A post on Bluesky drew my attention to Annette Baier’s famous article “Trust and Antitrust,” which appeared in Ethics in 1986. Many feminist philosophers (and others) regard this article as a pivotal contribution to feminist philosophy, ethics, and indeed, feminist ethics.

For the longest time, I have questioned why no philosopher, and certainly no (straight?) feminist philosopher, has pointed out the troubling homophobic remarks that Baier makes in her characterization of the tradition of moral theory. On pp. 248-9 of the article, in a section that appears under the subtitle, “The Male Fixation on Contract,” Baier says:

The great moral theorists in our tradition not only are all men, they are mostly men who had minimal adult dealings with (and so were then minimally influenced by) women. With a few significant exceptions (Hume, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Sidgwick, maybe Bradley) they are a collection of gays, clerics, misogynists, and puritan bachelors.

I first encountered Baier’s article when it was assigned in a graduate ethics seminar that I took at the St. George campus of The University of Toronto. I remember that I felt extremely uncomfortable in the seminar after the remark went completely unaddressed in class discussion. I myself was far too unsure of my own philosophical skill to broach the issue, especially given that I was, officially, registered as a graduate student at a different Toronto university.

As noted, however, in the years since that grad seminar, I have neither read nor heard even the slightest intimation that Baier’s remarks in that context are homophobic. Indeed, as I have noted, furthermore, feminist philosophers generally laud the article, regarding it as pathbreaking for feminist ethics.

What explains this lacuna in feminist philosophy/ethics?

In my view, feminist philosophy has in the past (and still) harbored a latent homophobia directed particularly at gay men. It is, I want to argue, this latent homophobia against gay men that motivates many of the feminist critiques of Michel Foucault (among others) and his work, many of which critiques rely upon misunderstandings of his claims, rumors about them, and little more than hearsay. It is, I contend, difficult to reconcile, on one side, the extant and emerging philosophical movements with respect to gender and sexuality in feminist philosophy and, on the other side, the assumptions about binary gender and heterosexuality on which Baier’s article relies.

One of the aims of “Foucault and Feminist Philosophy: Other Perspectives and Approaches,” the special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly that I am guest editing and compiling at present, is to undermine this latent and outdated homophobia that persists in feminist understandings of Foucault and in feminist ethics and feminist philosophy in general.