BOOKS
High Schools, Race, and America's Future: What Students Can Teach Us About Morality, Diversity, and Community, Harvard Education Press, 2012
Blum provides an account of a rigorous high school course on race and racism that he taught to a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse class, chronicling the students’ engagement with one another, with the challenging material, and with the intellectual underpinnings of their own racialized experiences. Blum reflects as a moral philosopher and race scholar on his pedagogy and his role as a white teacher teaching mostly students of color. Topics in the course included the historical development of the idea of race, historical change over time in the character of American slavery, the American black Abolitionist David Walker's scathing critique of Thomas Jefferson's claims about the inferiority of blacks. Other educational topics discussed in the book include the role of expectations in student achievement, differences in school performance between African Americans and immigrant blacks, how classrooms function as communities, the role of race-based solidarities in education, ways of teaching morality in relation to race, and asymmetries in racial incidents and social structures.
Blum provides an account of a rigorous high school course on race and racism that he taught to a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse class, chronicling the students’ engagement with one another, with the challenging material, and with the intellectual underpinnings of their own racialized experiences. Blum reflects as a moral philosopher and race scholar on his pedagogy and his role as a white teacher teaching mostly students of color. Topics in the course included the historical development of the idea of race, historical change over time in the character of American slavery, the American black Abolitionist David Walker's scathing critique of Thomas Jefferson's claims about the inferiority of blacks. Other educational topics discussed in the book include the role of expectations in student achievement, differences in school performance between African Americans and immigrant blacks, how classrooms function as communities, the role of race-based solidarities in education, ways of teaching morality in relation to race, and asymmetries in racial incidents and social structures.
Friendship, Altruism and Morality
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 [Reissued in Routledge Revivals, 2009] This work argues for the moral significance of altruistic emotions such as compassion, sympathy, concern, care, and of friendship, and argues that this significance cannot be captured by theories centered solely on reason, rationality, duty, and/or moral principle. The argument draws on Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's ethics and shares the former's view that moral goodness resides in a direct, unmediated concern for the welfare of others, and that moral goodness lies not solely in the motivational dimension of such concern but its expressive dimension as well. |
"I'm Not a Racist, But...": The Moral Quandary of Race
Cornell University Press, 2002 Selected Best Social Philosophy book of the year by North American Society for Social Philosophy. Media, politicians, and individuals often use the term "racism" casually and inaccurately, threatening to strip the concept of its meaning and moral force, argues Blum in "'I'm Not a Racist, But...': The Moral Quandary of Race". Not all racial incidents are racist incidents. Blum asserts that only "certain especially serious moral failings and violations" merit the designation "racism." Discussing various scholarly perspectives on the construction of racial categories, Blum calls for a balance between "ridding ourselves of the myth of race" and understanding the role of race in social inequality and in history. He discusses the history and genesis of the idea of race, moral asymmetries between whites and non-whites, and blacks and non-blacks in racial incidents; institutional racism; the nature of racial discrimination; and other topics. |
A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism
Co-authored with V.J. Seidler, Routledge, 1989 [reissued Routledge Revivals, 2009] Simone Weil - philosopher, trade union militant, factory worker - developed a penetrating critique of Marxism and a powerful political philosophy which serves as an alternative both to liberalism and Marxism. In A Truer Liberty, Blum and Seidler show how Simone Weil sought to put political action on a firmly moral basis. Weil criticized Marxism for its confidence in progress and revolution and its attendant illusory belief that history is on the side of the proletariat. The authors relate Weil's work to influential trends in political philosophy today, from the 'analytic' Marxism of Gerald Cohen and others to the liberal tradition of Anglo-American political philosophy represented by Rawls, Dworkin, and others. |
Moral Perception and Particularity
Cambridge University Press, 1994 The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. They examine moral exemplars and the "moral saints" debate, the morality of rescue during the Holocaust, role morality as lying between "personal" and "impersonal" perspectives, Carol Gilligan's theory of women and morality, Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, and moral responsiveness in young children. |