Professor Clare Chambers

Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge

  • Professor Clare Chambers
  • biography
  • books
    • Intact
    • Against Marriage
    • Sex, Culture, and Justice
    • Teach Yourself Political Philosophy
    • Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality
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    • full list of publications
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    • all posts on culture and religion
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    • all posts on the body and beauty
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  • latest posts
  • Professor Clare Chambers
  • biography
  • books
    • Intact
    • Against Marriage
    • Sex, Culture, and Justice
    • Teach Yourself Political Philosophy
    • Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality
  • publications
    • full list of publications
    • liberalism
    • feminism
    • social construction
    • beauty
    • the body
    • multiculturalism and religion
    • marriage
  • media
    • listen
    • watch
    • read
    • talks
  • policy & impact
  • current projects
  • students
  • posts by topic
    • all posts on culture and religion
    • all posts on liberalism
    • all posts on the body and beauty
    • all posts on feminism
    • all posts on marriage
  • latest posts
  • all posts on feminism,  all posts on marriage,  media,  read

    Quoted on marriage in The Guardian

    June 20, 2018 /

    Rose Hackman quotes me in a long-form piece on marriage in The Guardian. You can read the whole article here. ” “Married men gained rights over women’s bodies, property and children,” confirms Clare Chambers, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge who wrote a book arguing for an end to state-recognized marriage. “Traditionally [marriage] has maintained legal gender inequality, and it has done so to the benefit of men.” “Chambers concedes that many formal inequalities tied to marriage have been denounced and revoked. Marital rape was outlawed in the UK in 1991 and in the US in 1993 – hard to believe there was ever an exemption –…

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    Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality

    June 10, 2022

    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017

    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage

    Against Marriage wins APSA’s David Easton Award

    June 4, 2018 /

    I am delighted and honoured to learn that Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State has won the 2018 David Easton Award of the American Political Science Association (APSA). APSA say: “The David Easton Award is given for a book that broadens the horizons of contemporary political science by engaging issues of philosophical significance in political life through any of a variety of approaches in the social sciences and humanities.” The citation for the Award is as follows: “Clare Chambers’ Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State and Barbara Arneil’s Domestic Colonies: The Turn Inward to Colony won recognition from our committee because these two books…

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage

    Danny Reviews Against Marriage

    May 15, 2018 /

    You can read the review here. “I found Chambers persuasive: Against Marriage compelled me to rethink some of my ideas on the subject and brought much greater precision to others. And even those who disagree with much more of it will have to engage with it, as an integrated and reasonably comprehensive analysis of how the state should approach marriage.”

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage,  media,  read

    The American Conservative on Against Marriage

    May 15, 2018 /

    They don’t like it. See here. Note that the article does not always read the argument of the book accurately.

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • all posts on culture and religion,  all posts on liberalism,  all posts on the body and beauty,  liberalism,  multiculturalism and religion,  the body

    Reasonable Disagreement and the Neutralist Dilemma

    May 15, 2018 /

    Chambers, Clare, “Reasonable Disagreement and the Neutralist Dilemma: Abortion and circumcision in Matthew Kramer’s Liberalism with Excellence” in The American Journal of Jurisprudence (May 2018). You can read the paper here. Abstract: This paper starts by investigating the idea of reasonable disagreement. It then considers Matthew Kramer’s argument that there is no neutral solution available to the disagreement over abortion. The paper argues that Kramer’s account has wider application, and identifies a neutralist dilemma. The neutralist dilemma applies when, of two policy options available to the state, one is unreasonable. It follows that the state should enact only the reasonable policy. However, in a neutralist dilemma the fact of reasonable disagreement due to the…

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    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
  • Against Marriage,  all posts on feminism,  all posts on liberalism,  all posts on marriage,  media,  read

    Fabian Society on Against Marriage

    May 15, 2018 /

    Andrew Harrop, General Secretary of the Fabian Society, reviewed Against Marriage in Fabian Review, May 2018. You can read the full review here. “Marriage makes me uncomfortable, whether the reason is political, historical, cultural or aesthetic. No matter how many married couples I see living modern equal relationships, for me, the whole concept is tainted by its patriarchal past. But I say ‘for me’ with good reason, as I have dozens of friends and comrades who disagree. This is a fault-line issue that divides socialists and feminists amongst themselves. In Against Marriage, Clare Chambers makes the case for why egalitarians and liberals should reject marriage. It is political philosophy at its…

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage

    Against Marriage reviewed in Political Theory

    May 10, 2018 /

    Against Marriage is reviewed by Tamara Metz, author of Untying the Knot, in Political Theory. You can read the full review here. An excerpt follows. “This is a distinct and important contribution to an increasingly crowded field of liberal political philosophy on marriage and the state and, perhaps most interestingly, to our understanding of the liberal project broadly. … Where other liberals seek more vigorously to balance competing demands of freedom and equality, or emphasize freedom, Chambers hews rigorously to an egalitarian position. You won’t find another book that does this so effectively or by way of such productive engagement with existing scholarship. Laying out the egalitarian case in such clear and compelling terms, Chambers highlights the…

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage,  media,  read

    Against Marriage on JHIB blog

    April 27, 2018 /

    My Aeon article “Against Marriage” was recommended by the Journal for the History of Ideas Blog here.

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • Uncategorized

    Books

    April 27, 2018 /

    I have written three books: Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State (Oxford University Press, 2017); Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (Penn State University Press, 2008) and, with Phil Parvin, Teach Yourself Political Philosophy: A Complete Introduction (Hodder, 2013). For more information about each book, including contents and reviews, click the links in the menu above.

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  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage,  media,  read

    Times of India on Against Marriage

    April 26, 2018 /

    The Times of India featured my Aeon article “Against Marriage” on 22 April 2018. You can read the coverage here.

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage,  articles,  media,  publications on marriage,  read

    Against Marriage at Aeon

    April 17, 2018 /

    I have a 3,300 word essay on “Against Marriage” at Aeon magazine. You can read the article here.

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • all posts on culture and religion,  all posts on liberalism,  all posts on the body and beauty,  event

    Neutrality at University of Edinburgh

    April 5, 2018 /

    I presented my paper “Reasonable disagreement and the neutralist dilemma: Abortion and circumcision in Matthew Kramer’s Liberalism with Excellence” at the University of Edinburgh in March 2018. You can read their account of the session on the Just World Institute blog here.

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    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
  • all posts on culture and religion,  all posts on the body and beauty,  media,  read

    Edinburgh Just World Institute blog

    April 5, 2018 /

    The University of Edinburgh Just World Institute blogged about my paper “Reasonable disagreement and the neutralist dilemma: Abortion and circumcision in Matthew Kramer’s Liberalism with Excellence”. You can read the blog here.

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    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage

    Against Marriage at APT books

    April 5, 2018 /

    Against Marriage is featured in the New Books By Members section of the US Association for Political Theory. You can see the page here.

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • media,  read

    Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit

    March 22, 2018 /

    On 16 April I’ll be doing an AMA – Ask Me Anything! – for Reddit Philosophy. You can join in the fun at 12noon EST / 5pm GMT. Read the discussion here.

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  • all posts on feminism,  all posts on social construction,  media,  read

    Gli Stati Generali on the “Me Too” movement

    March 19, 2018 /

    I was interviewed by Valentina Saini for her piece “È L’ALBA DI UN’INTERNAZIONALE FEMMINISTA?” on the Italian news site Gli Stati Generali. You can read the piece, in Italian, here. For those who don’t speak Italian I don’t have a translation of the full article, but here are the answers I gave to Valentina Saini’s questions. VS: In many countries and regions of the world, sexual harassment in the form of a “pat” on a woman’s “butt”, for example, is seen as something innocent and harmless, nothing one should be especially offended by – many women think so too. Why is that? Is women’s body still something that does not belong…

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    Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality

    June 10, 2022

    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017

    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
  • media,  read

    The Reading Lists

    March 6, 2018 /

    Want to know what books I like? You can read an interview with me by Phil Treagus of The Reading Lists blog here. His questions were fascinating to think about and very hard to answer!

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  • full list of publications

    Full list of publications

    January 23, 2018 /

    This page gives a simple list of publications. For more information about each work, including abstracts and clickable links, view publications by theme from the drop-down menu above. * = peer-reviewed Books *Chambers, Clare, Freedom & Equality: Essays on Liberalism and Feminism (Oxford University Press, in press) Chambers, Clare, Intact: The Unmodified Body (Allen Lane / Penguin, 2022). *Chambers, Clare, Brian D. Earp, and Lori Watson (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality (Routledge, 2022). * Chambers, Clare, Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State (Oxford University Press, 2017). 226 pages. Winner of the 2018 David Easton Award of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Chambers, Clare…

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  • all posts on the body and beauty,  beauty,  policy & impact,  the body

    Cosmetic procedures: ethical issues

    January 22, 2018 /

    Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2017 This report was written by the Working Party on Cosmetic Procedures, of which I am a member. There has been increasing demand for invasive cosmetic procedures in the UK, prompting questions about potential risks to users and the lack of regulation and professional standards in this area. This report explores ethical issues in cosmetic procedures with a particular focus on the role and responsibilities of health and scientific professionals and others in responding to demand for invasive non-reconstructive procedures that aim to enhance or normalise appearance. It engages in detailed ethical analysis and makes recommendations affecting all parts of the sector. You can read the report…

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    Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body

    August 25, 2021

    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage,  media,  read

    Against Marriage on BMJ blog

    June 6, 2018 /

    Richard Smith writes in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) blog that he is persuaded by the arguments of Against Marriage. You can read the full article here. “Chambers is against marriage on the grounds of equality and liberty. Women are not equal with men within marriage, and the state by attaching a bundle of rights and duties to marriage creates a hierarchy of relationships with marriage at the top, making unmarried couples and single people inferior. Much of the population, including my wife and I, thinks that “common law wives” have similar rights to married women, but in fact they have none. By bundling rights and duties together, marriage (and…

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage,  event,  media,  watch

    The Politics of Marriage at LSE Forum

    January 10, 2018 /

    Marriage is an odd mix of sex, religion, and politics. Our speakers ask what marriage is and whether there is there any distinctive moral value in it. Should the state promote it? Is it possible to have an ‘equal’ marriage, or is marriage fundamentally an oppressive institution? Should marriage be rejected in favour of civil partnerships, or something else, or perhaps nothing else? You can watch a video of the event and listen to the podcast here. Speakers Clare Chambers Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Cambridge Sir Paul Coleridge Former high court judge and Chairman, The Marriage Foundation Peter Tatchell Activist and Director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation Chair Sarah…

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    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • all posts on culture and religion,  all posts on feminism,  all posts on the body and beauty,  media,  watch

    Dress codes at work for the BBC

    December 6, 2017 /

      Can your employer demand  that you go to work naked? In this short video and article for the BBC I tell David Edmonds why not.        

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    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
  • event

    Seminar in Contemporary Political Thought

    October 6, 2017 /

    Seminar in Contemporary Political Thought Convened by Dr Clare Chambers (Philosophy) and Dr Duncan Bell (POLIS) University of Cambridge Michaelmas Term 2017 All sessions are held on Fridays at 1 – 2.30pm in the Bawden Room of Jesus College. This is in West Court, which can be accessed either via the main entrance of Jesus College or directly from Jesus Lane. Refreshments will be served at the close of formal proceedings. There are no precirculated papers and all are welcome. 6 Oct: Tom Shakespeare, University of East Anglia: “The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: making use of the stilts?” 20 Oct: Avia Pasternak and Jeff Howard,…

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  • all posts on marriage,  event

    Blackwells Festival of Philosophy

    September 14, 2017 /

    I’ll be launching and speaking about Against Marriage at Blackwell’s bookshop, Oxford on 16th November 2017, as part of the Oxford University Press Festival of Philosophy. Register for the event here.

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    CChambers 0 Comments

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    Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality

    June 10, 2022

    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • all posts on feminism,  all posts on liberalism,  projects

    Freedom & Equality: Essays on Liberalism and Feminism

    September 16, 2019 /

    My next book is in press with Oxford University Press. Freedom & Equality investigates the contours of feminist liberalism: a philosophical approach that is appealing but elusive. Its hallmark is a liberalism that prioritises equality and individual autonomy, while offering a rigorous critique of using individuals’ choices as the measure of justice. Liberalism without feminism prioritises individual choice, a strategy that has played a crucial role in the liberal defence of freedom against authoritarianism and conformity. However, as feminism shows, relying on individual choice is insufficient to render an outcome just, because people often choose things that harm or disadvantage themselves. From beauty norms to the gendered division of labour,…

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    CChambers 0 Comments

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    Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality

    June 10, 2022

    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017

    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
  • all posts on the body and beauty,  event,  policy & impact

    Royal Society of Medicine

    July 19, 2017 /

    I spoke on “The ethics of cosmetic surgery” at the Royal Society of Medicine event “Changing the image of cosmetic surgery: patients before profit” in October 2017. Find details here.

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    Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body

    August 25, 2021

    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
  • all posts on marriage,  event

    Alumni Festival

    September 14, 2017 /

    I am speaking on “Should the State Recognise Marriage?” at the University of Cambridge Alumni Festival on 22nd September 2017. Details are here.

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    Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality

    June 10, 2022

    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • all posts on feminism,  all posts on social construction,  event

    Joint Session 2017

    July 13, 2017 /

    I’m a Symposiast at the 2017 Joint Sessions of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association in Edinburgh. My paper is called “Ideology and Normativity” and it responds to Sally Haslanger. You can find details here and read my paper here.

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    CChambers 0 Comments

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    Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality

    June 10, 2022

    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017

    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
  • all posts on marriage,  event

    Association for Social and Political Philosophy

    July 13, 2017 /

    I was a keynote speaker for the Annual Conference of the ASPP at the University of Sheffield in June 2017, talking about my book Against Marriage. You can find details of the conference here.

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    CChambers 0 Comments

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    Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality

    June 10, 2022

    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017
  • all posts on liberalism,  all posts on marriage,  event

    Freedom and Autonomy Conference

    June 15, 2017 /

    I am giving the keynote lecture at the conference on Freedom and Autonomy at Birkbeck College, University of London in June 2017. My lecture is titled “Marriage and Freedom.”

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    CChambers 0 Comments

    You May Also Like

    Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality

    June 10, 2022

    Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

    March 14, 2017

    Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice

    August 20, 2013
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