I am very happy to welcome Miriam Ronzoni as the next featured philosop-her. Ronzoni is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Manchester and the principal investigator of a Research Project on “Background Justice between States: Global Institutional Design to Foster Sovereign Statehood,” at the Technical University of Darmstadt, funded through a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award.  

She is mainly interested in contemporary normative theory. Her interests are both in meta-ethical problems (e.g. the justification of normative principles) and in applied ones (e.g. social and transnational justice in non-ideal circumstances).

Her post follows.

— MK

* * *

Thank you Meena for hosting me on your blog! I was originally going to write on something else, but what is starting to shape up as a debate taking place in your “Featured Philosop-her” section prompted me to change my topic. So, in the spirit of continuing that debate, I would like to offer some remarks on the relationship between justice and institutions (with special emphasis on a specific understanding of the basic structure of society) by way of a partial response to some concerns raised by Kristina Meshelski and Sally Haslanger in their respective posts.

Kristina argues that Elizabeth Anderson’s relational egalitarianism (1999) cannot account for structural injustices that are not the direct result of unequal treatment by the state. Some structural distributive inequalities, she claims, are unjust regardless of their cause (i.e., even if they are the unintended result of uncoordinated behaviour). Therefore, she concludes, whereas Anderson is right in pointing out that equality of status is an important aspect of justice which distributivists overlook, she ends up making the opposite mistake of fetishizing relational concerns. Sally, on the other hand, argues that most of mainstream political philosophy disregards the social, understood as a distinct level of analysis from both the individual and the political. The state cannot penetrate and regulate all aspects of our lives; on the other hand, many such areas are best described as embedded social practices and norms which we reinforce and perpetuate as a result of social pressure, rather than freely and individually chosen types of conduct. Social practices (such as gender norms) give rise to injustices which can be described neither as unjust individual conduct, nor as unjust coercive rules imposed by political institutions. Interestingly, both Kristina and Sally use examples concerning gender to support their claims. Kristina argues that the pay gap between men and women is an injustice even if, as an involuntary outcome of many uncoordinated actions, it is not a sign of the state (or anybody) directly treating women as less than equal. Sally mentions norms of motherhood and the idea that “pink means girl and blue means boy” as social norms that cannot be described as freely chosen by individuals, yet are beyond the scope of action of political institutions. Sally also establishes an explicit analogy between her remarks and Cohen’s critique of Rawls’s claim that only the basic structure of society is the site of social (or for Sally, presumably, political) justice.[1]

I would like to suggest that we need relational egalitarianism precisely to describe what is distinctively unjust about the pay gap between men and women. And I am going to ground that claim on an account of institutions and their agency which might address some (though probably not all) of Sally’s concerns.

To justify the first claim, I am going to draw on Pogge’s (1995) critique of purely recipient oriented approaches to justice and on how Christian Schemmel (2012) uses such a critique to vindicate relational egalitarianism. Purely recipient oriented conceptions view justice as a matter of what individuals are entitled to get, rather than of how institutions ought to treat them. Now, suppose that in societies A and B women are equally impoverished, but that in society A women are legally prevented from engaging in paid labour, whereas in society B they are legally allowed to work and employers are not allowed to discriminate against women, but enforcement of such non-discrimination policies is lax and spotty. If the distributive outcome is identical, purely recipient oriented approaches cannot account for the arguably widely shared view that both A and B are unjust, but A is more unjust than B. Schemmel draws on this point to argue that only relational accounts can account for that: both societies treat women as less than equal, but the attitude they thereby express is different – whereas society A officially sanctions that women are not equal members of society, B expresses disrespect for women in terms of neglect for the special obstacles they face. Hence, although B is less unjust than A, it is nevertheless unjust in relational terms because institutions do express an attitude when they disregard specific social disadvantages that pre-identifiable groups face. Indeed, he goes on to claim, only relational theories can account for the fact that B-type disadvantages are graver when they cluster around a pre-identifiable group (in terms of gender, race, or class) rather than across a random range of individuals, because, in allowing that to happen, institutions express the attitude that members of that group are less than equal. Hence, the pay gap, understood as pay gap between men and women rather than a random inequality, is something which specific injustice relational egalitarians can describe better than distributivists. Relational egalitarians not only can account for such structural injustice, but can provide a more sophisticated account of what is exactly unjust about it.

Now, as some might have already noticed, this presupposes a particularly demanding and expansive conception of what institutions are and should do. As artificial agents that we create, institutions are unjust, on this account, not only when they “actively” promulgate unjust rules, but also when they fail to respond to specific and context-sensitive social challenges. In this sense, the business of institutions is both to act on just rules and to bring about the social conditions for principles of justice to be realized. This leads me to an expansive understanding of the realm of action of the basic structure (Ronzoni 2008a and 2008b): informal social norms are not directly part of the basic structure of society, but what makes said basic structure just largely depends on prevailing social norms in a given society. Hence, Cohen is right in saying that “sexist family structure is consistent with sex neutral family law,” but wrong in implying that sex neutral family law is what (Rawlsian) justice requires in all scenarios. In a sexist society, sex neutral family law is unjust and expresses disrespect for women, in that it neglects the fact that women and men are not equally positioned when they apply for jobs, file in for a divorce, etc. In not trying to address that (with incentives generating policies to trigger changes in social norms), and in failing to envisage compensatory instruments in the transition towards a just setting (with instruments such as quotas, affirmative action, or compulsory paternity leave), institutions are being unjust.

This, I believe, can address some (though not all) of Sally’s concerns: without making the social collapse into the political, we should have an account of the latter that is not blind to the former. Just political institutions are those which respond to the specific challenges of the social environment they have to regulate (prevailing norms of “total motherhood,” for instance, being one of them). And finally, to connect this point back to Kristina’s argument, “uncoordinated behaviour” is perhaps best described as the outcome of unjust social norms, and unjust social norms are almost invariably the vestiges of past political injustices whose long-term effect is still with us (of a time, in the case of gender, when the less than equal status of women was legally affirmed – Kristina herself speaks of historically disadvantaged groups).

Incidentally, I think this has implications for how we conceptualize the basic structure of society in global justice debates (Ronzoni 2008a and 2009) and for the importance of non-distributive justice concerns at the global level. This last topic is what I originally wanted to write my post about, so I guess you’ll have to host me again one day if you want to hear that part of the story  🙂

References:

Anderson, Elizabeth. “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337.

Cohen, G.A. “Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997): 3–30.

Pogge, Thomas. “Three Problems with Contractarian-Consequentialist Ways of Assessing Social Institutions.” Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995): 241–66.

Ronzoni, Miriam. “The Global Order: A Case of Background Injustice? A Practice-dependent Approach”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 37 (2009): 229-256.

_____ “Two Concepts of Basic Structure, and their Relevance to Global Justice”, Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric 1(2008a): 68-85.

_____ “What Makes a Basic Structure Just?” Res Publica 14(2008b): 203-218.

Schemmel, Christian, “Distributive and Relational Equality.” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 2012 11(2012): 123–148.

I’m very pleased to welcome Kristina Meshelski.  She is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Northridge.  She specializes in political philosophy.  Her current research includes work on Rawls, the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory, the scope of distributive justice, how social contract theory can adequately respond to globalization, and affirmative action.  She also does a bit of work on Spinoza.

Her post follows.

–MK

Thanks Meena for having me on the blog!  I want to use this space to try out an argument I’ve been developing against relational egalitarianism.  Like many philosophers I know I was extremely happy when I first discovered Elizabeth Anderson’s 1999 article “What is the Point of Equality?” which argued for relational egalitarianism as an alternative to luck egalitarianism.  Briefly, while luck egalitarians seek to equalize inequalities due to luck, relational egalitarians seek to equalize inequalities in social relationships.  For me, the biggest problem with luck egalitarianism is that it must rely heavily on a distinction between chosen and un-chosen circumstances in order to demarcate which inequalities are objectionable.  For example, consider two unemployed people.  The luck egalitarian needs to know why they are unemployed – someone who had the misfortune of being born in an area without any job opportunities or without money to move was unlucky and thus her unemployment is something society should seek to redress in some way, but someone who freely choses to turn down job offers in the interest of leisure is unemployed by choice and thus her unemployment is not something society should seek to redress.  This is a problematic distinction to rest a theory of equality on for those of us concerned with oppression.  I do not doubt that there is such a thing as choosing a certain way of life as opposed to simply finding yourself lucky or unlucky, but using choice as the way to set the limits of egalitarianism is far too blunt to take account of the real facts of the world.  When a person faces oppression it can become impossible to tell which difficulties she faces are her own fault, so to speak, not to mention I find it profoundly unhelpful to try to figure this out at the level of theory.

So an alternative to luck egalitarianism was certainly needed, but recently I have more and more misgivings about relational egalitarianism, and I want to try and articulate some of them here.  I’m here sticking to the domestic context for the most part, but I think my worry applies to relational egalitarian views of global distributive justice as well (Rekha Nath defended one such view on this blog, though I think her view escapes my worry).

For Anderson, relational equality is an equality of authority, status or standing, as opposed to an equality of goods.  To me, this collapses some important distinctions.  On the one hand, it is taking a stand against resourcist views, which seek to equalize resources.  There are some well-known problems with resourcist views, most importantly the fact that we all need different amounts of resources to flourish.  (At this time in my life I don’t require any assistance to walk, but I can’t see much without my glasses/contacts.  All this requires more resources than some people, since I need to buy stuff to see well, but far fewer resources than it would if I had to buy something like crutches, a wheelchair, or a guide dog.)  Whether or not we want to respond to these complications by adopting a welfarist view (in which we seek to equalize welfare) we can at least say that strict equality of resources is not sufficient or necessary for distributive justice.

But I am uncomfortable with the idea that concern for equality of status or standing should replace concern with equality of resources. It seems there is something very different going on when we use relational equality as justification for more equality – as when we say we want to equalize more than resources – as opposed to when we use relational equality as a justification for less equality – as when we say those who are equal in status do not need to have equal resources.

I argue in a (unpublished) paper that principles of justice should regulate structures, not individuals or institutions.  To connect to Sally Haslanger’s earlier post on this blog, I am replacing what she calls “political justice” with something I think is broader, and may answer some of her concerns about the narrowness of “political justice”.  My motivation for this is roughly the same as that articulated in Iris Marion Young’s later work, that there may be injustice that is not caused by individual bad actors, nor is it caused by state institutions like the legislature or the criminal justice system.  Young defines structures as “the accumulated outcomes of the action of masses of individuals enacting their own projects, often uncoordinated with many others” (2011, 62).  Young wants to differentiate between structural injustice and injustice directly caused by the state whereas I would say these things are not easily separated.  But I am in agreement with her that justice, including distributive justice, must be concerned with the outcomes of various uncoordinated actions.  For example, it seems that the pay gap between men and women is the outcome of many uncoordinated actions.  Though we have evidence that some employers pay women less than men consciously and with malice, this doesn’t seem to account for the entirety of the pay gap.

Now I think there is some tension between a Young-type concern with structural injustice and Anderson’s relational equality.  I believe it has to do with the fact that we would normally take something like the pay gap as evidence of women’s oppression, without needing further information about how this is caused. (And I think this is the right thing to do, the pay gap is objectionable because it serves to marginalize a historically disadvantaged group, whether it is done on purpose or not.)  One way to understand this would be as Anderson does, that we find this inequality objectionable because it disadvantages people in the sense that it “reflects, embodies, or causes inequality of authority, status, or standing” (2010, 2).  But that explanation goes the other way too, we believe women are disadvantaged partly because there is a long-standing pay gap between men and women.  In other words, we take the pay gap as evidence of women’s disadvantage, at the same time as we find women’s disadvantage to be the reason why the pay gap is objectionable.

So while relational egalitarianism is very good at capturing the importance of equality of status, it seems counter-productive to say that equality of status can replace all other types of equality.  Resource equality seems petty or even confused at the individual level, but quite important at the level of social groups.  Shouldn’t critics of structural injustice want to eliminate these resource inequalities between groups?

Anderson makes my worry more acute when she asserts that while luck egalitarians believe justice consists in a desirable distributive pattern, relational egalitarians believe justice is a virtue of agents, not of states of affairs (2010, 2).  But if structures are outcomes they are at least partly distributions (in fact I believe structures are distributions, but that may be too much to argue for here).  So eliminating structural injustice must at least partly consist in achieving a desirable distribution, and this distributive goal is not reducible to achieving virtuous people and virtuous institutions, because an institution or a person could be virtuous and still inadvertently disadvantage a certain social group.

References:

Anderson, Elizabeth. “The Fundamental Disagreement Between Luck Egalitarians and Relational Egalitarians.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy Special Issue: Supplementary Volume 36 Supplement 1 (2013): 1-23.

Anderson, Elizabeth. “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109.2 (1999): 287-337.

Young, Iris Marion. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.

I am very pleased to welcome Rae Langton.  She is Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University, and Fellow of Newnham College. Prior to this, she was Professor of Philosophy at MIT from 2004-12. She works in Ethics, Political Philosophy, History of Philosophy (especially Kant), Metaphysics and Feminist Philosophy.  She is the author of Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford, 2009) and Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford, 1998). She has published in a variety of journals including Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the Philosophical Review. Born and raised in India, she has taught Philosophy in Australia, India, Scotland, England and the USA. Langton was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and will be giving the John Locke Lectures at Oxford next year.

–MK

Free speech, media speech, and objectifying speech

Rae Langton

How do free speech principles bear on media speech? This question has received renewed attention following the Leveson Inquiry in the UK, which looked at a range of press abuses, including phone-hacking, invasions of privacy, corruption, and also—my topic here— the objectifying treatment of women. It has been agreed on all sides that any norms guiding the media should respect free speech. (I have in mind norms assumed by self-regulatory or independent regulatory structures such as, in the UK, the Press Complaints Commission, and the Royal Charter on Self-Regulation of the Press (2012).)  But in considering what this means, we need to think about what speech is, and what its point is, especially for the goals of knowledge, political participation and equality that have mattered to liberals and feminists alike. Reflection will show that these goals are not well served by sexually objectifying speech.

Speech and free speech

If we start with the idea that ‘to say something is to do something’ (Austin 1962), then speech is more than ‘only words’, and more than ‘expression’ narrowly construed.  Speakers do many things with words: tell stories, make promises, incite violence, and more. Free speech is freedom to ‘do things with words’, but includes some speech acts and not others. What is included under ‘free speech’ depends on its point. Two linked proposals have been influential: free speech is thought to provide conditions for knowledge, and for democracy. These are linked, because democracy depends, at a minimum, on our deliberating, and voting, about what we know.

J.S. Mill defended ‘freedom of expression of opinion’ in the name of truth, arguing that the collision of adverse opinions provides our best hope for knowledge. This is sometimes understood narrowly, but Mill’s conception was expansive, including a diversity of speakers, and attentive hearers as well: diverse opinions need to be ‘advocated’ and ‘listened to’ (1859). Free speech is also thought to be a condition of democracy itself (Meiklejohn 1948), enabling citizens as both speakers and hearers to engage in the political process, question authority, and ‘speak truth to power’. If knowledge and democracy supply the point of free speech, then what matters most is the communicative speech of ordinary people, and speech that enables their political participation.

Speech, like other action, is constrained by a harm principle. For Mill, the ‘opinion’ that ‘corn dealers are starvers of the poor’ provides content for different speech acts: an ‘unmolested’ argument, ‘when circulated through the press’; or a punishable incitement, ‘to an excited mob’. Mill was over-optimistic in viewing the press as venue for harmless debate, not harmful incitement, given a history where an ‘opinion’ about Jew or Tutsi circulated in the press, or broadcast on airwaves, has incited inequality, hate, and genocide. Even if harmful speech acts should receive more protection than other harmful action, a liberal, Millian perspective might not protect such speech (cf. Mill 1869, Dyzenhaus 1992, Hornsby and Langton 1998, Waldron 2012).

So there may be more, and less, to the ‘speech’ in ‘free speech’ than you might have thought: more than just only words, and less than just any words (MacKinnon 1993). Free speech may encircle more than ‘expression’, achievable in isolation, but less than ‘incitement’ and other harmful speech (Hornsby 1995; Hornsby and Langton, 1998; Langton 1993, 2009; O’Neill 2009, 2012).

Where does a free press come in? I follow Onora O’Neill in taking this to be an institutional freedom, whose value derives from the individual freedom it enables. So those goals of knowledge and political participation will the chief point of a free press too. There may be other goals as well: amusement and entertainment for readers, profit for the publisher. But whatever the value of these, they are not the main epistemic and political goals that give a free press its point.

Sexually objectifying speech

Much speech about women in the media is in the form of pictures and words that include victim-blaming stories of rape, and pornography, as defined by Catharine MacKinnon as ‘the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures or words’, that includes ‘women dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities’. A range of women’s groups testified about such material to the Leveson Inquiry. Equality Now said, ‘women and girls in the UK are bombarded with stereotyped images through the media on a daily basis’, and that ‘if similar treatment were routinely meted out to a specific group based on religion, race or sexual orientation, it would not be tolerated.’  They said, ‘the widespread objectification and sexualisation of women in the UK press’ normalizes ‘stereotypical and often subordinate roles of women, promoting their second class status in society.’ Object evaluated sexually explicit portrayals of women in the tabloids that objectify women and trivialize harassment and violence. They called for consistency in the application of zoning norms for such material, to conform to expectations in broadcasting and the workplace. (One amusing symptom of the zoning anomaly: images supplied to the Leveson Inquiry by Object, from material visible in any newsagent, were deemed too graphic for the illustrious eyes of the Committee members.) Both submissions cited the UK’s commitment to the UN Convention CEDAW; and the harms to equality incompatible with that commitment, which accompany this stereotyping and objectification.

The claim that such speech objectifies women is defensible. These are speech acts that rank women as sex objects, having merely instrumental value, denying or ignoring women’s qualities as full human beings, qualities such as dignity, intelligence or autonomy (cf. Nussbaum 1995); that legitimate discrimination against women, making harassment and sexual violence more permissible; that silence women, undermining women’s powers to perform certain speech acts of sexual consent, and testimony. A woman’s ‘no’ may sometimes fail as a refusal, her account of rape fail as testimony, for hearers who have taken on board a sexually objectifying vision of women, with its victim-blaming myths about women who ‘ask for it’. (Langton 1993, 2009; Hornsby and Langton 1998; Hornsby 1995; MacKinnon 1993; West 2003, 2004).

This perspective receives support from a surprising quarter. Martin Daubney, longest serving editor of Loaded magazine, described his dawning realization that his magazine’s use of women was not ‘harmless fun, dictated by market forces’, but ‘objectification’, a ‘crass sexualization of women’ which paved the way for a younger generation to accept a false vision, a debasing view of women as one-dimensional fakes: fake boobs, fake hair, fake nails, fake orgasms and fake hope. […] Porn objectifies women, demeans and cheapens them, because it sells a fantasy where men are always in control and get what they want. But real life isn’t like that. In porn, women cry, ‘yes, yes, yes!’ but in real life, they often say, ‘no’. Not all men have the intelligence or moral fortitude to understand they cannot take what they want.

Such speech does not pretend to be ‘news’ that contributes to wider goals of knowledge or democracy. Any trade-off is not between women and the values central to free speech, but between women and money. Daubney’s comments on his magazine have wider application:

Loaded won eight industry awards for journalistic excellence, but its massive success…was always down to pictures of scantily-clad women [and] acres of flesh.

The upshot seems to be this, then, for norms guiding the media. If speech is governed by a harm principle, there will be a question about speech acts that harm women’s civil standing and women’s speech. If the point of free speech is knowledge and political participation, there will be a question about speech acts that damage, rather than promote those goals. To think otherwise would be to give up on what gives free speech its point in the first place.

[Note: this post draws on my submission to the Leveson Inquiry 2012]

References

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words (London:  Oxford University Press, 1962).

Daubney, Martin. (2012) ‘The lad’s mag I edited turned a generation on to porn—and now I’m a father I bitterly regret it’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2156593/; related misgivings range from Scott Christian, GQ http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-feed/2013/11/10-reasons-why-you-should-quit-watching-porn.html to Rhiannon Lucy Coslett, Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/27/porn-influence-real-sex-education-online-fantasies

Dyzenhaus, David. (1992) ‘John Stuart Mill and the Harm of Pornography’, Ethics 102, 534-551.

Fricker, Miranda. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Hornsby, Jennifer. (1995) ‘Disempowered Speech’, in Philosophical Topics 23 ed. Sally Haslanger, pp. 127-147.

_____ and Rae Langton. ‘Free Speech and Illocution’, Legal Theory 4 (1998), pp. 21-37.

Langton, Rae. ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993), 305-330.

_____ Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

_____ (2012) Evidence to Leveson Inquiry http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/

Lord Justice Leveson.  Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press, 2012. http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/

MacKinnon, Catharine. (1987) Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

_____ Only Words (1993) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Meiklejohn, Alexander. (1948) Free Speech and its Relation to Self-Government (New York: Harper). http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/UW.MeikFreeSp

Maitra, Ishani, and Mary Kate McGowan, eds. (2012). Speech and Harm (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Mill, J.S., On Liberty (1859). http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34901

_____ The Subjection of Women (1869) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27083

Nussbaum, Martha. (1995) ‘Objectification’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 249-291.

Object (2012), Testimony at http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/

O’Neill, Onora. (2009) ‘Ethics for Communication?’ European Journal of Philosophy 17:2

_____ (2012) ‘Media Freedoms and Media Standards’, Centre for Ethics and Law Annual Lecture, University College London.

Equality Now. (2012) Testimony at http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/

UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979 (CEDAW) http://www.hrcr.org/docs/CEDAW/cedaw.html

Waldron, Jeremy (2012). The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press)

West, Caroline. ‘The Free Speech Argument against Pornography’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 33 (2003), 391-422.

____ ‘Pornography and Censorship’ (2004), Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pornography-censorship/

I am very happy to welcome Lisa Fuller as the next featured philosop-her.  Fuller is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany. Her main areas of research interest are political philosophy (especially global justice), applied ethics and feminism.  Having worked closely with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) Holland, much of her work has focused on issues related to global poverty and international aid. In addition, some of her recent work addresses problems related to adaptive preferences and issues in non-ideal theory. She has published in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Journal of Moral Philosophy, Journal of Global Ethics and Developing World Bioethics.

Her post follows.

–MK

Transforming Philosophy: A Proposal

Lisa Fuller, University at Albany, SUNY

Recently a great deal of excellent work has been produced on the topic of why women philosophers make up such a small percentage of the discipline.  Much of this work has focused on how unconscious psychological processes such as implicit bias act as barriers to women’s success in philosophy.[1] Various methods designed to combat these barriers have been suggested, such as anonymizing written work and application materials, and where this is not possible, minimizing time pressure, exposing decision-makers and evaluators to examples of excellent women philosophers, and encouraging decision-makers to actively reflect on the possibility that bias may have entered into their judgments.[2] My understanding of these recommendations is that they are primarily aimed at reducing the effect of implicit bias on judgments of philosophical quality, that is, they are meant to help us improve our assessments of papers, job candidates and students by correcting for systemic unconscious prejudices that cause women philosophers to appear less good, rigorous, articulate, insightful, etc.[3]

There can be little doubt that regularly employing these strategies would bring about improvements.  Nonetheless, I think it would be illuminating to shift our focus away from psychological factors for a moment, and instead direct our attention to the larger social and institutional contexts in which professional philosophers make assessments and decisions. Specifically, we can fruitfully view the situation of women in philosophy as an instance of structural oppression.

Iris Young explains that,

“[O]ppression also refers to systemic constraints on groups that are not necessarily the result of the intentions of [the powerful]. Oppression in this sense is structural, rather than the result of a few people’s choices or policies. Its causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules.”[4]

She adds that structural oppression is built-in to “features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms” and are “systematically reproduced in major economic, political and cultural institutions.”[5] In what follows, I mean to call attention to the institutional structures and systemic constraints that may contribute to the continuing underrepresentation of women in philosophy.

It is important to recognize that the choices we make in our professional lives only make sense because they are made with reference to a set of social, institutional, and professional norms and rules.  No matter whether we are deciding which candidate to hire, where to go to graduate school or whether to take a specific job, we are deciding in light of the incentives and disincentives, bureaucratic rules, learned standards, and “normal” procedures and expectations that shape the background context.

But this is precisely the problem. The consequence of the way we have collectively organized ourselves up to this point is the situation we now find ourselves in, namely, that women are severely underrepresented in the discipline.  Even if we were very successful at correcting our judgments concerning the quality of women philosophers and their work, this would only make it the case that the rules, procedures and standards that we have always utilized are now being applied more uniformly.  But what if the standards and norms are themselves part of the problem?

Both Louise Antony and Sally Haslanger have noted that the culture and ideals of contemporary analytic philosophy are gendered.[6]  They point out that philosophy is framed as a “masculine” activity, and that feminine gender norms conflict with the norms of the discipline.  This leads me to surmise that the causes of women’s exclusion are embedded in the way we normally get things done.  They are part and parcel of “business as usual” across the discipline. Now, it may well be argued that much more evidence is required to fully establish the truth of this claim.  I will nevertheless assume it is true for the sake of argument, and attempt to draw some conclusions about what we ought to do about it.

If it is the case that our standardly accepted rules, procedures, evaluation criteria and expectations are structured so as to produce the underrepresentation of women in the discipline, then what can be done?

Proposal: Change the context.

            In essence, the systemic constraints and structural imperatives that shape the current professional landscape make it seem normal, inevitable and justifiable that few women will enter, stay and succeed in philosophy.  As such, we need to change the background conditions for decisions about hiring and graduate admissions, as well as for acceptance to journals and conferences.  One way to go about discovering what needs changing is to look carefully at the reasons that are normally given for why things turn out the way they usually do.  For instance, sometimes it is said that “not enough women applied” for a given position or graduate program, and so it was just a statistical likelihood that a man would occupy the available spot(s).  Sometimes the absence of women at an event is explained by the fact that none of the women who were invited could make it.   And as we have seen, it is often judged that the articles, conference papers or abstracts submitted by women were of lower quality than those against which they were being compared, and so could not be included.

These explanations point to places where the incentives and background constraints need to be re-configured so as to produce better results.  One good example of this is the Gendered Conference Campaign.[7]  By making public – and encouraging people to boycott – those conferences that have only male participants, philosophers who support the campaign have succeeded in changing the incentive structure around obtaining conference speakers.  Basically, if you are a conference organizer, and you want your conference to be well received and attended, then it is now in your interest to ensure that some female speakers are on the schedule.  What was once acceptable and “normal” is no longer the standard. The result has been that more papers deemed “acceptable” have been found, and women’s schedules have been consciously taken into account.[8]

There are other ways to change the discipline by rearranging institutional and departmental imperatives.  Here are just a few possibilities:

• Set aside a specific percentage of graduate student fellowships for women candidates.  Make it the case that certain graduate student lines must be filled by female candidates. If they cannot be filled in a given year, then they should remain empty until the following year, with the result that there are fewer teaching and research assistants available to faculty. Departments can advertise these places to attract good candidates. This would not be so different from the current practice in which conferences reserve a number of spots for graduate student presentations.  I take it we do this because we regard it as good practice to provide opportunities for those who would otherwise be excluded.  Similarly, if women have fewer opportunities to succeed at every level in the discipline, then we must create them.  We can’t expect to attract more women students by allocating fellowships the same way they have historically been allocated.  And if the health of our graduate programs depends on it, it seems likely that good candidates will be found.
• Recognize, and explicitly compensate for, the effects of structural injustice that put pressure on women to leave the profession.  When it isn’t possible to change standards and expectations or to re-configure decision-making mechanisms (or when this can’t be accomplished in the short term), we need to acknowledge the constraints imposed on women by their particular position in both the discipline and in society at large.  In short, we need to make it worth their while to stay.  This means that we can’t keep pretending that all students and faculty are similarly placed vis-à-vis the possibility of success.  If, as a rule, women in philosophy have to work harder to publish, receive worse teaching evaluations, and are routinely judged as less competent than their comparable male colleagues, then we need to give them the time and resources to catch up.[9]  This means reducing teaching and service duties, and providing research leave so that women are better equipped to live up to “normal” expectations.

In addition, we should recognize that women are expected to perform the lion’s share of carework, and that they are more likely to be pressured to move to where their spouses have jobs. If we want to prevent the pressure of these gendered expectations from “tipping the balance” in favor of quitting philosophy, then we will have to make it possible for women both to do philosophy and to care for others.  Finally, if women are subject to pressure to move with their spouses (and so often to take contingent or non-tenure track positions as a result) then where women have tenure track positions we need to advocate strongly for hiring their spouses. Likewise, we should recognize that the practice of hiring spouses as long-term contingent or non-tenure-track faculty is a form of exploitation.  We should work to eliminate this practice and instead to place so-called “trailing spouses” in tenure-track positions, even if this means introducing job-sharing between spouses, or other unorthodox arrangements.

Of course, there are many other possibilities here, and perhaps these particular proposals will not turn out to be among the best.  Still, the more general point is just this: In order to address the underrepresentation of women in philosophy, we must transform the established incentive structure, disciplinary norms, and admissions, hiring and promotion processes in ways that are responsive to women’s concrete experience.

I am very happy to welcome Julia Driver as the next featured philosop-her.  Julia Driver is a Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis.  She has published articles in normative ethics, meta-ethics, and social and political philosophy.  Her work in normative ethics has focused on consequentialist accounts of moral evaluation and virtue theory; in meta-ethics she has published in moral epistemology, particularly on the topic of moral expertise; and more recently she has begun working on the topic of moral complicity.

Her post follows.

–MK

I’d like to thank Meena for the opportunity to post on some of my more recent work.  Lately I’ve been thinking and writing about moral complicity. I became interested in the topic in thinking through how to handle morally fraught social interactions.  The typical case I have in mind is a situation in which one feels compelled to speak out against something on pain of losing at least a bit of one’s integrity.  This is an example of what I term tolerance complicity:  one is tolerating the wrong-doing by not speaking out.  Other cases of complicity involve active participation: conspiring to commit murder, or plotting a robbery.  In most cases of both tolerance complicity and participation complicity pro tanto wrong-making features in these cases are easily discerned:  for example, when one is complicit one is contributing, causally, to the production of a harm or to the likelihood that a harm will be produced, either directly or via a failure to intervene.

However, there are cases in which tolerating and even participating in wrong-doing will not contribute to any appreciable harm because resistance simply has no effect, and yet complicity in such cases still seems quite wrong.  For example, there may be situations in which one reasonably believes that speaking up and challenging the speaker will not change the speaker’s mind, or have any impact on the speaker’s behavior, or the attitudes and behavior of others, and it still seems (pro tanto) wrong not to speak up.  Someone who believes that moral considerations are not exhausted by considerations of whether or not a course of action is, or is likely to, produce some bad effects will point out that if one rejects consequentialism (the view, that roughly, the moral quality of an action is completely determined by its consequences), one will not have a problem with these sorts of cases.  This is because there are other wrong-making features of actions and inactions to consider:  one such feature might be the expression of a bad attitude, for example.  Failure to speak out might be expressive of an insufficient concern for the well-being of others.  However, this response from non-consequentialists only offers a partial solution because there are other cases in which participation in wrongdoing occurs in which a person cannot be said to be expressing or exhibiting a failure of concern for the well-being of others.  Such cases come off as disingenuous, but are certainly possible.  Imagine a person, Rebecca, who is strongly against sweatshop working conditions and the exploitation of workers – she believes that such systems are immoral.  They lead to suffering and misery.  One might think that, given such beliefs and attitudes Rebecca would be committed to, at the very least, not purchasing any clothing made in sweat shops.  However, Rebecca also believes that her purchase of a blouse from a very large organization that employs sweatshop labor will make no difference at all to the production practices of that organization.  It is simply not sensitive to the purchase of a single blouse.  Thus, she believes that were she to purchase the blouse she would not be making any difference at all to the suffering of workers.  She cares about them.  She just doesn’t think that anything she does on any single occasion makes any difference to them.  Most of us would still regard the purchase as morally problematic, even granted that she is not contributing to suffering, and the action does not express a failure of concern for the well being of others.  If she buys such a blouse, knowingly, she is complicit in the exploitation.  One strategy in such cases is to try to locate some other morally significant attitude: perhaps it isn’t enough to be concerned for the well being of others, but also to be concerned about things like the symbolic value or significance of one’s own actions; or be concerned about honoring the good (rather than simply promoting it).  What makes purchasing the blouse complicity in wrongdoing is that it dishonors those who have been exploited in the production of the blouse.  Someone was exploited:  not someone will be exploited.  Again, however, Rebecca notes that it is often the case that people will argue that once something bad has happened – if there is no chance that using the bad event will encourage further bad things to happen – then it is okay.  Some vegetarians, for example, think that it is perfectly morally permissible to eat the extra chicken airline dinner that will just be tossed if one doesn’t eat it.  They would never think it okay to eat if eating it has any chance of harming future chickens – but if it doesn’t, then no harm done.

The natural intuition that people have with such cases is to hold that we need to regard our actions not in isolation, but as part of collectives or groups.  How might we do this?  One suggestion is that we view complicity as a matter of how a person intends to act – does she intend that her action be ‘part of’ the production of a harm?  This would give us a standard for complicity that focuses on an internal psychological state of the agent – her intention.  What would be wrong is to intend to be part of the production of a harm.  However, this doesn’t seem to fit Rebecca either.  She does not in any way intend that her action of buying a blouse be part of the production of the harm of exploitation of workers.  Further, given the specification of actual production practices assumed in this discussion, she is right that she makes no difference.  So, a person can be part of a problem even if she doesn’t intend to be part of anything that produces a harm.  One line of thought I’ve been pursuing is to hold that there are two sides of ‘expression’ both of which are relevant:  the causal side:  the expression is caused by an attitude, for example, and then the take-up side: the expression is taken up, or characteristically taken up in a certain way by the audience.  What agents need to be sensitive to is not simply how their actions are intended, but how others could reasonably construe their actions.

I am very excited to welcome Sally Haslanger as the next featured philosop-her.  Sally Haslanger is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. She has published on topics in metaphysics, epistemology and feminist theory, with a recent emphasis on accounts of the social construction of race and gender. In metaphysics, her work has focused on theories of substance, especially on the problem of persistence through change and on Aristotle’s view that substances are composites of matter and form. Her work in feminist theory takes up issues in feminist epistemology and metaphysics, with a special interest in the distinction between natural and social kinds. She has co-edited Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays (Cornell University Press, 2005) with Charlotte Witt, Theorizing Feminisms (Oxford University Press, 2005) with Elizabeth Hackett, and Persistence (MIT Press, 2006) with Roxanne Marie Kurtz. She regularly teaches courses cross-listed with Women’s Studies. Before coming to MIT, she taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and the University of California-Irvine.

Her post follows.

–MK

What is the Domain of Social (not Political?) Justice

I.  Between the Individual and Political

Recently I’ve been arguing that there has been insufficient attention in the analytic philosophical literature to the domain of social practices.  On the one hand, mainstream analytic political philosophers spend a lot of time thinking about the State and institutions that form the “basic structure” of society, but (perhaps due to the influence of political liberalism) do not consider the micro-politics embedded in the practices of everyday life.  Ethicists, on the other hand, tend to focus on individual action (character, will) and often don’t even consider that an agent, in acting, is engaged in a social practice.

This may be a serious misrepresentation of recent history of philosophy (I know it leaves out a LOT of us who are working outside the mainstream, e.g., in feminist and critical race theory).  However, even if it is a distortion, it is worthwhile to get clearer on what constitutes the domain of social justice, i.e., the domain which we have reason to think is outside the state’s purview, but also a realm where we aren’t just talking about individual actions but structures and practices.

Recently, I heard the objection that there isn’t a separate domain of social justice.  The objection comes from two sides, the individual side and the political side.  On the individual side, the claim is that if you have a society of good people, you will have justice, for good people arrange themselves in ways that prevent injustice.  On the political side the claim is that if you have justice in the basic institutions of society – usually understood in Rawlsian terms – then that’s all justice requires.  Under such conditions things might not be perfect, but that’s due to moral wrongdoing.  It isn’t injustice.

I find both of these arguments startling.  If the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Movement of the late 20^th century taught us anything, they taught us that state action cannot reach many sources of bias that are responsible for persistent inequality, and this persistent inequality is unjust.  The state can’t tell us whom to love, trust, or admire; it can’t tell us what to aspire to, where to live, what to care about.  But these issues aren’t just a matter of individual psychology and individual agency either, for who we are and how we live is conditioned by the social practices and social meanings that structure our lives.  As individuals, we aren’t responsible for social meanings (though we must constantly navigate them) or social practices (though we can act to resist or sustain them).  Good people enact problematic practices: they may enact them unintentionally or without awareness; they may even think that the behavior in question is entirely natural and they have no choice; or they may not be in a position to have any idea they are problematic.  And some of the practices in question cannot be ruled out by state intervention and so could occur even within a politically just society.

Maybe the suggestion that, “Good people arrange themselves in ways that prevent injustice,” is exactly what I’m worried about.  Good people are, by the time they are socialized, already arranged.  We are embedded in social meanings.  We live in a social world structured by practices.  It is true, of course, that these meanings and practices can change.  But the change must be social change, collective change.  It isn’t about just changing the State or just changing my individual attitudes.

I take the point here to echo G. A. Cohen’s critique of Rawls.  Let us assume for the moment that Rawls’s theory of justice is a good example of a theory that applies to the basic structure of society.  Cohen has argued that a just structure is not enough:

A society that is just within the terms of the difference principle, so we may conclude, requires not simply just coercive rules, but also an ethos of justice that informs individual choices. In the absence of such an ethos, inequalities will obtain that are not necessary to enhance the condition of the worst off: the required ethos promotes a distribution more just than what the rules of the economic game by themselves can secure.  (Cohen 1997, 10; also Cohen 2000, 119-123)

Cohen frames his critique of Rawls by echoing the feminist slogan “the personal is political.”  This would suggest that the source of injustice in such a society is personal.  But note also that he describes the site of an additional constraint on justice as the social ethos. One might argue that individual and institutional injustice are the expression of deeper and less tractable sources of inequality in social meaning.  But what exactly is social meaning?

II.  Social Meaning

Begin (very briefly) with a background social ontology.  Social structures are networks of social relations. Social relations, in turn, are constituted through practices.  Social practices are, in the central cases, organized responses to a resource; shared schemas are what organize us. Borrowing from contemporary social science, I have proposed this hypothesis:

Practices consist of interdependent schemas and resources “when they mutually imply and sustain each other over time.” (Sewell 1992, 13) 

What is social meaning?  Social meanings can be understood on the model just presented as schemas. Lawrence Lessig says:

Any society or social context has what I call here social meanings – the semiotic content attached to various actions, or inactions, or statuses, within a particular context…[the point is to] find a way to speak of the frameworks of understanding within which individuals live; a way to describe what they take or understand various actions, or inactions, or statuses to be; and a way to understand how the understandings change. (Lessig 1995, pp. 951-2)

Extending Lessig’s suggestion, we should allow that not only actions/inactions and statuses have social meanings, but also include things such as corn, traffic signals, money, jewelry.  Pink means girl and blue means boy, no? Importantly, Lessig points out,

[Social meanings] change, they are contested, and they differ across communities and individuals.  But we can speak of social meaning, and meaning management, I suggest, without believing that there is a single, agreed upon point for any social act… (954-55)

However, social meanings are “in an important way, non-optional.  They empower or constrain individuals, whether or not the individual choses the power or constraints.” (955; see also 1000) Two examples, (a) stigma, and (b) stereotypes/ideals.

a) Elizabeth Anderson characterizes racial stigmatization during Jim Crow:

The condition of racial stigmatization consists of public, dishonorable, practically engaged representations of a racial group with the following contents: (1) racial stereotypes, (2) racial attributions or explanations of why members of the racial group tend to fit their stereotypes, that rationalized and motivate (3) derogatory evaluations of and (4) demeaning or antipathetic attitudes (such as hatred contempt, pity, condescension, disgust, aversion, envy, distrust, and willful indifference) towards the target group and its members. (Anderson 2010, 48)

Stigma, like other social meanings, and like linguistic meanings, are collective and public.  Such meanings affect us and our interactions even if we reject their content, e.g., whistling Vivaldi. (Steele 2011)

b) George Lakoff offers an analysis of our ideal of mother in terms of five overlapping cognitive models based on birth, genetics, nurturance, marriage, and genealogy. (Lakoff 2000, 395)  He says,

…more than one of these models contributes to the characterization of a real mother, and any one of them may be absent from such a characterization.  Still, the very idea that there is such a thing as a real mother seems to require a choice among models where they diverge.  (395)

The central case [is] where all the models converge.  This includes a mother who is and has always been female, and who gave birth to the child, supplied her half of child’s genes, nurtured the child, is married to the father, is one generation older than the child, and is the child’s legal guardian. (400)

Women’s lives are substantially organized around practices of mothering – in anticipation, in avoidance, in enactment, in resistance.  But why do we even employ the concept(s) of mother?  Why do we persist in thinking that one’s sex is relevant to one’s parental nurturing?  How we define ‘mother’ and whether we continue to categorize people as mothers is a matter of justice.  The same is true for ‘race.’ Insofar as social meanings define our social practices, and internalized meanings guide our interactions, social justice requires attention to – and changes to – social meanings.  “Social meaning management” can be done through law (this is the point of Lessig’s article), and can be achieved through social activism (“slut walks”?), but if we focus entirely on the individual and the State, then we obscure the significance of such meanings and the necessity of changing them in order to achieve justice.

I am very happy to welcome Anca Gheaus as the first featured philosop-her of the new year.  Anca works at the University of Sheffield. She has been grappling for a while with the question of what makes a society gender just, for instance in her article ‘Gender Justice’ published in 2012 by the Journal for Ethics & Political Philosophy 6(2). Other recent publications include ‘The feasibility constraint on the concept of justice’ in the Philosophical Quarterly 63(252), 2013 and ‘The right to parent one‘s biological baby’ in The Journal of Political Philosophy 20(4), 2012.

Her post follows.

–MK

Gender justice and the costs of sexist norms

The gendered division of labour – at home and in the workplace – is a main culprit for the fact that women lag behind men with respect to economic, political and social status. Indeed, many people think that the gendered division of labour is the major obstacle to gender justice in societies where women have achieved legal equality to men[1].

But is the gendered division of labour always unjust – that is, even when the individuals choose it freely? If yes, there is a case for using policy measures to eliminate it. Yet, some women claim that they desire to perform what is traditionally considered ‘women’s work’ – and, in general, that they prefer a ‘feminine’ lifestyle. Does this mean that, ideally, policies that influence how people organise work and family should accommodate equally preferences for gendered and preferences of non-gendered lifestyles? For instance, should we aim for extended (subsidised) maternal leaves allowing women to stay longer at home after they give birth to, or adopt, a child? Should we facilitate ‘different but equal’ lifestyles for women and men? Many, although not all, feminists want to resist this conclusion.

One way to approach this contentious issue is by noting that  individual gendered preferences aren’t likely to be genuine, given existing gender norms and their role in socialising. A problem with this approach is that people often strongly identify with their preferences even while accepting that their preferences have been formed in unjust conditions; the mere origin of the preference does not mean it is legitimate to frustrate it. Another problem is that discounting women’s preferences can easily come across as condescending.

Yet, it is possible to account for the injustice of the gendered division of labour without reference to adaptive preferences, by focusing on the costs imposed by gender norms.  Consider an idealised case in which women and men shoulder the same overall burdens and enjoy the same overall level of benefit by conforming to gendered lifestyles: say, a ‘perfect’ heterosexual family, intact over time, and adopting an equal, but gendered, division of labor. This may come in the more extreme form of the man as a full-time breadwinner and the woman as a full-time homemaker. Or it may take a more modern shape, with the man holding a full-time job and doing some housework and care and the woman working a part time job while also managing and doing the main bulk of the housework and care. If both partners work the same amount of time and enjoy equal benefits, is there any injustice involved?

I think no injustice is involved in such an arrangement if the society in which this couple lives does not make their gendered arrangement the least costly lifestyle option. In other words, this is not a case of injustice provided the couple in question would find it no more costly to share paid and unpaid work equally. This claim accounts well for the intuition that all is fine provided we can be sure that people make choices without the pressure of gender norms coming in the form of individuals’ expectations or constraints of the labour market.

More generally, I propose the following principle meant to capture the nature of injustices based on gender and to guide us in getting closer to a gender just society: 

A society is gender just only if the costs of a gender-neutral lifestyle are – all  other things being equal – lower than, or at most equal to, the costs of gendered lifestyles.

Because the principle is meant to explain the injustice of a very widerange of phenomena, the sense of ‘costs’ is similarly wide. The costs can be material: for example financial, time or effort; or psychological: self-respect, a good relationship with one’s body and emotions; or social: reputation, social acceptance and valuable social relationships. So the principle can account for cases other than the gendered division of labour, including, for instance, the injustice of women having less safe access to streets at night, facing higher social penalties for being successful, or being judged as less reliable knowers. In all cases, in order to achieve the same desirable results as men – the same levels of mobility, social acceptance or credibility – they will have to pay a higher price of a kind or another.

Since all gender norms impose some costs on individuals making gender-atypical choices, they appear as such incompatible with gender justice. Even when the costs of a particular choice are not prohibitive, and therefore individuals are making a free choice, gender norms compromise the equality of women’s and men’s access to what they have reason, and sometimes choose, to pursue. Gender norms are as such sexist.

Both women and men pay the costs of sexist norms. I believe the overall costs imposed on women are, even in liberal democracies, much higher than those imposed on men. This is a point of dispute. But if you agree with my account of the nature of gender injustice, the complaint that men, too, suffer injustice resulting from gender norms will obviously not be counted against, but in favour of promoting a feminist agenda.

To advance gender justice, then, it is to aim – ideally – at a world free of gender norms (and, hence, of gender.) Policies that would be desirable in such a world need not be desirable in our, hopefully transitional, societies. For instance, if there were no gender norms it may be good without qualification to have longer parental leaves; men and women would share them equally[2], and neither would pay economic or other career penalties. By contrast, in the world as we know it, the design of parental leaves will have to take into account women’s propensity to take leaves much more often than men: policies will have to either eliminate the gendered costs that women who do not take such leaves are likely to incur or else lower the costs for men taking the leave.

I am very happy to welcome Sarah Goff as the next featured philosop-her.  She is a postdoctoral fellow in the Government Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. From 2012-2013, she was a research fellow with “Justitia Amplificata: Rethinking Justice – Applied and Global,” based at Goethe University Frankfurt. She received her Ph.D. in 2012 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Her research interests include global justice, ethics in markets, responsibility in non-ideal circumstances, and gender equality. She is currently writing a book on fair trade.

Her post follows.

–MK

The Components of a Coercive Act

In my post, I would like to pick up a thread of Nicole’s and Meena’s arguments about coercion, starting with an effort to understand the motivations of a coerced person. Why does a coerced person comply with her coercer’s request? I think if the coerced person is rational, she chooses to perform the requested action only when it is in her interest to do so.† This implies that there is a sub-part of a coercive action that makes the coerced person better off.

In general:

Sub-action 1) Agent A is responsible for harming Agent B††

Sub-action 2) A makes an unfavorable offer to B

If B takes up A’s offer, then A has coerced B

Let’s take up the classic example of a mugger’s threat, “Your money or your life.” The mugger has announced that his presence poses a risk to his victim’s wellbeing (sub-action 1). The mugger offers that he will leave the victim alone if she gives up her money in exchange (sub-action 2). The victim agrees to this exchange because her money is less valuable to her than the mugger’s agreement to leave her alone. Let’s assume that the victim would like to keep her money.††† It is only in the victim’s interest to give up her money (sub-action 2) because she experiences harm from the mugger’s presence (sub-action 1).

Taken on its own, sub-action 2 is an offer for B to engage in a mutually beneficial exchange with A (albeit on unfavorable terms for B). So why is A’s offer coercive? Sub-action 2 is coercive because it is a necessary component of the mugger’s broader plan to motivate his victim to give up her money. Given the mugger’s plan, it makes sense to evaluate sub-action 2 in virtue of its role in a compound action that is coercive in its aims.

My main interest in this topic is to identify where coercion exists in the global context. It is often argued that particular aspects of global political life are coercive towards poor people and poor states. These criticisms include programs and policies that offer to transfer resources to poor people and poor states, in exchange for their agreement to perform certain actions. We might wish to characterize these offers as “coercive,” because the actors’ agreement seems forced by the circumstances of their poverty. Can we properly characterize these offers as “coercive” as we did with the mugger case? I think it frequently will be difficult to do so. Often we will do better to evaluate sub-action 1 and sub-action 2 separately. To see why, consider this description of institutional harms (sub-action 1*) and one-off interactions (sub-action 2*) in the global context:

Sub-action 1*: Poor people and poor states have valid complaints that the global order is harmful.†† Responsibility for the problematic features of the global order can be properly attributed to the cumulative actions of many individuals, states, international institutions, and transnational actors.

Sub-action 2*: A rich country offers to give resources to a poor country in exchange for the poor country’s agreement to adopt certain policies (via a conditional aid program).

Let’s say the poor country agrees to the terms of the conditional aid program, and the poor country adopts the requested policies in exchange for the rich country’s resources. We can assume that the poor country’s reason for accepting the rich country’s offer has a lot to do with the difficulties it experiences due to the global order. Has coercion occurred? If so, where has it occurred?

Before we can say that sub-action 2* is part of a broader coercive action, we need to know that a couple of things are true. First, it needs to be true that the rich country in question is responsible for the particular features of the global order that pose difficulties for the poor country. But it is very difficult to attribute responsibility for global problems to particular individual agents, as Judith Lichtenberg noted in her post.†††† Perhaps this particular rich country is responsible for supporting features of the global order that have problematic effects for other poor countries, not for the particular poor country in its conditional aid program. Second, it would need to be true that the rich country undertook sub-action 1* in order to motivate the poor country to adopt the requested policies. But it doesn’t seem that conditional aid programs have nearly this much importance to rich countries.

So how would I characterize conditional aid programs? I think the idea of “exploitation” is useful here. In my view, some conditional aid programs have terms that are unfavorable to recipients. Recipients have to give up a great deal of policy discretion and other things they care about, in exchange for a donor’s resources. I think these unfavorable terms can be exploitive when the recipient’s reasons for accepting the terms have to do with its unmet claims for some other actors to perform their duties. These other duty-bearers, who might be rich individuals, rich states, transnational actors, or international institutions, are failing in their duties to poor people/poor states in any number of different respects. For instance, these various actors might have duties in virtue of their responsibilities for migration policy, trade policy, aid and humanitarian assistance policies, and so on.

I can’t fully articulate my view of exploitation here, although I would be happy to discuss it in the comments. In this post, my primary aim has been to propose necessary conditions for viewing an offer as part of a broader coercive action. A first condition is that the agents have to be the same in sub-actions 1 and 2. A second condition is that sub-actions 1 and 2 need to have a common overarching aim. In the global context, often these conditions will not hold because the relevant actors are different agents whose plans are uncoordinated. It seems possible that these conditions might hold in some of specific cases of loans that Nicole and Meena were discussing, even if they don’t hold in other kinds of global interactions. I haven’t thought enough yet about loan cases.

†Here, I presume that coerced persons correctly perceive their own interests.

††I use “harm” as a placeholder. We might also say “violation of entitlements.”

†††In agreement with Meena’s earlier post, I believe the victim has not been successfully coerced if she actually wanted to give up her money.

††††If we believe responsibility for global poverty properly resides in groups, I am unsure whether it is possible to characterize a rich country’s conditional aid program as coercive.

I am happy to welcome Judith Lichtenberg as the next featured philosop-her.  She is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. Until 2007 she taught at the University of Maryland in the Department of Philosophy and the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. She is the author of articles about ethical theory, international and domestic justice, nationalism, war, higher education, and the mass media; the coauthor (with Robert K. Fullinwider) of Leveling the Playing Field: Justice, Politics, and College Admissions (2004); and the editor of Democracy and the Mass Media (1990). Her book Distant Strangers: Ethics, Psychology, and Global Poverty has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

Her post follows.

–MK

Paltry Misfortunes and the Ruin of Millions

When Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines two weeks ago, I thought of Adam Smith. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Part III, III.1.46), he imagines a Chinese earthquake that swallows up all the inhabitants of the empire. Smith asks how a European “man of humanity” would be affected on hearing of the calamity. He would “express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune” and “make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment.” But “when all this fine philosophy was over,” Smith continues, the man would go on “with the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened”:

If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him than this paltry misfortune of his own.

Smith doesn’t mean that the “man of humanity” actually believes losing his finger matters more than the deaths of millions—nor even that if he could stop the deaths of millions by contributing his finger he would refuse. Smith’s point is about the disconnect between our moral convictions and our emotions.

It’s difficult to imagine things being otherwise. We could barely endure life if we felt every stranger’s suffering the way we feel our own and that of our intimates. Our immunity to the pain of distant strangers does not signify deep flaws in our character.

But this seemingly inevitable feature of our wiring, and others, must be reckoned with if we want people to act to lessen the suffering of nameless and faceless strangers. My new book, Distant Strangers: Ethics, Psychology, and Global Poverty (available now in the U.K., and in the U.S. in December), wrestles with such questions: how to reconcile what seem to be enduring features of our psychology with the need to address pressing moral concerns like global poverty.

Peter Singer’s 1972 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” argued strikingly for a moral obligation to give unto others until giving more would make the donor as badly off as the recipients. Two years later, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick effectively denied any obligation to aid others. These positions set off the familiar debate among philosophers over whether and how much comfortable individuals are morally obligated to act to alleviate poverty, global or local. Despite the important contributions Singer and others have made and their influence on my own thinking, at a certain point I tired of this debate and the epicycles it induced.

One reason is that I don’t believe the concepts of duty and obligation—so central in contemporary moral philosophy—are very helpful in describing or fixing our responsibilities in this realm. That’s in part because of their yes/no, on/off character, suggesting a bright line where none is available. And the going moral approaches—utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, virtue ethics—are so open to interpretation as to be compatible with a very demanding morality, a pretty lax one, and everything in between. (Act-utilitarianism, implausible for a variety of reasons, may be the exception here.) A pluralistic mix-and-match doesn’t help solve the problem either.

Maybe, therefore, the familiar debate is asking the wrong question. Maybe we don’t need a theory to become convinced that the current distribution of wealth is for a variety of reasons repellent and indefensible. In that case, the question changes from how demanding morality is to how we can make poverty alleviation less demanding. I began to think about how to channel human tendencies in the right direction rather than determining precise individual duties. There’s a thread in this thinking that some will find objectionable. I argue that it’s not only unrealistic but unreasonable to expect too much of ordinary mortals. Some maintain, by contrast, that (as Samuel Scheffler puts it) Morality Demands What It Demands—and if we don’t live up to its demands that just shows our deficiencies. I argue that when we have reason to think these “deficiencies” are nearly impossible to eradicate, we need to work around them.

So we should think about how to make it easier for people to act in ways that would benefit others. One crucial part of the solution is to change the focus from individual duties to the behavior of groups. Acting together with others turns out to be less demanding on individuals psychically and materially, even if under some description each individual performs the same action.

We do and feel what others around us do and feel, and we judge our own level of well-being and deprivation by looking around us. You need a car when most others in your community drive cars, thereby undermining the public transportation system. You want shiny new gadgets because you see them and they’re pretty. You feel cramped in a two-bedroom apartment because you’ve always lived in a big house. Another central reason concerns status. Many people wrongly think only of status-seeking when considering why we do as others do—and they usually disapprove. As Smith famously explained, however (this time in The Wealth of Nations), concerns about status should not always be condemned as vanity: it is self-respect, not vanity, that requires that we have certain things others around us have. In Smith’s day the bare minimum was leather shoes and linen shirts for anyone who would be seen in public.

Deprivation, in other words, is often relative. From the significance of relative deprivation, captured in these examples, it follows that if we can induce collective change we can avoid making excessive demands on individual human will and character. Economists such as Richard Easterlin have shown that ratcheting consumption up does not increase happiness (see, e.g., here and here). Robert Frank has made these ideas popular in works like Choosing the Right Pond and Luxury Fever. A corollary is that ratcheting collective consumption down in rich countries—important at the very least for slowing climate change, which hurts the poor in developing countries most—need not make a significant dent in people’s well-being.

Conceiving the locus of responsibility for alleviating poverty as residing in the group rather than the individual makes sense on many grounds. Global poverty cannot be disentangled from deep-seated structural features of institutions in the contemporary world. Comfortable people participate in these institutions as minute elements in a complex web. Acting alone, they can rarely make significant differences—which can fallaciously make individual action feel futile.

Some will be surprised to learn that it was Peter Singer who insisted that “An ethic for human beings must take them as they are, or as they have some chance of becoming.” I’ve taken his advice to heart.

As our next featured philosop-her, I am very happy to welcome Sandrine Berges.  She is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Her research interests are in Ancient moral and political philosophy, feminist history of philosophy, and feminist ethics. She has published two books : Plato, Virtue and the Law, 2009, Continuum, and Wollstonecraft’s a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2013, Routledge. She is working on a third book Virtue Ethics : a Feminist Perspective.

Her post follows.

–MK

Epistemic injustice and the history of philosophy – why we have to lobby to get things done.

Doing Ancient Philosophy doesn’t normally precipitate one at the frontline of political activism of any sort. If philosophers live in an ivory tower, then those who study texts that were originally written in ancient Greek belong in that small windowless room at the bottom of the long corridor no one ever goes to.

Even as a feminist philosopher, if you want to be political, you need to address contemporary issues without, if possible, too many references to dead Greek guys who thought women had no soul. This is certainly what I believed for first years of my career as a professional philosopher. My work on Plato I considered scholarly, but, if I wanted to become more relevant, I had to move to more contemporary questions such as the Capability Approach. Of course, even then there was an undertow of Greekness (Nussbaum herself draws influence from Aristotle as far as her version of capabilities is concerned). But mostly, there was history, and there was political philosophy.

Of course there’s a sense in which being a feminist philosopher is always perceived as political. Readers always want to know whether you are truly attempting to advance knowledge in the field, or whether you are ‘pushing an agenda’, or worse, that you are using discussions of gender injustice to get ahead in your career. This was made very clear by the recent comment by an Oxford philosopher on the value of discussing epistemic injustice. A feminist philosopher is often perceived as first a feminist, second a philosopher, and it is often assumed that the political enthusiasm that is seen as part of the former taints the quality of one’s work as the latter.

But it was coming back to Ancient Greece that made me realise fully that as a feminist philosopher, one can never really escape politics. I was working on a text published under a woman’s name – Perictione I – probably sometime in the third century BC. I found that very little was written about either her, or other women whose texts belong to the same corpus, that of the Hellenistic Pythagoreans. And that which was written turned out to focus mostly on whether these texts were fake, and whether they could have been written by women at all. Nice.

As a result I got involved in a correspondence with various people writing on that period – something I described in another post. I found myself asking questions bordering on issues of political correctness. Why, I asked, do you refer to these authors as ‘Pseudo-Pythagoreans’ thereby labelling them as forgers, and casting doubt on whether they were even women, when there is no evidence that the texts were forgeries at all ? One author wrote back that he prefered the appellation ‘Hellenistic Pythagoreans’, which is one I’ve now adopted.

There is a strong sense of epistemic injustice at play here : texts apparently authored by women are only judged worth studying if it can be argued that they were in fact authored by men . This isn’t only the case for ancient philosophers, but some have argued that Heloise’s letters were in fact penned by Abelard.

The epistemic injustice committed by the reluctance to treat these texts by women as significant enough to be discussed in research, let alone taught, is compounded by the epistemic injustice done to historical women philosophers at the time they were writing. We know of several women philosophers in Ancient Greece, but have very few remaining writings by them. Does this mean they did not write ? There is no reason to think that, as philosophers, they would have been less given to putting their thoughts on paper than their male counterparts. On the other hand, it is not unlikely that less efforts would have gone into copying, distributing, and preserving their writings . Reflect, for instance, that Plato’s students Axiothea of Phlius and Lastenia of Mantinea, who later taught philosophy under Speusippus, were contemporaries of Aristotle, who made it very clear that women were not capable of doing philosophy !

Doing ancient philosophy doesn’t normally involve you in politics. Doing feminist ancient philosophy, however, does. It means lobbying so that women writers who matter, and who ought to be included in the debate, get taken seriously. This doesn’t mean that feminist historians of philosophy are any less good at doing history of philosophy than non-feminists : it means that we need to have additional skills that we won’t have picked up by learning to read Ancient Greek, skills that most feminist writers, historians or not, need to have.