St. Mary’s College student Gina Gaebl ’19, majoring in philosophy, won the "Best Undergraduate Paper" at the 2018 Great Lakes Philosophy Conference, held April 6-8, at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Mich. The conference was open to undergraduates, graduate students, and professional philosophers.
According to Gaebl, her paper challenged a claim central to Iris Marion Young's argument in her book “Responsibility for Justice” (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), which is that only public and collective actions can be political.
“I argue that personal actions can in fact be political as well, and that these personal actions are a necessary part of taking up political responsibility,” said Gaebl. “I argue this under the pretense that regular morality allows for complicity with structural injustice, where political morality cannot.”
