predictable backlash appears to be in the making. Sally Satel, for example, in P.C., M.D: How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine (2001), argues that work to reduce social inequalities in health are ideologically motivated by "indoctrinologists" and politically correct ideoogues. Physician, Robert White, in a 2000 article in the Archives of Internal Medicine, suggested that ex-President Bill Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study had the potential to continue to "replace reason with outrage" in the African American community, thereby making health disparities worse. I will analyze the rising conservative backlash as various agencies and groups seek to address and reduce the health disparities between people of color and whites. I will demonstrate the faulty reasoning and racist assumptions implicit in the rhetoric of people like Satel and White. I will explore some of the forces that undermine efforts to reduce health disparities and discuss the implications for an ethical resolution of the healthcare disparities dilemma.

About Annette Dula: Annette Dula believes that bioethics must explicitly address issues of race, class, gender, and culture. One of a handful of African American bioethicists in the United States whose area of interest focuses on racial aspects of bioethics, Dula is an affiliate at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law and currently serves as a consultant and is on the external advisory board for the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. A graduate of Hampton Institute and Harvard University, Dula was a Fellow at the University of Chicago Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and has taught everyday medical ethics to interns and residents in neighborhood clinics. She has been a keynote or invited speaker at the major bioethics societies, universities and medical schools throughout the nation, and served on the bioethics committee of President's Health Task Force in Washington DC. She has published in the Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved, Hastings Center Report, and the Journal of Clinical Medical Ethics, and has contributed to several encyclopedia volumes on bioethics. An edited volume, It Just Ain't Fair! The Ethics of Health Care for African Americans was published by Praegar Publishers in 1994.

 Cheshire Calhoun, "Same Sex Marriage and Polygamy" (Friday, 1:45 - 3:15 pm)

Activists, philosophers, and political and legal theorists who argue in favor of extending civil marriage to same-sex couples typically maintain a vigorous silence about the other contemporary marriage bar-the bar to polygamous marriage. When challenged by their opponents with "And why not also polygamy?" advocates of same-sex marriage typically dismiss any analogy between the two bars on the grounds that polygamy is harmful to women's equality and thus is contrary to a liberal egalitarian democracy. I think that denying any connection between the two marriage bars is a mistake. In this lecture, I argue that attending to the millenias-long Judeo-Christian tradition of polygamy is useful in countering conservative appeals to "tradition" as a basis for not extending marriage rights to same-sex couples. Second, I try to show that 19th century advocates of polygamy and current advocates of same-sex! marriage both adopted conservative strategies insofar as neither campaign questioned the desirability of haviing one state-defined form of marriage. I argue that this underlying assumption of both rights campaigns needs to be critically scrutinized. Finally, I suggest some reasons why we should be careful not to automatically assume that all polygamous marriages will be gender inegalitarian. If that assumption is unwarranted, then the proper response to opponents of same-sex marriage who challenge, "And why not also polygamy?" may "Indeed, why not polygamy?"

About Cheshire Calhoun: Cheshire Calhoun is Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy and department chair at Colby College, Waterville Maine. Her philosophical work is in the areas of ethics, feminist philosophy, and gay and lesbian studies. Her work in ethics includes essays on moral shame, common decency, integrity, and forgiveness. She is author of Feminism, the Family and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement as well as editor of a new collection, Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers (which contains an essay by Alison Jaggar). She edits Oxford University Press's series, Studies in Feminist Philosophy. Most recently, she has contributed an essay on same-sex marriage to the forthcoming Sex from Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopedia edited by Alan Soble. She has served on the APA Committee on the Status of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Persons in the Profession as well as on the APA Committee on Inclusiveness.

 Eva Feder Kittay, Closing Keynote Address (Friday, 3:30 - 5:00 pm)

Neither dependents (that is, young children, the frail aged, and those who are very ill or severely disabled), nor those who care for dependents, have figured importantly in Western political philosophy. Because political philosophy has set the parameters for citizenship, the needs and concerns of both dependents and their caregivers are poorly represented in the requirements and claims of citizenship. In this talk I will explore the claims of dependency and ways in which it bears on individuals and groups who stand outside traditional norms of "the independent citizen."

About Eva Feder Kittay: Eva Feder Kittay is a professor of philosophy at SUNY, Stony Brook. Her books include Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, Routledge (Thinking Gender Series) 1999; Theoretical Perspectives on Dependency and Women (with Ellen Feder), Rowman and Littlefield, 2002; Women and Moral Theory (edited with D. T. Meyers) Rowman and Littlefield; Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure, Claredon Press, Oxford University Press 1987, 1989; Frames, Fields and Contrasts (edited with A. Lehrer (Erlbaum 1992). She is currently working on the Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (with L. Alcoff), Blackwell. She has recently edited two Special Issues of Hypatia: Feminism and Disability (with A. Silvers and S. Wendell); and Special Issue of Social Theory and Practice: Embodied Values: Philosophy and Disabilities (with R. Gottlieb). Her areas of expertise include feminist philosophy, feminist ethics, social and political theory, metaphor, disability studies. She has taught and published more generally in philosophy of language and normative ethics and social thought. She is a former Chair of the APA Committee on the Status of Women, and as of June 2003 is the co-editor of the Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She is the mother of two adult children, one of whom is a young women with significant physical and cognitive disabilitites.