Identifying adaptive preferences in practice: lessons from postcolonial feminisms
General Material Designation
[Article]
First Statement of Responsibility
/ Serene J. Khader
GENERAL NOTES
Text of Note
9626-1744
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
I argue that postcolonial feminist critiques draw our attention to four phenomena that are easily confused with what I call paradigmatic adaptive preference and that the ability to distinguish these phenomena can improve the quality of development interventions. An individual has paradigmatic adaptive preferences (APs) if she perpetuates injustice against herself because her normative worldview is nearly completely distorted. The four lookalike phenomena postcolonial feminist critics help us identify are (a) APs caused by selective value distortion (SAPs), (b) APs caused by forced tradeoffs (TAPs), (c) APs caused by misperceptions of the facts (MAPs), and (d) wellbeingcompatible preferences that are misunderstood because of a lack of cultural or contextual knowledge. The first three, I argue, are nonparadigmatic forms of AP that have gone previously unrecognized and that we need to expand our conceptual vocabulary to describe; the last is not a form of AP at all. Development practitioners can grapple more seriously with the realworld complexities of moral psychology and crosscultural moral judgments if they are capable of distinguishing paradigmatic AP from the lookalike phenomena.