‘A Woman First and a Philosopher Second’: Relative Attentional Surplus on the Wrong Property – The new paper by LSE Philosophy Fellow Ella Whiteley has now been published in the journal Ethics.

About the paper: One theme in complaints from those with marginalized social identities is that they are seen primarily in terms of that identity. Some Black artists, for instance, complain about being seen as Black first and artists second. These individuals can be understood as objecting to a particularly subtle form of morally problematic attention: “relative attentional surplus on the wrong property.” This attentional surplus can coexist with another type of common problematic attention affecting these groups, including attentional deficits; marginalized individuals and groups themselves are routinely insufficiently attended to in virtue of the surplus attention given to their social identity properties.

Link to the paper (open access).

Ella Whiteley is currently a Fellow at LSE Philosophy. In September, she’ll be joining Sheffield University as a permanent lecturer in the Sheffield Methods Institute.