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The Virtues of Coldness: Rethinking the Ethics of Indifference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2025

Nicole Yokum Open the ORCID record for Nicole Yokum [Opens in a new window]
Nicole Yokum*
Affiliation:
St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, USA
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Email: yokum1@stolaf.edu
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Abstract

Feminist philosopher Lisa Tessman argues that sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering is a burdened virtue: virtuous insofar as it serves as a ground of possibility for other virtues, but also burdensome because, taking into consideration the background condition of extreme suffering in the world, it evokes anguish by always being joined to its opposite, indifference. For Tessman, indifference is horrifying and an irredeemable meta-vice. However, in this essay, I bring Tessman into conversation with critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno to argue for a more nuanced feminist ethical appraisal of indifference. Adorno’s critique of coldness shares several important elements with Tessman’s critique of indifference; for Adorno, coldness made the Holocaust possible, and overcoming it means striving to cultivate identification-based solidarity. But Adorno’s dialectical approach to coldness has important implications for a character-focused liberatory ethical project, and his testimony to his own coldness, as a Holocaust survivor, introduces further complexity to this picture. Drawing on and moving beyond Adorno’s work, I argue that certain kinds of coldness—in particular, critical coldness and self-protective coldness—can have liberatory feminist potential. I introduce the concept of liberatory vices to delineate this new category of dispositions.

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Hypatia , First View , pp. 1 - 19
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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