Is Self-Identification Sufficient for Enabling Membership of Gender, Linguistic, or Age Groups?

Within the discipline of moral and political philosophy one generally accepted reason for assigning rights and responsibilities to people is to cater to their objective needs and interests (e.g. their socio-economic, communicative or democratic interests). But a clear, emerging trend can be witnessed within the discipline: the increasingly popular trend of paying more normative attention and attributing more value than before to people’s subjective interests – such as whether they feel, experience or simply claim a certain issue to be of great importance – and also to people's subjective claims to group membership (rather than to objective markers of such membership). In this project we zoom in on one subjective dimension that was centrally put on the table in academic political philosophy – and also in society at large – primarily by the gender debate: the question whether the fact that one self-identifies as a member of a group is in itself a sufficient condition for membership of that group and for being subject to the rights and responsibilities that get attributed to members of that group (for example and in the context of gender, access to women-only sport competitions, to women-only spaces or to positions reserved within a gender quota). 

Specifically, through this project we will work out, for the first time, an ontology of self-identification (What IS self-identification? WP1), a moral theory of self-identification (Why is self-identification important, if at all? WP2) and a political philosophy of self-identification (What kinds of rights and duties follow from self-identification and what are their limits? WP3). We shall carry out our investigations by focusing on three types of groups: gender groups, language groups and age groups, mutually extrapolating from – and inter-confronting – them.