Annette Baier
New Zealand philosopher
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Through Philosophy, Justice and Trust (social science)
Biography
Baier earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Otago in her native Dunedin, New Zealand. In 1952 she went to Somerville College, Oxford, where she earned her PhD and met fellow philosophers Philippa Foot and G. E. M. Anscombe. For most of her career she taught in the philosophy department at the University of Pittsburgh, having moved there from Carnegie Mellon University. She retired to Dunedin.
She was former President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, an office reserved for the elite of her profession. Baier received an honorary Doctor of Literature from the University of Otago in 1999.
Her husband was the philosopher Kurt Baier.
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Ethics
Baier's approach to ethics is that women and men make their decisions about right and wrong based on different value systems: men take their moral decisions according to an idea of justice, while women are motivated by a sense of trust or caring. The history of philosophy having been overwhelmingly compiled by men, she suggests, leads to a body of thought which apparently ignores the role of nurture and trust in human philosophy.