Amy Hilden

Within the context of her enthusiastic commitment to the possibility of human goodness, along with the recognition that as human beings we are, in many ways, far from achieving what is possible for us to achieve morally, Amy sees as one of her projects the search for and evaluation of the many sources of moral knowledge. We can and must, she argues, be held accountable for our moral beliefs and actions, yet it seems that as a culture we lack the skills to analyze these beliefs and actions in a very persuasive way. She argues for a cultural revolution in ethics, claiming that at least we ought to know what we're believing and why we believe it!

Being a feminist and recognizing the feminist suspicion of Kant, she has only recently come out as a Kantian at heart. You can often find her arguing passionately for the necessity of a Kantian ethical framework to argue for her favorite moral conclusion: "There is no reasonable way that one can justify making oneself morally special." When the ethical push comes to shove, she will suggest that if you hold any moral conviction, hold this one.

As a mother, Amy constantly struggles to balance the discipline of the mind (philosophy) with the practice that is substantially (though not exclusively) of the body (motherhood), finding that each discipline is importantly informed, and insightfully changed, by the other. She thinks and writes about motherhood as a freely chosen and liberatory phenomenon, except in the middle of the night when no form of persuasive argumentation can convince her son or daughter that monsters don't exist.