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Laurie J. Shrage (born December 4, 1953) is an American political and moral philosopher whose analysis of the agendas for social change advanced by gender and sexual dissidents has been influential.


Education and career

Shrage has taught at
Howard University Howard University is a private, historically black, federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C., United States. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" and accredited by the Mid ...
,
Lake Forest College Lake Forest College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Lake Forest, Illinois. Founded in 1857 as Lind University by a group of Presbyterian ministers, the college has been coeducatio ...
,
Scripps College Scripps College is a private liberal arts women's college in Claremont, California. It was founded as a member of the Claremont Colleges in 1926, a year after the consortium's formation. Journalist and philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps pr ...
, California State Polytechnic University, and now teaches at
Florida International University Florida International University (FIU) is a public research university with its main campus in Westchester, Florida, United States. Founded in 1965 by the Florida Legislature, the school opened to students in 1972. FIU is the third-largest univ ...
. She earned her B.A. (1975) from the
University of California, Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Davis, California, United States. It is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University ...
and her M.A. (1979) and Ph.D (1983) from the University of California, San Diego, Philosophy. In her first book, ''Moral Dilemmas of Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion'' (1994), Shrage argued for empirically informed philosophical analyses of moral problems. She argued against the possibility of offering a universal social ethics and, as an alternative, she developed an interpretive approach to moral problems, based in part on the work of Charles Taylor. Her second book, ''Abortion and Social Responsibility: Depolarizing the Debate'' (2003), argues for reconsidering the
American Law Institute The American Law Institute (ALI) is a research and advocacy group of judges, lawyers, and legal scholars limited to 3,000 elected members and established in 1923 to promote the clarification and simplification of United States common law and i ...
's model abortion law developed prior to
Roe v. Wade ''Roe v. Wade'', 410 U.S. 113 (1973),. was a List of landmark court decisions in the United States, landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protected the right to have an ...
. Shrage explores abortion policies around the world, the history of reform and repeal movements in the U.S., moral and legal debates, and ethnographies of pro-life and pro-choice groups, and then recommends restricting elective abortions to roughly the end of the first trimester, in order to balance competing rights and values. Shrage was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University (2011–12) and a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (1998–99). She was a co-editor of the journal Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy from 1998-2003. She has served as the American Philosophical Association's Ombuds for Non-Discrimination, 2008–11, and as the Program Chair for the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division meeting in 2001. She was Director of Women's Studies at FIU (2008–11).


Research areas

Shrage's work evaluates public policies on markets in sexual services and expressive materials, reproductive health care, legal gender identity, and marriage. She is more interested in the active application of philosophical theory to inform public debate - in what she terms "empirically informed philosophy" - than she is in focusing her work on a particular school of philosophical thought. She suggests that moral and political philosophers should pay more attention to historical and scientific accounts of political and moral problems than they currently do.


Selected bibliography


Books

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Journal articles

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References


External links


Laurie Shrage's Academia.edu listing

Laurie Shrage's articles on ''The New York Times'' Opinionator blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Shrage, Laurie 1953 births Living people American women philosophers American political philosophers 20th-century American philosophers 21st-century American philosophers American academics of women's studies Florida International University faculty University of California, Davis alumni University of California, San Diego alumni 20th-century American women 21st-century American women