A Tribute to Karen Warren

When Karen Warren died last year, friends and colleagues agreed that we had lost a compassionate, bold, and radical scholar, an award-winning teacher, and a widely influential public philosopher. She was professor emeritus at Macalester University, an early and important influence in the development of ecofeminist philosophy, and a self-proclaimed “street philosopher.” Her influence on my own writing was formative. I thought of her as primarily a scholar of critical thinking, ecological and feminist ethics, history of philosophy, and philosophy of science. I did not know that after learning of her diagnosis with a degenerative disease in 2015, Karen Warren became an activist for medical assistance in dying. She shared her story of her illness and her activism with a local newspaper, which reported:

The diagnosis has radically changed her outlook on life. She said her perspective has “deepened” from academic expertise to lived experience, and she has turned her orderly intellect away from philosophical research and toward the uncertain work of political activism.

“It became obvious to me that the one thing I could do as a philosopher and teacher was I can do a three-minute speech,” she said. “Before I got the illness, I don’t think I understood my role in life or why I was here.”

I cannot stop thinking about that last sentence. Karen Warren’s life and work will be honored at the Central Division Meeting of the APA later this month in a special session of the Committee on the Status of Women, but I wanted to take the opportunity to write about her here in advance of our session, in order to share what a large role she played in philosophy, and why her final, purposeful attitude toward her public advocacy is the culmination of all she wrote while she was here. Warren models making one’s life’s work contribute to one’s public ethical activities. Her philosophical positions are evident in every line of the two first-person narratives she published about her attitudes toward death and dying.

Space is too short to do justice to the depth and reach of Warren’s body of work. My colleagues in critical thinking and informal logic would want me to tell you of her pathbreaking article, “Critical Thinking and Feminism,” for Informal Logic in 1988. Warren did some of the first feminist work in argument theory. She argues with clarity and passion that better concepts, even those aiming for “impartiality,” require inclusiveness, and that any conceptual framework that omits the felt experiences and perspectives of marginalized individuals is not necessarily impartial and may lack a better data-base from which to make generalizations — an insight to which I will return.

Friends who teach the history of philosophy would want me to tell you of Warren’s first-of-its-kind collection, An Unconventional History of Western Philosophy: Conversations Between Men and Women Philosophers (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). Warren pairs selections from canonical works of men in philosophy with selections by women whose works respond to or engage with the relevant ideas of each canonical selection. Warren’s lead essay in that collection, “2600 Years of the History of Western Philosophy Without Women: This Book as a Unique, Gender Inclusive Alternative,” is a study in feminist philosophy in itself, as she provides her typically rigorous overview of the different senses in which we might add women to or include women in the history of philosophy, and argues instead for her approach, one of integration rather than addition. She emphasizes the importance of ethical attention to how to include the perspectives of those affected, in the way that will be most helpful — another insight to which I will return.

More influential in environmental and feminist ethics was Warren’s monograph, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). One chapter in that work includes portions of her widely reprinted article, “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism” (Environmental Ethics 12(2), 1990), which has informed my own work for decades. In that essay, Warren explains with generous and compassionate clarity to the newcomer what a conceptual framework is, how it can be oppressive, and why an oppressive conceptual framework is related to and perpetuated by the logic of domination. The logic of domination assumes that the superiority of X to Y on some dimension justifies X’s subordination of Y. Here, as elsewhere, she concludes that feminism should be a movement to end all forms of oppression and subordination. To advance that movement and disrupt oppressive conceptions, Warren specifically advocates for the values of first-person narrative and the nature of relationships as meaningful and important units of value. First-person narrative, she says, “gives voice to a feIt sensitivity often lacking in traditional analytical ethical discourse, viz., a sensitivity to conceiving of oneself as fundamentally ‘in relationship with’ others, including the nonhuman environment. It is a modality which takes relationships themselves seriously.” These are insights to which I will return.

Karen Warren’s contributions in philosophy were deep and wide. Those who read her contributions to the blog of Psychology Today will notice that her diagnosis of Multiple Systems Atrophy (MSA) did not put an end to the breadth of her work but extended it as she wrote about facing her own death and, later, her advocacy for medical assistance in dying. Her work in these essays, as always, is compassionate and personal, generous and urgent. Although her concern is for everyone who is denied the option of having a say in the manner of their death, her posts also strike me as completely consonant with her feminist approach to philosophy.

Consider again her concern in that critical thinking essay that we not omit the felt experiences and perspectives of those denied their share of the power to assert generalizations and principles. In “Watching Myself Die,” Warren notes that some physicians who take an oath to “do no harm” so as to help their patients “interpret this oath as requiring that patients be kept alive at all costs,” including a quality of life the patient might not have chosen for herself. “I think this interpretation of ‘doing no harm’ is harmful,” she asserts, rather than “honoring how people choose to die when faced with illness.” Advancing the importance of felt experiences and her perspectives as one facing powerlessness, she shares her own experience:

My first phone call was to my 38-year-old daughter, Cortney. I told her the little I knew about MSA. She paused and asked, “Mom, are you afraid of dying?” I didn’t hesitate in responding: “No, I am not afraid of dying. But, I am afraid of dying this way. There is no treatment. No one—no doctor, no caregiver, no loved one, not even I—can do anything to prevent the illness from progressing irreversibly. Eventually I won’t be able to walk, talk, swallow, or move.”

This was the start of my personal journey confronting death. . . . I never anticipated that my academic expertise would turn into a lived experience: Every day I watch myself deteriorate from a fatal and excruciatingly painful disease. And every day I do so knowing that I cannot legally choose to end my life before I become immobile. Because in my home state—Minnesota—it is illegal to help someone die.

In this 2016 post, Warren bears out her commitments expressed in her informal-logic paper of 1988, resisting the overinterpretation of a principle such as “do no harm,” including the perspective of the patient rather than the agent of that view, and in providing her own experience, adding to the base of data from which to make better generalizations.

The ethics of such inclusion are challenging, and she also shares with the reader her experience with living through those challenges. In “A Follow-Up to ‘Watching Myself Die,’” Warren offers her own “process for dealing with my MSA diagnosis,” including seven questions that, she hoped, “may be helpful to anyone diagnosed with a terminal illness and their loved ones as they move forward from the diagnosis.” They include considering whom to tell, what anyone might need (in her case, a case manager), what one wants to do, and what really matters; the last question is simply, “What can I do to help others in my position?” Note how well this reflects her attention, in Unconventional History, to how to include the perspectives of previously neglected agents. Inclusion of the perspectives of those with whom one has relationships is not just a matter of adding voices, quantitatively, to one’s storehouse of information. Working out how to go about including the perspectives of others requires the navigation of a series of social and moral questions.

Last, both “Watching Myself Die” and “A Follow-Up” reflect Warren’s stated commitments in her ecofeminist publications to first-person narrative and appreciation of relationships as morally important in ways that are not reducible to the value of the relators. The power of the first-person narrative is evident, as Warren both advocates for prioritizing the experiences of patients suffering in ways that are underappreciated by policy makers, and couples her felt understanding of her experience with recommendations to fellow sufferers. “When you tell people, they will want more information. Like me, they had never heard of MSA. And like me, they were full of questions that I could not answer. There may be conflicting emotions. It’s important to remember that you don’t owe anyone information,” she says in “A Follow-Up,” and the injunction at the end is weightier precisely because it comes at the end of her first-personal account. Repeatedly, she returns to the importance of relationships in her own life, and the importance of care directives and policy change as relational things, dependent upon supportive connections with those who listen, care, and carry out the business of dying.

Karen Warren’s contributions to philosophy had breadth and depth. Her final work in public advocacy was an extension of that scholarship and the ethical commitments she practiced. I have not visited Warren’s justifications for advocacy of medically assisted dying (which she did not receive). Warren defended this position by arguing that the experience of patients is the experience of agents—moral agents who should have legal options that honor their dignity and their choices. In the presence of arguments that perhaps we should not choose death because death is part of nature, I point to her scholarship arguing that “the concept of nature is socially, historically, and materially constructed. It is not a fixed, static, self-evident given, or absolute (nonnegotiable, noncontestable) concept” (2000). What death and dying mean, Warren argues, is conditioned by social and material realities. And of course, as she adds, that it is socially constructed is not to deny that there are material, natural, realities. I end on her observations (from her last blog post) about those realities:

I now understand that I am dying and I am living. Dying is a part of living and living is a part of dying. Every day, I remind myself that knowing I am dying offers me the opportunity to be my best self and to spend the time I have left living fully in the present.

Finally, the most significant gift was totally unexpected: Sometimes, I am happier than I have ever been, perhaps because I have let go of the past and the past has let go of me. It simply isn’t relevant anymore. I live more centered in the present moment than I ever have, and I am just plain happy to be here—right now.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.

Kathryn J. Norlock

Kathryn J. Norlock is professor of philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, and the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics, as well as affiliated faculty in Gender and Women's Studies. Norlock is the chair of the APA Committee on the Status of Women, which sponsors the Women in Philosophy series. She is a co-founder and co-editor of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal free to authors and readers. She writes on moral emotions and ethical virtues, especially forgiveness.