Non-Ideal Theories of (Trans)genders w/Matthew Cull

Show notes

Show notes

In this episode, Élaina interviews fellow philosopher Matthew Cull about the difference between “ideal” and “non-ideal” ethical theories in relation to access to healthcare for transgender people in the UK.

You can read Matthew’s work here:

“Against Abolition”, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2019

“Demarcating the Social World with Hume”, Philosophical Papers, 2022

Texts mentioned in the episode (All links are affiliated to Bookshop.org UK and any purchases made through them will generate a small commission that helps to support the podcast):

Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System, by Christopher Chitty

“Ideal Theory” as Ideology, by Charles W. Mills (PDF)

The Electronic Wireless Show (podcast)

Second Skins, by Jay Prosser

Invisible Lives, by Viviane Namaste

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Transcript

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 0:15

Hello and welcome to Philosophy Casting Call, the podcast that features underrepresented philosophical talent! I’m Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril, your host and producer. Today is the day your questions about non-ideal theory get answered, because I interviewed my colleague and fellow philosopher, Matthew Cull. Matthew’s research focuses on the access transgender people in the UK have to healthcare, and this involves dealing with metaphysics and fielding arguments from queer theorists and cultural feminists alike. The topic of transgender healthcare is so important, especially given the transphobic laws in the UK and the current healthcare crisis, so I’m very glad I can bring you this extremely timely conversation with Matthew Cull.

So hi, Matthew, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Matthew Cull 1:14

Thank you so much for inviting me on.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 1:17

Would you like to introduce yourself to our avid listeners?

Matthew Cull 1:20

Yeah, sure. So my name is Matthew Cull. I am a philosopher working at the University of Edinburgh. I work in the Centre for Biomedicine self and society, where I'm researching, basically two projects, one on transgender health, and the other one on the nature of gender, and what gender ought to be going forward.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 1:39

Very important questions, who will definitely be answered by the end of this episode(!)

Matthew Cull 1:47

Easy questions! That's the thing, you've got to pick easy questions for the researcher.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 1:51

So Matthew and I are two philosophers kind of scamming the industry being hired by a Faculty of Medicine at the moment. And so I'm very happy to have them by my side. And because we are in an interdisciplinary programme, the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society, is, I would say, a mix between medical humanities and across with biomedical Health Sciences, how would you, Matthew, define interdisciplinarity?

Matthew Cull 2:27

It's a good question, partly because I'm not sure exactly how to answer it. I mean, one way to answer it would be to ask, well, first, what's a discipline? And there, I think there's a number of different answers, you could give some broadly institutional, where you just say, "Well, look, the universities split up into a number of different departments, and the departments do their different kinds of research. And they'll get along happily, and occasionally, people from different departments will work together". And that's interdisciplinarity, right? Or you have someone who struggles two departments going across hiring situation. And that's, you know, one way of approaching it another way would be to kind of go, "Well, hey, let's think about the methods of these various departments." And I quite like this way, we looked at something like a Kuhnian, or Thomas Kuhn's notion of "normal science", where you say, "Well, look, in the mathematics departments, they have this research programme that's going on, and they have their methods that go along with that research programme, the training that they teach their students about. And then over in the biology department, they've got their set methods, their set textbooks, and they, you know, do their biological thing." And so that's the discipline, it's defined in terms of the practice of standardised science, or whatever you want to call the humanities that the science of literature or whatever. And occasionally, you'll get people who try and work with one another to combine these methods or to work across these methods or to combine the results from these different methods. And maybe that's a nice way of thinking about interdisciplinarity, whereby you're not so resigned to the whims of an institution to define what a discipline is, but rather you look at what these methods are, and you know, how they might be fruitfully combined, or drawn from together.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 4:14

And how do you see that as being relevant to the work you're doing now with CBSS and, basically, your decision to pursue a postdoctoral position not in a philosophy department, but in an interdisciplinary centre?

Matthew Cull 4:31

Yeah, so part of that is just down to who would hire me, you know, you send out so many applications. The academic job market is unfavourable to the person being hired. But also it's really appealing because of the kind of philosophy that I wanted to do. So the kind of philosophy that I wanted to do and have done for a long time is what we might call engaged philosophy. And engage philosophy is philosophy that is interested in issues of the day Interested in stuff that matters to people's lives. And it's really hard to sort of do philosophy about stuff that matters from the armchair. Now, it's often useful to sit back and have a think about things in the armchair, as is the traditional philosophical method. But it's really helpful if you want to talk about the contemporary political situation of transgender people to know what's going on. So you need some sociology, you need some sort of politic political science, you need some history as well, you need to think about how trans people have got into the situation that they're in at the moment. So there's a real sense that like applied or engaged philosophy, can't escape, at least drawing from other disciplines, if not doing the interdisciplinary work itself. So it's a really appealing kind of, sort of department to work in, just because I'm surrounded by a bunch of other people who want to do similar kinds of things, and hopefully, interested in cross collaboration on these sorts of topics.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 5:59

Yes, I didn't mean to imply that this was a free choice, devoid of material limitations. But this isn't about me talking about determinism(!) So thank you very much, I very much feel the same way. It's wonderful to be in an environment where everyone else agrees on at least one thing, which is we all need to learn from one another. And maybe in a less territorial way, than in a traditional closed discipline setting.

Matthew Cull 6:34

Yeah, and there's still room for expertise there, right? So it's not like everyone is all of a sudden an expert on everyone else's fields, but rather, one draws upon the expertise that others have in their fields and their knowledge of their methods. And you're able to contribute your own. So it's something that emphasises not just taking, you know, but also giving as well.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 6:57

Can you speak a bit to what your projects are at the moment?

Matthew Cull 7:02

Yeah, good. So I've got a bunch of things going on at the moment. So one, as I mentioned earlier, is this project on transfer the healthcare and the contemporary political situation of trans people. And that is basically an attempt to write a book about what's the consequence of the dispossessed economic situation of trans people in the UK for their access to things like healthcare, and jobs and political agency. And the thought is that it's not very helpful at all. And actually, we should see the situation of trans people in the United Kingdom, as living under what we might call gender hegemony. And I borrow this from an historians work, that is Christopher Chitty, his work is mostly about sexual hegemony, which is the idea that those who don't fit into the bourgeois understandings of how sexual relations should happen are they're going to be dispossessed, by mainstream heterosexual society, I think you can basically just swap out sexual for gender in this sort of notion of sexual hegemony and saying, "Well, look, those who don't fit into the normative understandings of gender are going to be dispossessed by cisgender society. And we see this sort of, played out in dispossession, from healthcare dispossession, from housing dispossession, from secure employment, resulting in a class of people who are, broadly speaking, either working class precarious, or just London." And so that's, you know, exploring that sort of political situation is one project. Another project that I'm working on at the moment is this other book, which is about what gender should be. So this is a more explicitly philosophical work, it draws on the long standing debates within analytic philosophy about the nature or metaphysics of gender, along with more recent work on conceptual engineering to ask, okay, so what is gender? And what should it look like in the near future? How should we build a society that's more inclusive to the people who are currently marginalised by gender? Should we get rid of gender entirely? And answering those questions is at the centre of this book, it's called what gender should be. And hopefully, we'll be out with Bloomsbury press in a couple years time, available where all good books are sold. And so those are the two big projects that I'm working on a moment that was working on a couple of other things. So one of those is looking at the rise of rhetoric about the trans question with obvious undertones of other previous social questions, such as the Jewish question or the Armenian question. And also, this sort of projects on ideal theory, non ideal theory and trans theory, which is I think, what we wanted to talk about today, yes.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 9:46

So for those of us who aren't familiar, can you briefly define what you understand as ideal and non-ideal theory?

Matthew Cull 9:57

Great. So, ideal theory is is a style of political and ethical theorising, which isn't sort of defined by the idea of theorists themselves as ideal theory. Rather, it's almost a pejorative term, which has been applied by the non ideal theorists to ideal theory. And the way that these non ideal theorists such as Charles Mills and Onora O'Neill, talk about ideal theory is they say, ideal theorists will abstract away from the realities of the current political situation, and sort of allied the political details of what's going on in order to talk about abstract ideal political states without any bearing on what's actually going on. So Mills characterises ideal theory as involving, firstly, an idealised social ontology. And this is the idea that whether it's families, or whether it's the institutions of government, or whether it's the nature of the individual person themselves, rather than looking at the actual structures of from a familial governance in the in the real world, or the actual way that government functions or actual individuals, they'll build in an ideal sort of abstract version of that. That thing, that thing in social ontology that they're trying to describe. So rather than looking at proper individuals, sort of psychologies, you might think of the traditional liberal understanding of the isolated individual who is free from exploitation, or coercion, and is free from any human relations. But of course, that's not how humans actually are, we are embedded within social networks. These humans, in ideal theory, will also have idealised capacities. So sort of enhanced rationality or perfect rationality, which is just not how humans actually function. Ideal theories will also be tend to be silent on oppression, right? So these idle theories will talk about how society ought to be, rather than thinking about how society in fact is, and in doing so they'll abstract away from actual historic oppression. And indeed, that oppression is legacy in the present. Ideal theory also tends to endorse the notion of strict compliance. And this is a thought that they don't, in my ideal society, when I'm coming up with this ideal theory, everyone's going to follow the war and do their part to build this ideal society. But of course, that's not how things actually function in real life. And so what the likes of mill and O'Neill will say is, we'll look. In fact, we aren't going to have this strict compliance with the principles of justice in this ideal society. Instead, we're going to have people who are only sometimes complying with the principles of justice. So on the whole, you have this picture of what society should be like, which is built by these ideal theorists, which sort of is completely removed from the reality of society as it actually exists. One other thing to say about ideal theory, as Mills characterises it is that it can function as a ideological tool. So if you've got this vision of how society should be, and that should be determining what we think about in political philosophy, in ethics, about what society should be. And this ideal society, completely allied and ignores oppression, domination, and so on, and so forth. Well, these ignorances, or these kind of illusions, these things that this theory of is leaving out what might serve an ideological role in reinforcing and helping to allied, actually ongoing oppression by failing to mention it in political theory. So, big picture, we've got ideal theorists coming along and giving us a vision of society which is completely abstracted away from actual individuals. And this can, according to Charles Mills, play an ideological role in helping to reinforce actually existing impressions. Mills goes on to say, how, in God's name, could anyone think that this is the appropriate way to do ethics?

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 14:22

Yeah, and this is something that I face in my corner of research as well, where in bioethics, it is predominantly presented as ideal theories of ethics are the mainstream focus. This is how we are increasingly educated to believe we should interpret different bioethical situations by applying ideal theory, like deontology, like utilitarianism, kind of as these systems of ethics that are they're applied to real life situations and it sounds Unlike your description of non ideal theory is more about actually seeing what human relations are like. How do we engage with one another and from there build a theory that reflects how human life is experienced, as opposed to trying to match human life to a top down theory?

Matthew Cull 15:28

Yeah, good. So we might characterise non ideal theory as simply the sort of negation of everything that I just described, right? So, instead of an idealised social ontology, we're going to have a social ontology, which accurately reflects institutions like the family, like government, and what individuals are actually like, we might say, Well, look, let's rather than focusing on idealised capacities, let's just look at humans actual capacities, we'll talk about the actual relations of oppression and domination that exist in the world. And we're going to recognise that people won't always follow these ideal principles of justice that we set up. And that might be one way of thinking about non ideal theory. Another way would be just to say, Well, look, there's this completely idealised theory, right, which is completely abstracted away from human life has, in fact exists. But then we could kind of say, well, look, let's actually talk about domination within this theory. And so you might take all these certain aspects of it. So you might say, well, actually, we could have a kind of spectrum of completely ideal theory to totally apply non ideal theory. So there's a room for a range of approaches here, more or less. And you might have arguments to say, Well, look, we should actually, you know, hold on to some aspect of ideal ideal theory, even if we don't buy things like we shouldn't be silent on oppression. Another thing to say is that, whilst ideal theory tends to be, you know, tends to focus on the actualities of people's lives. That doesn't mean we have no room for ideals at all, right? So we can still say, things are, you know, bad, and we shouldn't have things this way, right? There's room for ideals insofar as they are things that we aspire to. But these aren't to be kind of like, placed front and centre, right. These aren't the things which we will use to totally guide our understanding of society and how to build in the future. But rather, they sort of help us to understand what's going wrong in the present. So there's a sort of room for ideals in non ideal theory, but it's not just the we get rid of idealism completely.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 17:47

My understanding of the role of ideals in non ideal theory is that we approach them as dynamic concepts that are produced in relation. So kind of the positive of the negative you outlined, with saying that ideal theories don't take into account systems of oppression that happen in society and culture, etc. Well, the flip side of that is if we take into account those systems, we can also take into account empowering relations and see like how those shaped ideals that communities will want to hold up and have as aspirational values, for example, but I think, the differences, how we treat the ideal. So in ideal theory, as you've mentioned, there's kind of this idea that once everyone has shown the ideal, we will all bow down and worship, whilst but now not ideal theory, we assume that ideals are dynamic products of relational engagement, and therefore that they may change and evolve.

Matthew Cull 18:59

Yeah, good. I think that's right about many non-ideal theorists, but there is room for a position which says, Look, can't have it absolutely right about what's good. Right. So treat others as ends in themselves. Right? That's, that's what we should, you know, think of as the good we get, there's room for that, whilst also still saying, Well, look, the actual world doesn't match up to that in any way, shape, or form. And what a society looks like, where everyone follows Kant's categorical imperative, we don't really know what that looks like. But we in some way, you know, acknowledged that Kant had it right about what's good. So let's try and build a society that sort of more like that. So there's room for that sort of non ideal theory with, you know, strong kind of like commitment to abstract, universal moral principles. Mills himself, of course, was what he called himself a black radical Kantian, who was very critical of Kant And, of course, but nonetheless, you know, consider the himself very much in the Kantian tradition. And so you've got room for a range of positions from the extreme relativist social constructionist position which says, look, there's just values that emerge from societies. And those don't have any reality beyond the societies in which they emerge to a really strong, almost moral realism, which is combined with a recognition that the moral ideals just aren't instantiated in reality.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 20:32

Yeah, that makes me think of Catholic philosophy that I studied as an undergrad, as well, this idea of the tension between knowing the kingdom of God is now and is also coming at the same time. So we have a moral ideal, but we also accept that we will never fulfil it, like, and we live with that tension throughout. But that's, that's very interesting to think about, okay. So you are talking about or you're researching the role of non ideal theory in transgender access to healthcare.

Matthew Cull 21:10

So, this aspect of the research is looking at non-ideal theory in early what late 20th century and early 21st century, trans critiques of what was then queer theory and cultural feminist theory. So, in the early 2000s, in the late 1990s, shortly before Mills actually published his famous 2005 article on non ideal theory, we have Jay Prosser from the University of Leeds and Viviane Namaste, working over in Quebec, who both launched attacks on the dominant modes of theorising about transgender people at the time. Okay, so, Jay Prosser, in "Second Skins", argues, well look, queer theory, sort of fails to account for the realities of trans experience, in the same in a slightly different way to the way that what was then called cultural feminist theory, fails to account for the realities of trans lives. And both fail to sort of attend to the realities of trans bodies and material bodies in particular kinds of way. So we can go into some more detail on what that means in a second. Meanwhile, Viviane Namastate basically says it's very similar thing with regards to queer theory, but it also protects the practices of social science at the time for failing to attend to trans people, and in particular, failing to attend to this particular kinds of subjectivity that trans people have, and indeed had at the time. So this critique goes something like this. queer theory says that trans people have, to a certain extent, a very radical role. They demonstrate the constructiveness of gender, they demonstrate that gender is something that can be melded and can be undermined, and is contingent. So trans people have this really important radical political role that inherently political, politically radical. So on the one hand, you've got this queer theory view, which says, Look, trans people are somehow inherently politically radical, because of how they demonstrate the contingency of gender. On the other hand, we have cultural feminists and thinking here, in particular, people like Sheila Jeffries, who say no, trans people aren't inherently radical, they're inherently conservative. Why is that? Because they're dupes of gender. They have been tricked by gender and by patriarchy, and by the medical establishment into thinking that they need to build themselves a body which sort of matches up to idealised notions of womanhood or manhood. So for the cultural feminist, trans people ratify gender, they make gender real when it isn't really, okay, they treat it as if it's real, when it isn't, in fact, real. So, on either side of this, we have queer theorists who are saying that trans people are inherently radical. We have cultural feminists who are saying that trans people are inherently conservative pronouns, they basically say, Well, look, let's think about how queer theory thinks about trans people. So queer theorists, following the likes of Judith Butler have, you know, basically assumed that there's something called the heterosexual matrix, and this is an effect of heterosexual society, which basically says, Look, if you have a certain sex at birth, you're going to have a matching gender and you're going to have an appropriate set of desires to do with that gender and Sex. So if you've got a penis at birth, you're going to be a boy. And you're going to desire women. If you've got a vagina at birth, you're going to have be a woman, and you're going to have desires which make you design. Right? This is, you know, the vision of society as an oppressive kind of thing that queer theorists saw. Into this, trans people sort of "emerge", right. And they disrupt this in particular kinds of ways. Obviously, queer people disrupted in virtue of having desires that don't match up to the ones that the heterosexual matrix says one should have. On the other hand, trans people disrupt this by not having the appropriate kind of gender to match the sex. And so trans people in virtue of merely existing have this sort of radical function, this radical political function. Now, one thing to say is you can see this as a idealised social ontology in the way that Mills was worried about with ideal theory, right, so much the same way that Mills was worried about idealising how government functions or how the family functions and takes and how that takes away from thinking about how government actually functions and how the family actually functions to oppress and dominate this idealised notion of the heterosexual matrix as this kind of like, nice pattern of sort of how people should work in society, and how trans people enter into that, that seems like another sort of idealised social ontology. On the other hand, of course, we've got the cultural feminists who offer us this very kind of simple vision of patriarchy, as men dominating women, women being dominated by men, a hierarchical social structure, in which there's a kind of straightforward relationship of domination between the two genders. Here again, I think we can see an idealised social ontology, right? This really massive Miss misses out a bunch of the ways in which different patriarchy patriarchy is function in different kinds of ways. It's all too neat and misses out on the kind of ways in which society actually functions. So in this we've got sort of a Milton critique from Prosser-Namaste, which says, "Look, these theorists are offering a kind of idealised social ontology." They also say that, to a certain extent, both cultural feminist and queer theorists offer us a vision of society in which people have idealised capacities, okay, in the same way that individuals under traditional ideal theory might have idealised rational capacities. For proper analysis, they see that queer theorists and cultural feminists seem to idealise away rationality, they sort of void individuals of any capacity for agency on their own, and instead say, Well, they've just got this inherent political power to either undermine gender or to reinforce it just in virtue of existing. So in thinking about cultural, cultural, feminist theory and queer theory, as ideal theorists, we've got these two critiques, right one that offers a sort of idealised capacities and to that it offers an idealised social ontology or they offer an idealised social ontology. We can also see a silence on structures of domination and oppression, right? So remember that Mills wanted to say look, ideal theory fails to attend to and allied structures of domination and oppression. I think that we can see progress, the parser and Anastasia as arguing for something very similar with regards to queer theory and cultural feminism. This might seem weird at first, right?

So, cultural feminism is structured around this straightforward structure of domination, right? Men dominating women. Meanwhile, we've got queer theory, which is all about how you know these normative structures in society, the heterosexual matrix make us at be particular kinds of or make us become particular kinds of people, where we can see a silence on structures of domination and oppression whoever is the failure to attend to particular kinds of domination and oppression that trans people face okay. So, in failing to attend to the complexities of trans misogyny, or the transphobia that trans men face or the transphobia that non binary people face. Cultural feminists with their straightforward position on patriarchy as a basic hierarchical relation have just alighted this whole underlying structure of domination. Meanwhile, the queer theorist in offering us this nice, neat heterosexual matrix, let's fail to attend to the ways in which trans misogyny transphobia occurs even when the heterosexual matrix hasn't been or hasn't believed to have been sort of violated, right? So we see in transphobic on trans misogynistic oppression of transforming, that even when the person who is being transphobic towards that trans woman thinks that that the trans person is a man, right and believes this and you know, transphobic acts in virtue of that, nonetheless, the oppression still occurs. So the heterosexual matrix, sort of, you know, doesn't capture what's going on here. So there is a sort of a silence on oppression and domination that's occurring here, even if both of these styles of theory, nonetheless, talk about some kinds of domination and oppression, this all gets sort of played out quite neatly, I think, in how both these theories and the transgender person thinks about one's experience in the gender clinic, right. So think about the experience of going to the gender clinic, right? According to the cultural feminist, the experience of going to the gender clinic is something like this. You've been duped by patriarchy into thinking that you are authentically say a man or a woman. And you go to the go to the gender clinic to get yourself some affirming hormones and, and surgery to confirm your manhood or womanhood. And you do so with aided and abetted by a scheming medical doctor who is trying to construct these, you know, authentic men and women. Right. And according to the cultural feminist, what's going on in the clinic is when when a trans woman who goes into the clinic thumbs up in order to access the hormones that are offered, they are reinforcing harmful understandings of women mutatis mutandis for manhood, the queer theorist, on the other hand, sees the gender clinic as a site of rebellion of way of demonstrating the constructiveness of gender because it is precisely in the clinic that gender is actually constructed, you can build a new gender for yourself, right? You can build the body in particular kinds of ways with hormones and surgery. So the clinic for the queer theorists is a site of pure radicality. It's a place where the current gender order can be undermined by radical queers coming in to destroy heterosexuality, patriarchy, and the gender binary. However, for trans theorists, and for Prosser and Namaste, we see a slightly different vision of what's going on in the clinic. Instead, what's going on in the clinic is trans people trying to access healthcare, they are making pragmatic and reasonable decisions about how to access health care, such as hormones and surgery, which really help alleviate an awful a debilitating illness called "gender dysphoria". Okay, so rather than being inherently radical, or inherently politically conservative, the clinic is a space where people are making pragmatic and reasonable choices. And sometimes that means that people will butch up or femme up in the clinic, in order to convince a doctor to give them the treatment that they want, even if they don't particularly want to, you know, dress up in that particular kind of way, normally, right. And there are whisper networks about various kinds of doctors about how best to convince them to give you the health care that you desire. So in all, I think that this plays out quite nicely, right? We've got these two kind of idealised understandings of what trans nurse is, right? The queer theorist of the cultural feminist. But if you actually go and you think about how transgender people actually enter the clinic and actually navigate the clinic, it's one which is neither inherently radical nor inherently politically conservative. It's just people trying to get the health care they need.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 33:56

Yeah, this really resonates with what I encounter in disability studies and this idea that I was speaking to trans historian and activist and effectiveness about this, that we want to have access as disabled people to health care, in the sense that we're not adverse to medications to therapies, to treatments, but we don't want to be pathologized. And I don't know if you see that within issues around trans health care, this idea of just trying to survive and have access to the treatments that one needs to go on and keep living in many cases, but also skirting this dangerous line with being pathologized as someone who needs a corrective.

Matthew Cull 34:52

Yeah, good. There's a lot of debate going on in transgender communities about how best to think about our relationship to the medical establishment. And this is partly driven by pragmatic concerns about access to health care, in our situation here in the UK, but also around the world, whereby it's often comes down to a debate about what is the best way to just get everyone access to the healthcare that we need? Is it to go, "Okay, let's fully buy into a medical model, just because that's how you get health care on the NHS. And, you know, let's support the gender identity clinics that we have around the country campaign for more gender identity clinics to sort of increase access, because of course, we face huge waiting lists at the moment. So let's just increase the gender clinics, let's have more of them to cut those waiting lists." And that's, you know, one option that one might take another option would be to say, "Well, look, let's do away with a gatekeeper model for trans healthcare entirely". So what would this look like where you say, "Well, look, it's not up to the doctor, whether one is going to be prescribed this or that treatment. Rather, it's up to the individual to decide on what they want, perhaps with advice from the doctor, and the doctor can't say no to that person getting the treatment that they want". Of course, the doctor might then have a role, or the medical profession might have a role in helping the patient understand how best to have that treatment, and will of course, have a role if there's surgery involved. But the point is that the medical gatekeeper is sort of removed. So you kind of see a similar sort of dynamic rather than debating in terms of pathologizing. But in terms of a kind of gatekeeper model, or a non gatekeeper model for access to healthcare.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 36:43

Great. So as we wrap up now, I always ask people, what you're reading at the moment that's giving you life, whether it's philosophy or not academic or not something that is really sparking your interest at the moment.

Matthew Cull 36:58

So I don't think anything gives me life at the moment.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 37:02

On no! It could be a film, a TV show, song, anything! A potted plant, a furry animal...

Matthew Cull 37:16

Oh, I tell you what, okay. So at the moment, I'm listening to a podcast called The Electronic Wireless Show, which is a fantastic podcast. It's normally a podcast about video games put out by the website, Rock, Paper, Shotgun. But it's not really a podcast about video games. It's a podcast about three weird people talking about their lives. And it's fantastic. And it's a wonderful lesson that comes out once a week and it makes my week every week.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 37:43

Love it. I will put it in the show notes so people can discover it. Do you have any writings of yours? Or maybe important papers that you would like me to list in the show notes?

Matthew Cull 37:56

Yeah, so if you want to list some of my work on gender, I've got a paper called Against Abolition, which came out at a really unfortunate time because at the time, I was like, okay, Against Abolition published in Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. It's kind of it's about gender abolition, it's, you know, no, no cultural event is going to come up, which is going to dominate the conversation about the term abolition in the next couple of years, right? And, of course, massive riots around the world for police abolition shortly afterwards. So I will say, the paper is unfortunately titled given my own political commitments regarding police, but certainly, I think that's, that's a fun one to have a look at. Sort of another thing you might want to have a look at is my more sort of analytic philosophy stuff. And so I've got a paper called demotic demarcating the social world with Hume, which talks about the relationship between the social world and how that gets constructed, and the natural world, which is, you know, the stuff that's sort of out there already, and tries to explain what's going on with the help of David Hume, and the Canadian pop starlet, Carly Rae Jepsen.

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 39:05

Oh, I'll have to read that! All right, well, thank you so much for joining me! And I'm sure our paths will cross, but I hope our listeners will check out your work. And I hope you all the best in the future of your research!

Matthew Cull 39:24

Thank you very much!

Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 39:35

Thank you so much Matthew, that was a very clear introduction, not only to non-ideal theory, but also to how it can shape our understanding of access to healthcare. I will link Matthew’s articles in the show notes as well as the books they mentioned today. If you want to support Philosophy Casting Call, the best way is to rate the podcast and to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Also tell me if you use Philosophy Casting Call in your classrooms, cause I would love to know! If you are in a position to donate, you can also become a monthly supporter on Ko-Fi. You can follow the podcast @philoccpod on Twitter and Instagram and all the transcripts live at www.elainagauthiermamaril.com. Until next time, bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai