Lawrence A. Blum
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(Emeritus) Professor of Philosophy

Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education

​University of Massachusetts, Boston

Email: [email protected]
​
Latest Book (May 2021)
winner of Israel Scheffler Award in Philosophy of Education (from the American Philosophical Association, for 2021-23)

ABOUT

I started my career in philosophy as a moral philosopher. My Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 [Routledge Revivals, 2009]) was one of the first defenses of the role of altruistic emotions (compassion, sympathy, concern, care) against a pervasive rationalism of that period, and was an early articulation of what soon after came to be called “care ethics.” It was an exercise in what was then beginning to be called “moral psychology”—the philosophical exploration of human capabilities bearing on leading a moral life—that also dovetailed with the rise of virtue ethics. My 1994 collection of essays, Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge UP) carried on this project, branching into moral perception, Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, altruistic emotions in young children, the issue of “moral saints,” a direct engagement with feminist care ethics, and the morality of Holocaust rescue.

In the early 1990’s I began working in the related areas of race, education, and multiculturalism, prompted in part by my three children attending very racially and ethnically diverse public schools of Cambridge, Mass, and my becoming active as a parent around racial, cultural, and class issues. I was also responding to the efforts in the 1980’s of a small group of African American philosophers to show the way to a distinctly philosophical approach to racial issues (Bernard Boxill, Howard McGary, Lucius Outlaw, Anita Allen, Adrian Piper, Tommy Lott, Bill Lawson, and others). My “I’m Not a Racist, But...”: The Moral Quandary of Race (Cornell UP, 2002) grew out of that interest. (It was selected Social Philosophy Book of the year by the North American Society for Social Philosophy.)

At the same time I started to work in the area of philosophy of education, working within a recently influential strand of political philosophy of education, often focused on educational justice and racial and multicultural issues, in my case joining with my earlier interest in moral education and moral development. I have taught political philosophy of education as a visitor at Stanford School of Education, and four different semesters at Teachers College, Columbia University. I taught a (non-philosophy) course on anti-racist and multicultural education for many years at UMass. Listen to an interview I gave to philosophy podcast PIPEline.fm  (audio, 11 minutes) about being a philosopher of education.

In the early ‘00’s I arranged to teach a course on race and racism at my local public high school to a very diverse and minority white class. I taught the course four times and several years later wrote a book about it, High Schools, Race, and America’s Future: What Students Can Teach Us About Morality, Diversity, and Community (Harvard Education Press, 2012). Interviews about this course and the experience of teaching it can be found here  [video, 26 minutes], and here [audio, 15 minutes]. I have worked directly with teachers on racial issues, including teaching a professional development course for district school personnel on dealing with racial issues with students and colleagues.

In 2021 I (with a co-author, Zoë Burkholder, an historian of education) published Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Schools (University of Chicago Press). We argue that the equality-producing effects of integration by itself have been overstated, that sometimes “separate” is“equal,” that educational activists in African American, Latinx, and Indigenous communities have often sought equality without favoring integration, and that “integration” comes in several distinct modalities. (The book was awarded the Israel Scheffler Prize in Philosophy of Education, conferred by the APA, for the period 2021-23.)

In more recent years I have also written on the Holocaust, and on race and film, while continuing to work on empathy and fellow-feeling.

Read an interview on the Italian philosophy website Aphex.it, where I talk at length about my career as a philosopher.

I have been a visiting professor at UCLA (in Philosophy), Stanford School of Education, Teachers College (Columbia University), and Rhodes University in Makhanda(formerly Grahamstown), South Africa (in Philosophy).

​I am married to the historian and film scholar, Judith Smith, who is Professor Emerita in American Studies at UMass-Boston.

RECENT AND SELECTED ARTICLES


  • “Class and Race Together,” for special issue of American Philosophical Quarterly on “racism,” October 2023, 60(4): 381-395
    The dispute about the role of class in understanding the life situations of people of color has tended to be overpolarized, between a class reductionism and an “it’s only race” position.Class processes shape racial groups’ life situations. Race and class are also distinct axes of injustice; but class injustice informs racial injustice. Some aspects of racial injustice can be expressed only in concepts associated with class (e.g., material deprivation, inferior education). But other aspects of racial injustice or other harms, such as racial discrimination or stigma, are not reducible to class concepts and cannot be fully addressed through class-focused policies. Overall, any attempt to fully secure racial justice for a racial group will require a combination of race-focused and class-focused policies.Anti-racist outlooks often neglect or downplay either the normative or the explanatory significance of class, or both—for example, by overlooking or downplaying the dignitary harms of class and the material harms of race; missing the historical dimension of class injustice; masking class by a narrowing of the complex normative structure of racial disparities; or not recognizing that a class-focused initiative (like raising the minimum wage) can address substantial racial justice concerns, even though not all of them. “Systemic racism” terminology recognizes class explanatorily but suppresses it normatively. Charles Mills’s influential notion of “white supremacy,” while a powerful tool for conceptualizing and illuminating racial injustice, can also contribute to minimizing or masking the justice-related impact of class, as do some of Mills’s specific discussions of class in various writings.
  • "'Cultural Racism': Biology and Culture in Racist Thought," Journal of Social Philosophy, fall 2023
    Observers have noted a decline (in the US) in attributions of genetically-based inferiority (e.g. in intelligence) to Blacks, and a rise in attributions of culturally-based inferiority. Is this "culturalism" merely warmed-over racism ("cultural racism") or a genuinely distinct way of thinking about racial groups? The question raises a larger one about the relative place of biology and culture in racist thought. I develop a typology of culturalisms as applied to race: (1) inherentist or essentialist culturalism (inferiorizing cultural characteristics wrongly but intelligibly regarded as inhering in the nature of racial groups). This view has an historical pedigree in the work of J.G. von Herder, and the tradition of "national racism." (2) non-inherentist culturalism (groups regarded as possessing changeable, malleable inferiorizing cultural characteristics). (3) colonalist culturalism (colonial subjects regarded as uncivilized but capable of becoming civilized under European tutelage). (4) neo-racism (cultures of former colonial subjects in or potentially immigrating to European countries are regarded in an inherentist manner and incompatible with but not inferior to European cultures). Non-inherentist culturalism (#2) can be put to either a racist or an anti-racist use.
  • "Integration, Equality, and the Backlash Against Racial Justice Education: Comments on Stitzlein, Glass, and Fraser-Burgess" Philosophy of Education, 78(4): 127-36
  • "Neoliberalism and Education" Handbook of Philosophy of Education (ed. Randall Curren), New York: Routledge, 2023: 257-269                          Neoliberalism is an approach to social policy, now globally influential, that applies market approaches to all aspects of social life, including education. Charter schools, privately operated but publicly funded, are its most prominent manifestation in the U.S. The neoliberal principles of competition, consumerism, and choice cannot serve as foundations of a sound and equitable public education system. Neoliberalism embraces socio-economic inequality overall and in doing so constricts any justice mission its adherents espouse in virtue of serving a relatively disadvantaged student population, as charter schools often (by no means always) do. It constricts educational justice by (1) embracing a “human capital” approach as the primary good of education, (2) creating educational inequality through (unofficially) selecting a relatively advantaged segment of the disadvantaged demographic it serves, (3) denying the effect of poverty on educational performance, and (4) devaluing its students’ familial ethnic cultures.
  • "Reflections on Charles Mills," Radical Philosophy Review: In Memoriam: Charles Mills, vol. 25, #2 (2022): 209-218
    Charles Mills adhered to the highest standards of philosophical scholarship, while seeing his work firmly as a contribution to the cause of social justice. He had a deep appreciation for historical context and a history of ideas approach to racial/philosophical questions. He was one of the foremost Rawls interpreters or our time, though only a few years before his passing was he so recognized. He channeled his analytic training in his habit of demonstrating how a view is strengthened when an author shows how objections can be systematically replied to. I wish he had tried to integrate class and race into a larger theoretical system, of both an explanatory and normative character. Class is sometimes an unnoted presence in his explanation of white supremacy. Charles saw himself contributing to a collective scholarly social justice project and was happy to acknowledge the greater expertise of others in allied areas to his.
  • "Murdoch and Politics" for The Murdochian Mind (ed. Mark Hopwood and Silvia Panizza), Routledge (2022)
    Politics never became a central intellectual interest of Murdoch’s, but she produced one important and visionary political essay in the ‘50’s, several popular writings on political matters, and a significant chapter in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals that echoes throughout that book. In the 1958 “House of Theory,” she sees the welfare state as having almost entirely failed to address the deeper problems of capitalist society, including a failure to create the conditions for values she saw as central to the socialist tradition-equality, absence of exploitation, meaningful work, and a sense of community.                                                                       
    In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch abandons the idea that moral ideals provide a guide to constructing a good society. She retains from her earlier work that the individual-moral domain is governed by perfectionism, but society cannot be. ‘Society must be thought of as a bad job to be made the best of’, for example, through the liberal idea of rights.
    Murdoch had a lifelong engagement with Marxism as a philosophy, introduced to her as a member of the Communist Party in the late ‘30’s and ‘40’s, and continuing through her subsequent long Labour period, and even when she moved to the Right in the Thatcher era. Marx and Marxism were always part of her mental universe, and she continued to work out what she agreed and disagreed with in it.
  • "Iris Murdoch" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (March 2022)
    Covers Murdoch’s moral philosophy; trajectory and reception; critique of implicit view of self in Hare and Sartre; her Platonic moral realism; moral reality as other persons; essentiality of metaphysics; morality and the self/other framework; inescapability of metaphor; moral agency as inner activity; the fabric of the agent’s moral being; seeing replacing doing; influence of Simone Weil; attention (connected to care ethics, feminism, particularism); obstacles to loving attention; Freudian moral psychology; failure to recognize social sources of negative moral formation;virtue; “duties” and “axioms” in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
  • ​"'Black Lives Matter': Moral Frames for Understanding the Police Killings of Black Males," in Maksimilien del Mar and Amalia Amaya (eds.), Imagination, Virtues, and Emotion in Law and Legal Reasoning (London: Hart/Bloomsbury, 2020): 121-138
    The Black Lives Matter movement calls attention to the injustice involved in police killings of blacks and implicitly proposes that a particular emotional attitude--caring about the life of a human being not known personally to oneself--should have been, but was not, present in the police officers involves in these killings. I examine five prominent such killings, but especially Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice [the article was written before the killing of George Floyd] for the character of the moral failing involved in them, focusing especially on the police failure to aid once the subjects were subdued after being shot or taken down. The failure to care about life is not fully captured by three alternative, though complementary, moral failings--stereotyping, implicit bias, and failing to recognize the rights of black people. I then rebut four objections proposed by a police commissioner to my 'black lives matter' moral framework--(1) that shifting from an aggressive mindset toward someone perceived as a potential threat to a caring one is not possible; (2) that we should be concerned about behavior, not emotions; (3) that police officers kill white people also; and (4) that black police officers are sometimes perpetrators of the killings.
  • “Affirmative Action, Diversity, and Racial Justice: Reflections from a Diverse, Non-Elite University,” Theory and Research in Education, 14:3, November 2016: 348-362
    The “diversity” framework the Supreme Court has imposed on affirmative action weakens its justice import in theory and practice. The increasing alignment of wealth with attendance at selective institutions betokens a diminishing quality of student at those institutions. So some of the perceived advantages of affirmative action rely on an increasingly false sense of the quality differences between more and less highly-ranked institutions. Aligning those rankings with the quality of student (and quality of instruction at the different kinds of institution) would have the net effect of benefiting black and Latino students as a group. More generally, improving the quality of education and the standing of less selective higher education institutions is an urgent racial educational justice challenge of the current moment, from which affirmative action diverts attention. 
  • "A Moral Account of Empathy and Fellow Feeling," in T. Schramme and N. Roughley (eds.), Forms of Fellow Feeling: Empathy, Sympathy, Concern and Moral Agency. Cambridge University Press, 2016
    I develop a moral account of empathy as a species of fellow-feeling (like sympathy, compassion, care). Scheler shows that empathy in this sense does not require and is certainly not coextensive with having the same feeling as the other. He emphasizes the requirement of having a clear lived sense of oneself as a particular individual distinct from the target of empathy. Fellow feeling is morally valuable not solely in its role as promoting beneficent action, as it shares with respect, recognition and acknowledgment (“recognitional attitudes”) a value not so dependent on helping the other. This analysis is used to criticize current views of empathy of Darwall, Slote, Prinz, Snow, and Eisenberg (a psychologist). The intentional object of empathy is not the other’s state of mind but her situation with respect to her well-being. Distinct forms of fellow-feeling (empathy, concern, sympathy) are differentiated, including by distinct values that they exemplify.
  • ​“Races, Racialized Groups, and Racial Identity: Perspectives from South Africa and the US,” in Xolela Mangcu (ed.), The Colour of our Future. Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press, 2015
    Racialized groups are groups treated and regarded as if they possessed the characteristics attributed to them in classic racist ideology (inherent psychological characteristics, superiority and inferiority to other races). Blacks in both the US and South Africa are racialized groups in that sense but differently according to the somewhat different racist ideologies in the two countries. Racialized identity can be positive. This tends to be denied by the South African doctrine of “non-racialism,” though it was affirmed by the Black Consciousness movement. Non-racialism is nevertheless a largely racially progressive ideology in contrast to “color blindness” in the US, which comes to little more than race denial.
  • “Race and Class Categories and Subcategories in Educational Thought and Research,” Theory and Research in Education, March 2015: 1-18
    Educational thought and research often operates with whole-race (“black,” “white,” “Asian”) and whole-class (“low-income") categories, masking explanatorily and normatively important subdivisions. Regarding affirmative action, on average, among "blacks," African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and to some extent their offspring, have educational and motivational advantages over, and a distinct normative standing from, African Americans. With regard to the performance of “high commitment” charter schools, such as KIPP, that make substantial demands on parents of admitted students compared to traditional public schools serving similar class- and race-defined populations, it is essential to internally differentiate the relevant race and class categories with respect to degree of poverty, English language learner status, and parental capital. Doing so reveals normative problems for such charter schools.
  • “Racial and Other Asymmetries: A Problem for the Protected Categories Framework for Antidiscrimination Thought,” in Philosophical Foundations of Discrimination Law, edited by Sophia Moreau and Deborah Hellman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): 182-199
    In the American judicial tradition, “protected categories” are social categories regarded as deserving of special protection against discrimination on the basis of them (e.g. race, gender, religion, disability). The protected category framework implies a default presumption of moral symmetry across a given category—for example that discriminating against Blacks, or women, has the same moral valence as discriminating against whites, or men. I argue that this presumption is false and that we should generally abandon the language of “discrimination on the basis of.” Discrimination is not a unitary wrong, but involves a plurality of different wrongs in different contexts. This plurality, as well as moral asymmetries within some of the wrongs singly, account for the moral asymmetries among sub-groups of a given protected category. 
  • “Political Identity and Moral Education: A Response to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind,” Journal of Moral Education, 42:3, 298-315 (2013)
    In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt claims that liberals have a narrower moral outlook than do conservatives; they are concerned with fairness and relief of suffering, which Haidt sees as individualistic values, while conservatives in addition care about authority and loyalty, values concerned (he says) with holding society together. I question Haidt’s methodology, which overlooks liberals who express concerns with social bonds that do not fit within an “authority” or “loyalty” framework. Political liberalism has richer moral resources to draw on than Haidt recognizes.
    I also argue that of Haidt's six “moral foundations,” fairness and relief of suffering are more fundamental values than are authority and loyalty, which are virtues only if their objects are worthy. Moral education programs must also permit inquiry into the reasons for political behavior (e.g. voting) other than professed (liberal or conservative) value commitments. In light of these considerations, conservatism emerges as morally flimsier than Haidt claims, and liberalism more morally robust.
  • “Racialized Groups: The Socio-historical Consensus,” MONIST, issue on Race, April, 2010, vol. 93, #2: 298-320  
    Among race scholars, there is a general consensus that (1) groups thought to be races in the 19th/20th century do not possess the characteristics attributed to them in classic racial ideology, (2) such groups are nevertheless intergenerational collectivities with distinctive social and historical experiences, and (3) those experiences were and are deeply shaped by the false beliefs of classic racial ideology. The groups of whom this consensus is true may be referred to as “racialized groups,” terminology preferable to “social construction,” “classic racial groups,” “ethnic groups,” and “ancestral/descent groups,” though each of these has something to be said for it.  The socio-historical consensus is not, however, adequately reflected in recent work on race, for example, by Appiah (who confuses race and racialization), Mallon (who does not capture the “group-ness” of racialized groups), and Glasgow (who does not capture the way the false ideology of race has shaped the experience of racialized groups). 
  • “Stereotypes and Stereotyping: A Moral Analysis,” Philosophical Papers, (ed. Ward Jones), vol. 33, #3 (November 2004): 251-289 
    Stereotypes are false or misleading generalizations about groups, generally widely shared in a society, and held in a manner resistant, but not totally, to counterevidence. Stereotypes shape the stereotyper’s perception of stereotyped groups, seeing the stereotypic characteristics when they are not present, and generally homogenizing the group. The association between the group and the given characteristic involved in a stereotype often involves a cognitive investment weaker than that of belief.
    The cognitive distortions involved in stereotyping lead to various forms of moral distortion, to which moral philosophers have paid insufficient attention. Some of these are common to all stereotypes—failing to see members of the stereotyped groups as individuals, moral distancing, failing to see subgroup diversity within the group. Other moral distortions vary with the stereotype. Some attribute a much more damaging or stigmatizing characteristic (e.g. being violent) than others (e.g. being good at basketball). But the latter must also be viewed in their wider historical and social context to appreciate their overall negative and positive dimensions. The popular film The Passion of the Christ illustrates this point in its portrayal of the Jews and Romans.
  • "One-to-One Fellow-Feeling, Universal Identification and Oneness, and Group Solidarities," The Oneness Hypothesis: Beyond the Boundaries of Self," edited by O. Flanagan, V. Harrison, PJ Ivanhoe, H. Sarkissian, and E. Schwitzgebel. Columbia University Press, 2018​                                                                 Unusual among Western philosophers, Schopenhauer explicitly drew on Hindu and especially Buddhist traditions inhis moral philosophy. He saw plurality, especially the plurality of human persons, as a kind of illusion; in reality all is one, and compassionate acts express an implicit recognition of this oneness. Max Scheler retains the transcendence of self aspect of compassion but emphasizes that the subject must have a clear, lived sense of herself as a distinct individual in order for that transcendence to take place properly. This feature is absent in the Buddhist tradition.                                                                                                        Feminist philosophers of the early second wave built on this insight (only occasionally drawing it from Scheler) to recognize ways women are often not socialized to develop this distinctive sense of self, therefore harming their ability to engage in compassion and other forms of care for others. Iris Murdoch adds a Freudian-inspired (though Freud influenced Scheler also) pessimism about the ability of humans to keep their identities sufficiently distinct from the other to allow a clear view of the other, and thus real care and help to the other to take place. But in her later work, Murdoch explicitly recognizes and draws on the Buddhist tradition of oneness and transcendence of the self. Group solidarities can partake of aspects of Buddhist oneness and self-transcendence, for example the sense of fellowship in a social justice movement in which Blacks draw on a shared identity to experience connection, compassion, empathy, and solidarity with one another. But social justice movements also allow for a solidarity across racial lines, grounded in the shared commitment to justice, including justice for one of the groups in the solidarity community. (All these issues are powerfully portrayed in the 2014 film, Selma.) None of these solidarities, however, express the universalistic dimension of Buddhist oneness.

FORTHCOMING ARTICLES 

  • “’Separate is Inherently Unequal’: An Unfortunate Legacy,” in American Journal of Law and Equality (issue on 70 Years since Brown v. Board)
  • “Simone Weil and Marx,” in D. Casewell and C. Thomas (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Simone Weil (2025 or 2026)