The 16th Amherst Lecture in Philosophy (ALP) was presented by Sally Haslanger, Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women's & Gender Studies - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on Thursday, October 27, 2022.
Title: Situated Knowledge and Situated Values
Abstract: An important feature of theoretical projects that aim to promote social justice is their commitment to empowering those in oppressive circumstances so that they can solve their own problems. One argument for this is that the oppressed have situated knowledge – both moral knowledge and empirical knowledge of the circumstances – that others lack. I argue in this lecture that another way to understand this commitment is by exploring how values evolve in the context of social practices. If social values are contingent historically and materially grounded constructions, then change will involve a process of reconstructing existing values or constructing them anew in practice. I argue that such path dependency is compatible with values - and social justice - being objective, but not to be discovered by theory alone.