The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PH), commonly attributed to Leibniz, has given rise to much discussion and debate. Thus philosophers have argued over how it should be formulated, whether it is (necessarily) true, and what, if any, metaphysical consequences it has.

It is not my intention to add to these discussions here, having done so elsewhere. Rather, I intend to introduce and defend a closely related principle which I shall, for want of a better name, refer to as The Principle of the Identity of Necessary Similarity’ (PINS).

In section II, I briefly recapitulate some of the distinctions and other relevant points which are customarily made in connection with (PH). This is all too familiar material, but it is necessary in order to provide a general framework of concepts in terms of which we can discuss (PINS) in an intelligible fashion.

Susan Okin has written an important book on justice and the family. Animated by the experiences that contemporary feminism has sought to articulate, and guided by a principled hostility to the subordination of women that continues to disgrace American life, she argues that the current ordering of domestic life in the United States is unjust and that its alteration ought to be made a matter of public policy.

Families, according to Okin, are not havens in an otherwise heartless world. Instead the current division of domestic labor marks them as the centerpiece of a broader system of inequalities between men and women. Justice condemns those inequalities and commands their remedy through the transformation of our domestic practices. Because the division of domestic labor is so fundamental to injustice, we need in particular to ‘encourage and facilitate’ (171) equal sharing by parents in the responsibilities of child-rearing, and in the more quotidian chores that provide the material foundation of modern domesticity.

In her provocative discussion of the challenge posed to the traditional impartialist, justice-focused conception of morality by the new-wave care perspective in ethics, Annette Baier calls for ‘a “marriage” of the old male and newly articulated female ... moral wisdom,’ to produce a new ‘cooperative’ moral theory that ‘harmonize[s] justice and care.’ I want in this paper to play matchmaker, proposing one possible conjugal bonding: a union of two apparently dissimilar modes of what Nel Noddings calls ‘meeting the other morally,’ a wedding of respect and care.

In his influential paper ‘Two Types of Foundationalism,’ (TTF) William Alston distinguishes two important conceptions of foundationalism: ‘simple foundationalism’ (SF) and ‘iterative foundationalism’ (IF). SF is the view that there are immediately justified beliefs of some kind or other. IF is the stronger view that certain epistemic propositions are immediately justified. Alston favors a reliability account of immediate justification of the kind defended by externalists such as Armstrong, Dretske, and Goldman. Alston rejects IF by appeal to what he calls the ‘second level argument.’ He claims, further, that since IF is essential to the Cartesian project of reconstructing knowledge, the Cartesian project must be abandoned.