Moral Criticism and Structural Injustice

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MIND. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1093/mind/fzaa098

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Moral agency is limited, imperfect, and constrained. This is evident in the many ways we all unwittingly participate in systemic injustice through our everyday actions, which I call 'structural wrongs'. I argue that, to do justice to these facts, we should distinguish between summative and formative moral criticism. Traditional moral theory has focused almost exclusively on summative critical responses like blame, resentment, and punishment, which function to conclusively assess an agent's performance relative to some benchmark. However, it is also possible to give formative moral criticism that aims only to improve performance in an ongoing way, by pointing out how agents fall short of moral ideals. I show that the negative sanctions associated with summative responses are justifiably imposed under certain conditions when persons exercise their agency wrongly -- conditions that do not always hold for structural wrongs. Yet even in such cases we can still use formative responses, which are warranted whenever an aspirational ideal has not been met. Expanding out repertoire of moral criticism to include both summative and formative responses enables us to better appreciate both the powers and limitations of our agency, and the complexity of moral life.

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Reconceptualizing Solidarity as Power from Below

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2023. Philosophical Studies  180, 893–917.

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I propose a new concept of solidarity, which I call “solidarity from below,” that highlights an aspect of solidarity widely recognized in popular uses of the term, but which has hitherto been neglected in the philosophical literature. Solidarity from below is the collective ability of otherwise powerless people to organize themselves for transformative social change. I situate this concept with respect to four distinct but intertwined questions that have motivated extant theorizing about solidarity. I explain what it means to conceptualize solidarity from below as a form of power, rather than as a feeling, disposition, duty, or scheme of social arrangements. Finally, I suggest that the moral-relational aspects of solidarity emerge secondarily from the process of collective power, and not the other way around.

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What is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice

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Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1007/s1067.

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Structural injustices are highly complex phenomena with multiple causes and without easy solutions. Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully-developed account to date of responsibility for such injustice, according to which everyone who causally contributed to some unjust outcome is responsible for collectively organizing to change it. This paper motivates and defends an alternative model, which satisfies five desiderata that Young’s fails to fully meet. On the Role-Ideal Model, we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, because roles are the site where structure meets agency. The Role-Ideal Model (1) explains how individual action contributes to structural change, (2) justifies why each particular agent is expected to act, (3) specifies the kinds of acts to be undertaken (4) moderates between demanding too much and too little of individual agents, and (5) provides an account of the critical responses appropriate for holding individuals accountable for structural injustice.

Contingent Labor in the Academy: Power, Precarity, and Ideology

 

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. Advance online publication. doi: 10.111/hypa.12401.

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Feminist philosophers have challenged a wide range of gender injustices in professional philosophy. However, the problem of precarity, i.e. the increasing numbers of contingent faculty who cannot find permanent employment, has received scarcely any attention. What explains this oversight?

 

In this paper, I argue, first, that academics are held in the grips of an ideology that diverts attention away from the structural conditions of precarity, and second, that the gendered dimensions of such ideology have been overlooked. To do so, I identify two myths: the myth of meritocracy and the myth of work as its own reward. I demonstrate that these myths - and the two-tier system itself - manifest an unmistakably gendered logic, such that gender and precarity are mutually reinforcing and co-constitutive. I conclude that feminist philosophers have particular reason to organize against the casualization of academic work. 

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(with Nils-Hennes Stear)

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Imagining in Oppressive Contexts, or, What's Wrong with Blackface? 

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Ethics. 2023. 133(3). 

https://doi.org/10.1086/723257 

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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.

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Why Yellow Fever Isn't Flattering: A Case Against Racial Fetish

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Journal of the American Philosophical Association Vol 2(3): 400-419.

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Most discussions of racial fetish center on the question of whether they are caused by negative racial stereotypes. In this paper I adopt a different strategy, one that begins with the experiences of those targeted by racial fetish rather than those who possess it; that is, I shift focus away from the origins of racial fetishes to their effects as a social phenomenon in a racially stratified world. 

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I examine the case of preferences for Asian women, also known as "yellow fever," to argue against the claim that racial fetishes are unobjectionable if they are merely based on personal or aesthetic preference rather than racial stereotypes. I contend that even if this were so, yellow fever would still be morally objectionable because of the disproportionate psychological burdens it places on Asian and Asian-American women, along with the role it plays in a pernicious system of racialized social meanings.

Attributability, Accountability, and Implicit Bias

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In Implicit Bias and Philosophy: Volume 2, Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics, Jennifer Saul and Michael Brownstein (eds.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 62-89.

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This chapter distinguishes between two concepts of moral responsibility. We are responsible for our actions in the first sense only when those actions reflect our identities as moral agents, i.e. when they are attributable to us. We are responsible in the second sense when it is appropriate for others to enforce certain expectations and demands on those actions, i.e. to hold us accountable for them.

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This distinction allows for an account of moral responsibility for implicit bias, defended here, on which people may lack attributability for actions caused by implicit bias but are still  accountable for them. What this amounts to is leaving aside appraisal-based forms of moral criticism such as blame and punishment in favor of non-appraising forms of accountability. This account not only does more justice to our moral experience and agency, but will also lead to more effective practices for combating the harms of implicit bias.

Bias, Structure, and Injustice: A Reply to Haslanger

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Feminist Philosophical Quarterly 4(1). Article 4. 

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Sally Haslanger has recently argued that philosophical focus on implicit bias is overly individualist, since social inequalities are best explained in terms of social structures rather than the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that questions of individual responsibility and implicit bias, properly understood, do constitute an important part of addressing structural injustice, and I propose an alternative conception of social structure according to which implicit biases are themselves best understood as a special type of structure.

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What Kind of Responsibility Do We Have for Fighting Injustice? A Moral-Theoretic Perspective on the Social Connections Model.

 

 Critical Horizons 20(2): 109–126. 

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Iris Marion Young’s influential Social Connections Model (SCM) of responsibility offers a compelling approach to theorizing structural injustice. However, the precise nature of the kind of responsibility modelled by the SCM, along with its relationship to the liability model, has remained unclear. I offer a reading of Young that takes the difference between the liability model and the SCM to be an instance of a more longstanding distinction in the literature on moral responsibility: attributability vs. accountability. I show that interpreting the SCM as a conception of accountability resolves a number of objections, while also highlighting the SCM’s distinctive stance on the relationship between ethics and politics.

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A Job for Philosophers: Causality, Responsibility, and Explaining Social Inequality

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Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 57(2): 323-351.

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People disagree about the causes of social inequality and how to most effectively intervene on them. These may seem like empirical questions for social scientists, not philosophers. However, causal explanation itself depends on broadly normative commitments. From this it follows that (moral) philosophers have an important role to play in determining those causal explanations. I examine the case of causal explanations of poverty to demonstrate these claims. In short, philosophers who work to reshape our moral expectations also work, on the back end, to restructure acceptable causal explanations—and hence solutions—for social inequality. Empirical and normative inquiry, then, are a two-way street.

Race and Pornography: The Dilemma of the (Un)Desirable

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In Beyond Speech: Pornography and Analytic Feminist Philosophy, Mari Mikkola (ed.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2017: 177-196.

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Antipornography feminists have long argued against pornography on the basis of its racist representations of women of color. More recently, however, other academics and pornographers have advanced arguments to rehabilitate (especially non-mainstream) pornographic representations of race as sites of resistance and pleasure. 

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This chapter presents and criticizes three such arguments. On the one hand, pornography has the potential to expand and transform the standards of what is beautiful, desirable, and pleasure to include those in the bottom ranks of racialized and gendered hierarchies. However, pornography makes use of race always at the risk of reinforcing patriarchal and racist standards of desire. These risks and rewards represent the double-edged sword of pornography's critical role in the shaping of sexuality. The chapter concludes that we cannot in a principled way condemn or militate against pornography merely on the basis of its racial/ist representations.

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Women, Work, and Power: Envisaging the Radical Potential of #MeToo

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APA Newsletter of Feminism and Philosophy 19(1): 29–36. 

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I analyze the #MeToo movement alongside the Women’s March and the teacher’s strike wave, situating it between two poles of structured organizing and mass protest. This comparison highlights the imperative for movements to translate symbolic solidary power, which shift discourses and norms, into exercises of power that can alter structural conditions in a more fundamental way. I argue that while #MeToo has been highly successful in disrupting sexist mores and patriarchal norms on the cultural front, it must match this with a commitment to transforming the fundamental material conditions that enable men’s dominance over women.6 Eliminating sexual harassment— particularly of non-elite women—requires addressing the underlying job insecurity, poor working conditions, and economic vulnerability that threatens almost all workers. In short, #MeToo must go radical. 

Book Reviews:

 

Review of David Shoemaker's Responsibility from the Margins, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27(2): E-9-E-17.

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Review of Michael Hardimon's Rethinking Race:The Case for Deflationary Realism, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. November 2018. 

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Review of The Social Dimensions of Responsibility, edited by Katrina Hutchison, Catriona Mackenzie, and Marina Oshana, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97(4): 843–844. 

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“Rationalization, Controversy, and the Entanglement of Moral-Social Cognition: A ‘Critical Pessimist’ Take” (commentary on Joshua May's Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind). 2019. Brain and Behavioral Sciences 42, E167.

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Review of Marta Nussbaum's The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis. 2020. Ethics 130 (2): 250-255.