Sally Haslanger

Sally Haslanger is an American philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working in metaphysics, epistemology and social and feminist philosophy. She argues that gender and race are real social kinds, defined by a person's position in hierarchical social relations, and that philosophers should not only describe our concepts but ask what concepts we need for the purposes of justice. This ameliorative method has been widely discussed and criticised, including for how it fits people's self-understanding.

Key ideas

• Gender and race are social positions in systems of subordination and privilege, real though socially constructed.
• Ameliorative analysis asks what concepts best serve our legitimate purposes, not only what we already mean.
• Social construction does not make a category unreal.
• Social structures and ideology shape what seems natural or obvious.

Major works

• "Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?" (2000)
• Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (2012)

In the conversation

• Discussion Writing an eligibility rule taught me that metaphysics doesn’t settle policy Gerrit Venter · 6 replies
• Question My debaters keep talking past each other on gender. Are they even answering the same question? Sam Ellery · 4 replies
• Question My son asked whether race is real. How can ‘race isn’t biological’ and ‘racism is real’ both be true? Thamarai Raman · 5 replies
• Question Is the circularity objection to identity-based accounts of gender fatal, or a misunderstanding? Tomasz Szewczak · 6 replies
• Discussion Should a health service record race? Notes on the hardest practical case Alistair Gow · 6 replies
• Debate Appiah is right: racial terms are empty, like ‘phlogiston’, and we should stop talking as if they named kinds Kwame Asante · 7 replies
• Debate Haslanger’s ameliorative method changes the subject rather than answering the question Oskar Nyberg · 7 replies
• Debate Searle’s “X counts as Y in C” leaves out the power that makes people accept it Johanna Reinhardt · 6 replies