Gina Schouten, "The Anatomy of Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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What is the central thesis of Gina Schouten’s *The Anatomy of Justice*?
Welcome to the new books network.
Welcome to the New Books in Philosophy Podcast, part of the New Books Network. My name is Blaine Newfeld. I'm a professor of philosophy who specializes in political and moral theory. And I'm an interviewer at New Books in Philosophy, along with Carrie Figdor and Sarah Tyson. I should mention that this is my first interview for New Books in Philosophy. I'm taking over from Professor Robert Talise, who was a co-host here for over a decade. My thanks to Bob, along with Carrie and Sarah, for inviting me to join this exciting community. But enough about me. Today we are discussing a recent book by Gina Schautin, professor of philosophy at Harvard University. The book is called The Anatomy of Justice and is from Oxford University Press.
The Anatomy of Justice offers a new approach to theorizing about liberal egalitarian justice and responds to some important criticisms of liberal egalitarianism from the left. So hi Gina.
Hi Blaine.
Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. So let's start by getting to know a little bit about you. Perhaps you could say a few things about who you are, where you're from, your background, and how you became interested in philosophy. And maybe you could also situate your scholarly work overall, not just the book, uh, within the broader landscape of contemporary political philosophy.
Sure, Blaine. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really um pleased uh get to have this conversation with you. Um, so I grew up in a working class suburb of Indianapolis that was at that time, well, I was in public schools there, struggling to accommodate a lot of newly arrived Spanish speaking kids in the classrooms. And I had a formative experience in high school. I had a wonderful high school Spanish teacher who set up a program um which had um me and my classmates um sort of in the more advanced classes at the high school level regularly going to visit elementary school classrooms to work with um the younger English language learners there and I loved that work so when I um was persuaded to go to college I decided that I would um take classes that would sort of enable me to return to that work but better equipped
to do it well. So I decided I would major in Spanish and social work. Um, that plan fell apart even as I was uh sort of still working through the details. I went to college at Ball State University in Mumsee, Indiana, and right off the bat, my social work classes were my very least favorite. I um was wanting to think and learn about how to support kids who seemed um constrained in such an unfair way, but I was distracted um away from thinking about sort of um sort of strategies for helping them, I was distracted instead by thinking about big questions about the constraints themselves and the unfairness involved in the constraints. Meanwhile, unrelatedly, just for fun, I took an introductory philosophy class and then I took an ethics class and I just loved them.
And I think that even then I loved my philosophy classes for the same reason that I love Philosophy so much now. And that is for its sort of democracy. So it was, it struck me that you really didn't need any special equipment. You didn't need to be the fastest thinker in the room. In fact, you know, as many of us tell our students now, sometimes that can be a liability. You didn't need to retain a lot of facts. It seemed to me then that you really just had to care enough about the questions to think about them very, very carefully. Um and that's not to minimize it. It's not easy to do that. And the skills for doing that well are really hard one. But it felt to me at the time like what differentiated people was just how long they had been practicing those skills.
And so it sort of came to me like ready-made with a growth mindset, um, sort of like in that context. And I I I thought that that was a feature of the discipline. And looking back, I think it's It's really to the credit of my early teachers that that's what philosophy seemed like to me. So I was loving those classes.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central thesis of Gina Schouten’s *The Anatomy of Justice*?
0:01–6:18
2
How does Schouten’s personal background shape her approach to liberal egalitarianism?
6:18–14:30
3
Why does Schouten argue for a reorientation from normative principles to evaluative discernment?
14:30–22:35
4
What is the “anatomy of justice” and how does it weight different egalitarian values?
22:35–30:35
5
How does the anatomy of justice resolve the relational vs. distributive equality debate?
30:35–38:34
6
In what ways can liberal egalitarian theory address cultural and ideological injustices?
38:34–45:12
7
What is reflective equilibrium and how does Schouten defend it against feminist critiques?
45:12–53:31
8
What future projects does Schouten plan to extend her work on justice and political liberalism?
53:31–59:19
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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