Combating homophobia, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and violence in our society requires more than just focusing on the overt acts of prejudiced and abusive individuals. The very intelligibility of such acts, in fact, depends upon a background of shared beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that together form the context of social practices in which these acts come to have the meaning they do. This book, inspired by Wittgenstein as well as feminist and critical race theory, shines a (...) critical light on this background in order to show that we all share more responsibility for the persistence of oppressive social practices than we commonly suppose—or than traditional moral theories that connect responsibility just with the actions, rights, and liberties of individuals would lead us to believe. First sketching a nonessentialist view of rationality, and emphasizing the role of power relations, Peg O’Connor then examines in subsequent chapters the relationship between a variety of "foreground" actions and "background" practices: burnings of African American churches, hate speech, child sexual abuse, coming out as a gay or lesbian teenager, and racial integration of public and private spaces. These examples serve to illuminate when our "language games" reinforce oppression and when they allow possibilities for resistance. Attending to the background, O’Connor argues, can give us insight into ways of transforming the nature and meaning of foreground actions. (shrink)

Gender, race, and sexuality are not just identities; they are also systems of social organization – i.e., systems of privilege and oppression. This article addresses two main ways privilege and oppression (e.g., racism, misogyny, heteronormativity) are relevant topics in and for philosophical aesthetics: (i) the role of the aesthetic in privilege and oppression, and (ii) the role of philosophical aesthetics, as a discipline and a body of texts, in constructing and naturalizing relations of privilege and oppression (...) (i.e., white heteropatriarchy). The first part addresses how systems of privilege and oppression use the aesthetic. I will discuss various ways race, gender, and sexuality, as both embodied identities and broader social institutions, work with and through “the aesthetic”. The second part addresses racism and (hetero) sexism in the discipline of aesthetics. Both in its history and its present practice aesthetics’apparent neutrality on questions of privilege and oppression is actually evidence of its investment in systems of privilege and oppression. (shrink)

Liberalism is often claimed to be at odds with feminism and critical race theory (CRT). This article argues, to the contrary, that Rawlsian liberalism supports the central commitments of both. Section 1 argues that Rawlsian liberalism supports intersectional feminism. Section 2 argues that the same is true of CRT. Section 3 then uses Young’s ‘Five Faces of Oppression’—a classic work widely utilized in feminism and CRT to understand and contest many varieties of oppression—to illustrate how Rawlsian liberalism (...) supports diverse feminist and CRT projects, and why it may be critical to achieve solidarity between feminism, CRT, and Rawlsian liberalism. Finally, Section 4 responds to five objections. (shrink)

Book reviewed: O’Connor, Peg, Oppression and Responsibility: a Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002, 151 pp., ISBN 0‐271‐02202‐7.

This dissertation is a formulation of a theory of racism that transcends the narrow focus upon individual intentions and attitudes, capturing the ways and means by which it becomes an "institutionalized" part of the larger social context. I argue that this larger institutional level of racism is what makes it oppressive, as opposed to simple prejudice or dislike. Chapter one establishes this basic position, and moves directly into an analysis of oppression, appealing to five basic "premises" which delineate (...) the boundaries within which any adequate theory of oppression must function. The chapter concludes by claiming that a successful theory of oppression, which must be understood in terms of a related notion of freedom, requires a "positive" theory of freedom, rather than the "negative" one that dominates contemporary discourse on race. Chapters two and three develop a concept of positive freedom, and a corresponding understanding of racism , using Hegel, Sartre, and Frantz Fanon. I argue that a successful theory of racism can be constructed with a foundation in Hegelian recognition, aided by the appropriation of the social ontology developed by Sartre in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. I use Fanon's texts both to provide important insights overlooked by Hegel and Sartre, and to provide a theater in which to demonstrate the interpretive and analytic power of the theory of racism as it develops. Chapter four lays out the final theory, and applies it to several compelling contemporary contexts. (shrink)

Despite the concern with oppressive systems and practices there have been few attempts to analyse the general concept of oppression. Recently, Iris Marion Young has argued that it is not possible to analyse oppression as a unitary moral category. Rather, the term ‘oppression’ refers to several distinct structures, namely, exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. This paper rejects Young's claim and advances a general theory of oppression. Drawing insight from American chattel slavery and the (...) situation of the German Jews during the 1930's, I argue that to be oppressed is to be unjustly denied the opportunity for what I call ‘resilient autonomy’. I argue that all instances of oppression can usefully be analysed in these terms. I test my analysis against each of Young's five structures of oppression, concluding that in each case they are captured by my analysis. (shrink)

This article discusses explanatory theories of normative concepts and argues for a set of criteria of adequacy by which such theories may be evaluated. The criteria offered fall into four categories: ontological, theoretical, pragmatic, and moral. After defending the criteria and discussing their relative weighting, this article uses them to prune the set of available explanatory theories of oppression. Functionalist theories, including Hegelian recognition theory and Foucauldian social theory, are rejected, as are psychoanalytic theory and social (...) dominance theory. Finally, the article defends structural rational choice theory as the most promising methodology for explaining oppression. Key Words: oppression • explanation • rational choice theory. (shrink)

Rahel Jaeggi argues that forms of life ought to be the main reference point for a critical theory of society because the internal normative structure of life forms allows for immanent critique. In this article, I extend her model by systematically considering the possibility of oppressive forms of life. Oppressive forms of life are clusters of practices in which subordinated groups are systematically excluded or disabled from participating in the social processes of interpretation through which the values and purposes (...) of those very practices are determined. The possibility of oppressive forms of life poses a challenge to the method of immanent critique because it seems that any such critique must rely on immanent norms that are at least partly constituted by interpretations and that can therefore be distorted by oppression. I argue that Jaeggi’s model of immanent critique can be extended to respond to that challenge, either by recovering a constitutive form of freedom within all forms of life or by consciously adopting a partisan stance in favour of oppressed and marginalised self-understandings. (shrink)

The article presents an original needs-based partial theory of human injustice and shows its relationship to existing theories of human need and human liberation. The theory is based on an original typology of three social structural sources of human injustice, a partial theorization of the mechanisms of human injustice, and a needs-based theorization of the nature of human injustice, as experienced by individuals. The article makes a sociological contribution to normative social theory by clarifying the relationship of (...) human injustice to human needs, human rights, and human liberation. The theory contends that human injustice is produced when oppression, mechanistic dehumanization, and exploitation create systematic inequality in opportunities to address human needs, leading to wrongful need deprivation and the resulting serious harm. In one longer sentence, this needs-based partial theory of the sources, mechanisms, and nature of human injustice contends that three distinct social systemic sources—oppression, mechanistic dehumanization, and exploitation—produce unique and/or overlapping social mechanisms, which create systematic inequality in opportunities to address universal human needs in culturally specific ways, thus producing the nature of the human injustice theorized here: wrongfully unmet needs and serious harm. (shrink)

Introduction: Redeeming recognition -- Oppression reconsidered -- Foundations of a liberal conception -- Toward a liberal conception of oppression -- Conclusion : A liberal conception of oppression -- Misrecognition as oppression -- Exploitation and disempowerment -- Cultural imperialism -- Marginalization -- Violence -- Conclusion: Misrecognition as oppression -- Overcoming oppression : the limits of toleration -- Contemporary differences : matters of toleration -- John Rawls : political liberalism -- Will Kymlicka : multicultural citizenship -- (...) Conclusion: Accommodating differences : the limits of toleration -- Beyond toleration : toward a concept of recognition -- Hegel's early Jena theory of recognition -- Axel Honneth's critical social theory of recognition -- Charles Taylor's politics of recognition -- Conclusion: Toward a concept of public recognition -- Hegel's theory of recognition in the phenomenology : recognitive understanding and freedom -- The centrality of recognition in the phenomenology -- The pure concept of recognition and its failure in mastery and slavery -- The achievement of mutual recognition through recognitive understanding -- Challenges to Hegel's recognition theory -- Conclusion: Hegel's theory of recognition in the phenomenology -- Recognition in the philosophy of right : particularity and its right -- Recognition in the philosophy of right -- Particularity in the free market : the benefits and liabilities of free subjectivity -- Conclusion: The significance of the right of particularity -- Winning the right of particularity : recognizing difference in ethical life -- How particularity wins its right : the bildung of true conscience -- Exercising the right of particularity : corporations as sites of public recognition -- Challenges to Hegel's treatment of difference in ethical life -- Conclusion: The public recognition of difference in civil society -- Conclusion: Hegel, recognition, and ethical liberal modernity. (shrink)

We are, Julia Kristeva writes, strangers to ourselves; and indeed much of contemporary theory describes the human condition as one of alienation. Eloquently arguing that we cannot explain the developement of individuality or subjectivity apart from its social context, Kelly Oliver makes a powerful case for recognizing the social aspects of alienation and the psychic aspects of oppression.

Standard accounts of shame characterize shame as an emotion of global negative self-assessment, in which an individual necessarily accepts or assents to a global negative self-evaluation. According to non-standard accounts of shame, experiences of shame need not involve a global negative self-assessment. I argue here in favor of non-standard accounts of shame over standard accounts. First, I begin with a detailed discussion of standard accounts of shame, focusing primarily on Gabriele Taylor’s (1985) standard account. Second, I illustrate how Adrian Piper’s (...) ([1992] 1996) experience of groundless shame can be portrayed as 1) both a rational and an irrational experience of shame, in accordance with Taylor’s account as a paradigm model of standard accounts of shame, and 2) as a rational experience of shame when taken in its own right as a legitimate, rational account of shame. Third, without denying that some experiences of shame either are or can be irrational experiences of shame, I elucidate how standard accounts of shame can act as mechanisms of epistemic injustice, and in doing so can transmute the righteous indignation of the marginalized by recasting them as shameful experiences (i.e., by recasting them as experiences of the righteous shame of the marginalized). -/- (This chapter was previously published in Hypatia, forthcoming, under the title "Rationality through the Eyes of Shame: Oppression and Liberation via Emotion"). (shrink)

Danielle Wenner has crafted novel arguments in defense of republican accounts of freedom. I learned a lot from her discussion of how Philip Pettit's neorepublican account of freedom as nondomination does a better job than standard accounts of freedom as noninterference of explaining how power over an agent can restrict their freedom to act autonomously. The real crux of Wenner's argument, however, is that freedom as nondomination can do this work in a way that those who defend an account of (...) relational autonomy cannot. I will start with Wenner's defense of freedom as nondomination and of what it can do as the background for assessing her critique of relational autonomy. The upshot of my comments will be that Wenner... (shrink)

Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into ‘resources’ to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into ‘labor’ in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual (...) architectures. Settler systems of epistemic and conceptual resources and the relations among them are constructed to preclude certain forms of knowledge. This is not an accident; it is a central goal of colonial violence. Colonization and land dispossession would not be possible without the violent disruption of Indigenous knowledge systems and ongoing organized attempts to disrupt their survival. Violently disrupting the relationships of people to land is as much an epistemic project as it is a material one, and these two projects are inherently linked. The task of theorizing epistemic oppression is not only about epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression is a story that gives language to a phenomenon in order to get past it, to carry on with the maintaining and reviving the forms of Indigenous and diasporic knowledge that colonialism has worked tirelessly to corrupt and silence. (shrink)

Recently, social and political philosophers have shown increased interest in the ideological nature of ideal theory and the importance of non-ideal theory. Charles Mills, who sparked recent critiques of ideal theory, invokes the notion of “non-idealizing abstractions” and argues that these are helpful when applying non-ideal theory. In contrast, I argue that the notion of non-idealizing abstractions is not a helpful tool for non-ideal theory. I suspect that it pays insufficient attention to the actual power (...) dynamics of oppression, which significantly influence judgments about whose experiences and interests are worth being reflected by an abstraction. Failing to take account of the power differences among the oppressed, what Mills considers non-idealizing abstractions falls into ideology, which cannot reflect the experiences or interests of less-privileged minorities, and only concerns those of more-privileged minorities. I examine cases in which the concept of “patriarchy,” which Mills alleges to be a non-idealizing abstraction, functions as what I refer to as the “Colonialist Concept of Patriarchy” that marginalizes Third World women’s experiences of intersectional oppression. I suggest that a more suitable and less ideological way to apply non-ideal theory should avoid asserting that an abstraction is “non-idealizing” and should, instead, protect “resignifiability” of the abstraction. (shrink)

_Oppression and Liberty_ is one of Simone Weil's most important books on political theory.Here she discusses political and social oppression, its permanent causes, the way it works and its contemporary forms. Simone Weil's writings on oppression and liberty continue to be as valid and thought-provoking today as they were in her lifetime.

Wrongdoing is inescapable. We all do wrong and are wronged; and in response we often blame one another. But if blame is a defining feature of our social lives, so is ceasing to blame. We might excuse, justify, or forgive an offender; or simply let the offence go. Each mode of ceasing to blame is a social practice and each has characteristic norms that influence when and how we do it, as well as how it’s received. We argue that how (...) we relinquish blame, and how effective we are, depends on many circumstances only partially within our control. Like any norm-governed practice, one can do it well or poorly, appropriately or inappropriately, successfully or unsuccessfully. To successfully participate in a practice, one’s action must be done for the right reasons and secure uptake. We argue that social and material circumstances can compromise one’s ability to effectively cease to blame in the manner one prefers. But if one can fail, then one can lack access to particular ceasing to blame practices if one is regularly prevented from effectively relinquishing blame. However, uncooperative social and material circumstances do not only arise by chance. Our central argument is that circumstances of oppression can systematically compromise one’s ability and opportunities to effectively perform a variety of ceasing to blame practices. This deprivation is an insidious facet of oppression that is neglected both in theories of oppression and of forgiveness but which has significant implications for how we understand the power and purpose of forgiveness. (shrink)

I argue that Kant's ethical framework cannot countenance a certain kind of failure to respect oneself that can occur within oppressive social contexts. Kant's assumption that any person, qua rational being, has guaranteed epistemic access to the moral law as the standard of good action and the capacity to act upon this standard makes autonomy an achievement within the individual agent's power, but this is contrary to a feminist understanding of autonomy as a relational achievement that can be thwarted by (...) the systematic attack on autonomy that occurs within oppressive social conditions. Insofar as Kant's negative duty of self-respect is unable to accommodate the ways immersion in oppressive social environments can warp an individual's understanding of what she is owed and capable of as a moral agent, it perpetuates the cruelty of unjust social systems in the guise of respecting individual autonomy. I conclude by considering Carol Hay's argument that those who are oppressed have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression, in order to explore how this limitation in how Kant conceives of the duty to respect the self may reach expression in contemporary ethical theory inspired by Kant. (shrink)

_Oppression and Liberty_ is one of Simone Weil's most important books on political theory.Here she discusses political and social oppression, its permanent causes, the way it works and its contemporary forms. Simone Weil's writings on oppression and liberty continue to be as valid and thought-provoking today as they were in her lifetime.

Mary Devereaux has suggested, in an overview of feminist aesthetics[1], that feminist aesthetics constitutes a revolutionary approach to the field: "aesthetics cannot simply 'add on' feminist theories as it might add new works by [ Nelson ] Goodman, Arthur Danto or George Dickie. To take feminism seriously involves rethinking our basic concepts and recasting the history of the discipline." In particular, feminist theory involves a rejection of "deeply entrenched assumptions about the universal value of art and aesthetic experience." Overthrowing (...) these assumptions "constitutes what art historian, Linda Nochlin, describes as a Kuhnian paradigm shift."[2] Near the end of her essay, Devereaux returns to this theme: "If feminism constitutes a new paradigm, then we may wish to ponder how far the old model of aesthetics and the new are commensurable. Is traditional aesthetics contingently or necessarily associated with patriarchy? Can the 'gender-neutral' aesthetics of the traditional model be reformed or must it be rejected?". (shrink)

This collection of new essays examines philosophical issues at the intersection of feminism and autonomy studies. Are autonomy and independence useful goals for women and subordinate persons? Is autonomy possible in contexts of social subordination? Is the pursuit of desires that issue from patriarchal norms consistent with autonomous agency? How do emotions and caring relate to autonomous deliberation? Contributors to this collection answer these questions and others, advancing central debates in autonomy theory by examining basic components, normative commitments, and (...) applications of conceptions of autonomy. Several chapters look at the conditions necessary for autonomous agency and at the role that values and norms -- such as independence, equality, inclusivity, self-respect, care and femininity -- play in feminist theories of autonomy. Whereas some contributing authors focus on dimensions of autonomy that are internal to the mind -- such as deliberative reflection, desires, cares, emotions, self-identities and feelings of self-worth -- several authors address social conditions and practices that support or stifle autonomous agency, often answering questions of practical import. These include such questions as: What type of gender socialization best supports autonomous agency and feminist goals? When does adapting to severely oppressive circumstances, such as those in human trafficking, turn into a loss of autonomy? How are ideals of autonomy affected by capitalism? and How do conceptions of autonomy inform issues in bioethics, such as end-of-life decisions, or rights to bodily self-determination? (shrink)

This essay discusses a cluster of problems for feminist theory and practice which concern responsibility and choice under conditions of oppression. I characterize four major perspectives from which situations of oppression or victimization can be seen and questions about choice and responsibility answered: The Perspective of the Oppressor; The Perspective of the Victim; The Perspective of the Responsible Actor; and The Perspective of the Observer/Philosopher. I compare their strengths and weaknesses and discuss their compatibility.

The neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination has emerged as a powerful framework for conceptualizing the dynamic relationship between power, democracy, and constitutionalism in modernity. Despite this, I argue that adaptations of republican freedom to the problem of slavery displace attention to race and foreclose more productive ways of addressing how racial slavery constitutes a distinct form of oppression. To illuminate the limitations of neo-republicanism, I turn to the political thought of abolitionists David Walker and Ottobah Cugoano. Both utilize (...) comparative histories of race and slavery to reveal the specificity of modern slavery as a form of oppression, which cannot be captured as an issue of domination in the technical sense of the term. They thus pose challenges to neo-republican theory for its failure to fully appreciate the historical differences between ancient and modern slavery. To do so would illuminate how neo-republican theory faces severe limitations in providing an adequate conceptualization of oppression in the case of racial slavery. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Frederick Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State remains a fundamental resource for anyone wanting to understand the oppression of women as a capitalist form. By re-examining the strengths and weaknesses of Engels’s historicisation of women’s oppression through the lens of the debates opened by second wave feminism, I argue that, once properly understood, we can overcome the limitations of Engels’s book to point to the kind of unitary (...) theory of women’s oppression essential to a strategy adequate to the needs of the struggle for women’s liberation. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Frederick Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State remains a fundamental resource for anyone wanting to understand the oppression of women as a capitalist form. By re-examining the strengths and weaknesses of Engels’s historicisation of women’s oppression through the lens of the debates opened by second wave feminism, I argue that, once properly understood, we can overcome the limitations of Engels’s book to point to the kind of unitary (...) theory of women’s oppression essential to a strategy adequate to the needs of the struggle for women’s liberation. (shrink)

Oppression is a form of injustice that occurs when one social group is subordinated while another is privileged, and oppression is maintained by a variety of different mechanisms including social norms, stereotypes, and institutional rules. A key feature of oppression is that it is perpetrated by and affects social groups. In this article I show that because of the central role that groups play in theories of oppression, those theories face significant, and heretofore mostly unrecognized, metaphysical (...) problems. I then identify resources from analytic metaphysics that can be used to address these problems. I show that, although we should not be pessimistic about the prospects for a viable theory of oppression, it will take serious metaphysical work to develop a plausible ontology of oppression, and existing theories have for the most part failed to respond to this challenge. (shrink)

Open Access: This article argues for an aesthetic approach to resisting oppression based on judgments of bodily unattractiveness. Philosophical theories have often suggested that appropriate aesthetic judgments should converge on sets of objects consensually found to be beautiful or ugly. The convergence of judgments about human bodies, however, is a significant source of injustice, because people judged to be unattractive pay substantial social and economic penalties in domains such as education, employment and criminal justice. The injustice is compounded by (...) the interaction between standards of attractiveness and gender, race, disability, and gender identity. -/- I argue that we should actively work to reduce our participation in standard aesthetic practices that involve attractiveness judgments. This does not mean refusing engagement with the embodiment of others; ignoring someone’s embodiment is often a way of dehumanizing them. Instead, I advocate a form of practice, aesthetic exploration, that involves seeking out positive experiences of the unique aesthetic affordances of all bodies, regardless of whether they are attractive in the standard sense. I argue that there are good ethical reasons to cultivate aesthetic exploration, and that it is psychologically plausible that doing so would help to alleviate the social injustice attending judgments of attractiveness. -/- This essay was the winner of the 30th Anniversary of the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been (...) fighting their own battle against the abstraction of theory from the realities of trans lives and oppression. Vivian Namaste (2000) and Jay Prosser (1998) argued that contemporary gender theory failed to justice to the actuality of trans life, retreating instead to understanding trans life through literary archetypes and idealized radical figures. In this chapter I’ll compare Mills’ critique of ideal theory with the transfeminist critique of 1990s gender theory, arguing that they share much in common. Centrally, both critiques share an underlying commitment to theory needing to be grounded in the actuality of oppression and power relations. This common thread, I suggest, must continue to guide transfeminist thought and action: contra Marquis Bey (2022) transfeminist thought and praxis must continue to be about trans lives, about the oppression of trans women, and about ways of actually achieving liberation from our current dire position. (shrink)

Many contemporary forms of oppression are not primarily the result of formally organized collective action nor are they an unintended outcome of a combination of individual actions. This raises the question of collective responsibility. I argue that we can only determine who is responsible for oppression if we understand oppression as a matter of social practices that create obstacles for social change. This social practice view of oppression enables two insights: First, that there is an unproblematic (...) sense in which groups can bear irreducible collective responsibility for oppression. Second, that there are derived forms of individual responsibility for members of dominant groups. (shrink)

What is objectionable about “blacking up” or other comparable acts of imagining involving unethical attitudes? Can such imaginings be wrong, even if there are no harmful consequences and imaginers are not meant to apply these attitudes beyond the fiction? In this article, we argue that blackface—and imagining in general—can be ethically flawed in virtue of being oppressive, in virtue of either its content or what imaginers do with it, where both depend on how the imagined attitudes interact with the imagining’s (...) context. We explain and demonstrate this using speech act theory alongside a detailed case study of blackface. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to theorize insurgent political action on the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. It reconstructs a Sartrean model of insurgency that prioritizes an insurgent group’s capacity for situated inventions. It argues that, similar to Fanon, Sartre theorized that groups that struggle against oppression and exploitation constantly invent novel conditions that steer society in unforeseeable directions. However, these inventions of insurgent action are never absolutely contingent but always take place in concrete situations (...) which never cease to condition them. This paper analyses two concrete factors which condition the inventions of insurgent action: the seriality from which the group arises and to which it always threatens to return, and the actions of hostile groups. Taken together, this paper claims that Sartre provides a coherent and innovative account of insurgent political action. (shrink)

Enquiry into the relationship between kinds of oppression raises several possibilities. Perhaps there are multiple yet distinct oppressions. If this is so, are there philosophical relationships among them? What are the theoretical distinctions between racism and sexism, for example. The question raised here has to do with the philosophical structure of social dominance, rather than the discrete manifestations usually based on distinct target groups. Although the characteristics of peoples who are targets of each of the individual kinds of (...) class='Hi'>oppression are different, and even though many people are multiply oppressed, there is good reason to question the underlying assumption that each form of oppression is fundamentally separate and distinct from the others. There are many deep correspondences shared by specifically focused theories of oppression. It is plausible to suggest there is a single phenomenon called oppression. Perhaps there is only one monster with several heads, rather than many monsters hiding in our communal closet. (shrink)

It is common in the autonomy literature to claim that some more demanding theories of autonomy disrespect certain individuals by giving the result that those individuals lack autonomy. This claim is often made in the context of the debate between substantive and content-neutral theories of autonomy. Proponents of content-neutral theories often argue that, in deeming certain people non-autonomous—especially certain oppressed people who seem to have internalized their oppression in certain ways—the substantive theories disrespect those people. They take this as (...) reason to accept content-neutral views over substantive views. Despite its ubiquity, this concern about disrespect is hard to pin down precisely. In this paper, I articulate two questions that need to be answered before we can understand the disrespect objection. First: Who, exactly, is supposedly being disrespected by substantive views? Second: Why is it that excluding people with these features is disrespectful? I consider a number of possible answers to each of these questions, and I argue that none of them gives us a plausible explanation of why we should think substantive theories of autonomy are disrespectful to anyone. No matter how we fill in the details, I will argue, there is simply no reason to prefer content-neutral theories of autonomy over substantive ones on the grounds of respect. (shrink)

COVID-related racial disparities represent a spectrum of injustices and inequalities. Focusing on food oppression, this essay argues that racism infuses food law and policy in ways that contribute to racially disparate COVID deaths and severe illnesses. USDA nutrition program participants were at a nutritional disadvantage when COVID hit. Yet, government responses focused on food insecurity, not nutritional quality. Racism against a predominantly Black and brown labor force of essential food workers — from fields to meat plants to grocery stores (...) — created tolerance for the administration’s failure to protect or compensate some of the country’s most vulnerable workers. When COVID-driven supply issues threatened to narrow white people’s activities and choices, the favored response was to keep their options open by sacrificing Black and brown workers. A food oppression lens — understanding how corporate interests drive food policy — is necessary to achieve food equality in this pandemic and beyond. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

From a radical feminist perspective, gender is a cage. Or to be more precise, it’s two cages. If genders are cages, then surely we want to let people out. Being less constrained in our choices is something we all have reason to want: theorists in recent years have emphasized the importance of the capability to do and be many different things. At the very least, we should want an end to sex-based oppression. But what does this entail, when it (...) comes to gender? In this paper, I’ll compare four ‘transitional pathways’, with a view to considering how each relates to the ultimate end of ending sex-based oppression. Should we open the doors to the cages, so that people can move freely between them, but leave the cages themselves in place?. Should we add more cages?. Should we make the cages bigger, so that people have a lot more room to move around inside them? Or should we dismantle the cages, so there are no more genders at all?. Some of these options are ‘gender revisionist’, others are gender abolitionist. I’ll argue in favour of a gender abolitionist pathway. (shrink)

What structure do paradigm cases of oppression and domination, like racism and capitalism, have? Most theories of oppression and domination take them to have a binary structure. There are the oppressors and the oppressed, the dominators and the dominated. I argue that a better model for many paradigm cases of oppression and domination is a structure of graded inequality. Such a structure comprises multiple groups arranged in hierarchically ascending and descending order. A model of graded inequality has (...) both descriptive and normative advantages over a binary model. It better illuminates some mechanisms by which oppression and domination stabilize themselves. Understanding those mechanisms allows us better to destabilize them. Yet there still may be, I suggest, some good reasons for adopting the binary model in certain situations for certain purposes. The larger methodological upshot of the paper is to connect more closely social philosophy to moral psychology. (shrink)

Natalie Stoljar posits that purely procedural theories of autonomy are unable to explain the ‘feminist intuition’, which is the idea that the internalization of false and oppressive norms are incompatible with autonomy. She claims instead that an account based on ‘normative competence’ – which requires true beliefs and critical reflection – can explain why oppressive norms should be excluded as legitimate decision-making inputs. On my view, however, the normative competence approach is subject to a worrying problem. While Stoljar's view successfully (...) problematizes the internalization of oppression, her view misattributes non-autonomy also to those who perpetrate the oppression. I suggest that this is implausible, arguing instead that we can establish an asymmetry of autonomy between those who oppress others and those who are made target of oppression. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Oppression, Normative Violence, and VulnerabilityThe Ambiguous Beauvoirian Legacy of Butler’s EthicsLisa C. KniselyJudith Butler’s most recent writings are a sophisticated theorization of the significance of human vulnerability as a resource for “a non-violent ethics... that is based upon an understanding of how easily human life is annulled” (Butler 2004, xvii). Butler argues that recognition of the constitutive vulnerability of human existence provides the condition of possibility through which (...) we can respond to an ethical “appeal” or “call” for nonviolence (Butler 2009, 165, 170). This recent work carries on the feminist theoretical tradition of theorizing nonviolence via an attention to human vulnerability that has been strongly present in feminist care ethics (Held 2006; Kittay 1999; Ruddick 1989; Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). However, rather than turning to the care ethicists to think through the ethical relationship between vulnerability and violence, Butler produces an innovative feminist ethics by turning to a variety of thinkers in continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, such as Hegel, Freud, Cavarero, and especially Levinas. Butler’s recent discussion of the ethical import of human vulnerability therefore extends a long-standing feminist tradition of arguing for nonviolence while also helping to expand the theoretical resources feminists have used for this task.This article places Butler’s recent ethical focus on nonviolence1 in conversation with Simone de Beauvoir’s earlier existentialist feminist ethical writings2 [End Page 145] concerning the ethico-political import of violence. Together, these two thinkers reorient the dominant feminist conversation about violence away from an emphasis on women’s violent and oppressive victimization and toward an idea of gendered actors who are simultaneously ethically enabled and constrained by the bodily, historical, and political situations out of which they act. Ultimately, however, Beauvoir’s argument that ethics are always deeply contextual and are thus normatively ambiguous is a preferable feminist alternative to Butler’s attempt to delineate a specifically nonviolent ethics. This is because Beauvoir gives thorough attention to contexts of oppression as a major mitigating factor that shapes our ethical possibilities.For Beauvoir, there is no guarantee that a nonviolent response to vulnerability is a priori the most ethical response. Beauvoir does not insist on a nonviolent ethics because the ethicality of violence must be derived from within the embodied situations out of which people are acting. Ethicality cannot be determined prior to, or outside of, the lived contexts in which people are situated. Beauvoir’s ethics remind contemporary feminist theorists that both vulnerability, and responses to vulnerability, whether violent or nonviolent, are always contextually mediated by the forces of history, politics, and circumstance. This reminder is essential if we do not wish feminist ethical claims to override the feminist political goal of lessening oppression. Beauvoir’s attention to contextual specificity shows us that our possible responses to vulnerability are ethically ambiguous in the sense that no normative claim about how one ought to respond to human vulnerability, taken in the abstract, can be elucidated without the risk of making our ethics potentially oppressive.By returning to Beauvoir’s ethics, especially Beauvoir’s attention to oppression and freedom, the discussion here is meant to echo the concerns of a growing number of contemporary feminist theorists who express hesitation about the recent “turn” to vulnerability in feminist theory (Bergoffen 2001; Butler 2004, 2005, 2009; Fineman 2008; Oliver 2008)3 and more generally about moral claims that are made in the name of feminism (Murphy 2009; Dean 2008; Halley 2008; Mills 2007; Brown 1995). In addition, the emphasis on Beauvoir’s ethics here is meant to help return the contemporary feminist discussion of violence toward a more general emphasis on the importance of thinking about freedom as a primary feminist concern (Zerilli 2005; Willett 2001, 1995). Beauvoir’s ethics demonstrate that the ethicality of our responses to vulnerability cannot be judged without a thorough attention to the ethical freedom4 of oppressed ethical actors.Feminist ethicists have tended to undervalue attention to specific historico-political contexts in their discussions of violence as they develop normative arguments against violence. As Kimberly Hutchings notes in her article “Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguous Ethics of Political Violence,” there are two contemporary feminist positions on violence... (shrink)

In countries like the United States, White people benefit from appropriating Black hair culture, even while Black men and women experience race-based hair discrimination and oppression. One goal of this paper is to raise awareness of hair discrimination and oppression within the philosophical community. Another is to consider whether current theories of appropriation can account for the wrongness of this widespread phenomenon and, if so, how. We are particularly interested in the special case where one minority group appropriates (...) from another minority group—viz. the appropriation of Black hairstyles by Non-Black Persons of Colour. Our paper highlights the complexity of appropriation claims between competing minority groups—both of which have been oppressed, albeit differently, by White people— due to their multi-ethnic, multicultural and, therefore, intersectional, status. (shrink)

Feminists, critical race scholars, and other social‐justice theorists sometimes object to “abstraction” in liberal normative theory. Arguing that oppression affects individual agents in powerful yet subtle ways, they contend that allegedly abstract theories often reinforce oppressive power structures. Here I critically examine and ultimately reject Onora O'Neill's “abstraction without idealization” as a solution to this problem. Because O'Neill defines abstraction as simply the “bracketing of certain predicates,” her methodology fails to guide decisions about what to bracket and what (...) to include in the theory. Moreover, it may not be possible to abstract without also relying on some particular ideals. While abstraction is unavoidable, I conclude that it must be employed with greater attention to sociopolitical hierarchies and by using ideals that do not collude with structures of oppression. I discuss the work of Susan Babbitt and Elizabeth Anderson as examples of how nonoppressive ideals might be incorporated into normative theory. (shrink)