Clare Chambers (philosopher)

Clare Chambers (born 1976) is a British political philosopher at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Life
Chambers received her DPhil in political theory from the University of Oxford, and she subsequently taught at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, before moving to the University of Cambridge. She has published on feminism, liberalism, and social construction.

Philosophical work
In her 2008 book Sex, Culture, and Justice: the Limits of Free Choice, Chambers is concerned about what the state's response should be to cultural practices which individuals freely choose to partake in as a way of securing certain goods, when those practices impose disproportionate costs on vulnerable members of the community. She defends three main claims. First, individual preferences to pursue certain activities are shaped by social construction: if individuals are raised to follow certain practices which are deemed choiceworthy in their community, then they will be more disposed to follow these practices later in life. Second, if social construction brings individuals to form preferences for activities that are self-degrading or self-harmful, the individuals in question are victims of an unjust process of social construction. Third, the state is permitted to prohibit self-degrading or self-harmful activities that individuals freely choose to follow when their preference for following these activities was shaped by an unjust process of social construction; this is because preferences formed by an unjust process of social construction are morally suspect, and the state has a greater obligation to free individuals from pernicious practices that harm and degrade them than to satisfy morally suspect preferences. According to Marion Smiley, Chambers' use of the notion of an unjust process social construction "to justify, as well as to limit, prohibition, provides us with a whole new and productive way of using the state to promote gender equality," and she argues that a particular virtue of Chambers' work is that it "makes clear why we do not have to choose between gender equality and autonomy in our efforts to prevent harm in the lives of women and all others."

In her 2017 book Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defense of the Marriage-Free State she argues that marriage violates both equality and liberty so should not be recognised by the state, nor have any legal status. This built on her earlier paper 'The marriage-free state' which makes the case for abolishing state-recognized marriage and replacing it with piecemeal regulation of personal relationships.