An Intersectional Feminist Theory of Moral Responsibility 2019044446, 2019044447, 9780367343972, 9780429327117

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An Intersectional Feminist Theory of Moral Responsibility

This book develops an intersectional feminist approach to moral responsibility. It accomplishes four main goals. First, it outlines a concise list of the main principles of intersectional feminism. Second, it uses these principles to critique prevailing philosophical theories of moral responsibility. Third, it offers an account of moral responsibility that is compatible with the ethos of intersectional feminism. And fourth, it uses intersectional feminist principles to critique culturally normative responsibility practices. This is the first book to provide an explicitly intersectional feminist approach to moral responsibility. After identifying the five principles central to intersectional feminism, the author demonstrates how influential theories of responsibility are incompatible with these principles. She argues that a normatively adequate theory of blame should not be preoccupied with the agency or traits of wrongdoers; it should instead underscore, and seek to ameliorate, oppression and adversity as experienced by the marginalized. Apt blame and praise, according to her intersectional feminist account, is both communicative and functionalist. The book concludes with an extensive discussion of culturally embedded responsibility practices, including asymmetrically structured conversations and gender- and racially biased social spaces. An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Moral Responsibility presents a sophisticated and original philosophical account of moral responsibility. It will be of interest to philosophers working at the crossroads of moral responsibility, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, queer theory, critical disability studies, and intersectionality theory. Michelle Ciurria is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, USA. Her published work has appeared in journals such as Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Philosophical Psychology, and Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology.

Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory

Methodology and Moral Philosophy Edited by Jussi Suikkanen and Antti Kauppinen Self-Transcendence and Virtue Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Technology Edited by Jennifer A. Frey and Candace Vogler Moral Rights and Their Grounds David Alm Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein Edited by Benjamin De Mesel and Oskari Kuusela Perspectives in Role Ethics Virtues, Reasons, and Obligation Edited by Tim Dare and Christine Swanton Self, Motivation, and Virtue Innovative Interdisciplinary Research Edited by Nancy E. Snow and Darcia Narvaez Morality in a Realistic Spirit Essays for Cora Diamond Edited by Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor Comparative Metaethics Neglected Perspectives on the Foundations of Morality Edited by Colin Marshall An Intersectional Feminist Theory of Moral Responsibility Michelle Ciurria For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-Theory/book-series/SE0423

An Intersectional Feminist Theory of Moral Responsibility

Michelle Ciurria

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Michelle Ciurria to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ciurria, Michelle, author. Title: An intersectional feminist theory of moral responsibility / Michelle Ciurria. Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in ethics and moral theory ; 59 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019044446 (print) | LCCN 2019044447 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367343972 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429327117 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Feminist theory. | Responsibility. | Feminism—Moral and ethical aspects. Classification: LCC HQ1190 .C496 2019 (print) | LCC HQ1190 (ebook) | DDC 305.4201—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044446 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044447 ISBN: 978-0-367-34397-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32711-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction: An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Moral Responsibility

vii ix

1

1 Intersectional Feminism

29

2 Intersectional Feminism and Five Theories of Moral Responsibility

43

3 Intersectional Feminism Refined

73

4 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility: What It Means to Take a Stand Against Someone

89

5 Against Civility Constraints

118

6 Third-Party-Addressing Blame

134

7 Blaming Cognition

143

8 Responsibility and Conversation

157

9 The Mysterious Case of the Missing Perpetrators: How the Privileged Easily Escape Blame and Accountability

171

10 Women’s Blame in Conditions of Epistemic Injustice

189

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Contents

11 POC’s Blame in Conditions of Epistemic Injustice

210

12 Against Eliminativism

223

Conclusion

243

Index

252

Acknowledgements

It’s been said that criticism is the highest form of flattery. I hope that the people I criticize in this book receive it in that spirit. I have been influenced by no one more than the authors whose work I criticize the most in this book. Many of them are my philosophical idols and mentors, and I am grateful for their thoughtfulness, creativity, and open-mindedness. This book would not have been possible without the mentorship and kindness of my former supervisors and advisors. I am particularly indebted to Bob Myers, Alice MacLachlan, Michael Gilbert, and John Doris. I am also grateful to Neil Levy and Michael McKenna for their comments and kindness. And I have been greatly influenced by Lorrain Code, who introduced me to social epistemology many years ago. Without that introduction, I could not have written this book. Since I haven’t met many philosophers in person (one reason being my inability to afford travel), social media has been an incredible networking tool for me. I have found many informative posts, blogs, and articles through this medium. I’m grateful to all of the my online ‘philosofriends’ who responded to my requests for resources, information, and advice, including but not limited to Karen Kelsky, Kate Norlock, Shannon Dea, and Ekow Yankah. I am also grateful for the online groups that help the philosophical underclass gain access to the resources they need to stay in academia, and to the academics who support them. As important and underappreciated as professional mentoring is, emotional and material support are just as critical to academic success. I could not have written this book without the support of my family and friends. They emotionally supported me and financed the writing of this book while I lived as a migrant worker on an adjunct salary in the Midwest. They gave me access to the library resources that I needed and could neither procure through my institution nor afford to buy. They gave me access to the ideas that I needed to write this book, and they gave me the money that I needed to survive the writing process. I can never pay them back, and they would never ask me to. I am especially grateful to my parents, Evelyn and Nicholas Ciurria; my sisters, Andrea, Julie, and Vanessa; my best friend, Khameiel Altamimi; my partner, Gualtiero

viii Acknowledgements Piccinini; and my step-children, Brie and Martine. Thank you for making my life possible. I would also like to thank Daniel Gerth and Nancy Gleason from the Pierre Laclede Honors College for allowing me to teach my preferred subjects there, and my students from my Responsibility and Philosophy of Love courses. Their insightful comments in class discussion were invaluable. And thank you to my colleagues at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, especially Jill Delston and Lauren Olin.

Foreword

Some people describe writing a book as a labour of love. I wrote this book out of love and rage. Women’s caretaking labour is often labelled as a ‘labour of love,’ which disguises the fact that it’s a legitimate form of work that deserves compensation and respect. This language also obscures the way that many women feel about unpaid caregiving labour. When women do the majority of the caregiving labour under a system of gender schemas that designates caring as ‘women’s work,’ they may genuinely love the recipients of their caregiving – their children, for example – but this doesn’t mean that they love the patriarchal order that codes caregiving as ‘feminine’ and places it on their shoulders, and that punishes them for failing to do it to the ‘right standard’ or in the ‘right spirit.’ A woman can love her child and hate the system that obliges her to care for her child according to patriarchal standards, and the individuals who enforce that system. So, under patriarchy, a woman’s caregiving is ambivalent: it may involve love for some people and hatred for others. Similarly, this book was spawned out of love and hatred. One of my motives was anger. I grew up in the 1980s, a time when gender-based violence and harassment were both ordinary and invisible. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the rate of sexual violence against women has fallen by 64% since 1995 (Planty et al. 2013). It’s hard to get accurate statistics from before this time because the legal definition of rape changed significantly throughout the 1980s. This includes the criminalizing of marital rape, the repeal of marry-your-rapist laws, the introduction of rape shield laws (which limit the court’s ability to cross-examine rape complainants about their sexual history), the expansion of the definition of rape to include the rape of an unconscious or incapacitated person, and changes to the age of consent, amongst other reforms (Kilpatrick 2000). Similarly, sexual harassment wasn’t codified in the law until the 1970s and 1980s through a series of legal precedents (Cohen 2016). In spite of these legal reforms, it was hard for women to prosecute men under these laws, one reason being that society was saturated with rape myths that disguised the reality of rape. Gender-based violence and harassment were both normalized and romanticized in the media; raping

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severely intoxicated and unconscious women was seen as normal and acceptable male behaviour; sex with minors was accepted as long as it involved grooming or manipulation without physical duress. We can find these rape myths in movies ranging from Revenge of the Nerds to The Breakfast Club to Sixteen Candles to Blade Runner to The Blue Lagoon to Say Anything – beloved ’80s classics that treat women and girls like sexual objects who don’t need to give affirmative consent, as long as they don’t, or can’t, resist. Needless to say, girls of the ’80s grew up in a climate of fear and alienation. They were taught that their value lay in their ability to conform to a standard of beauty constructed by and for white men, to defer to the opinions of white men, to gratify men’s sexual appetites, to take care of men at home and at work, to be grateful for any male attention, and so on. I grew up in this environment, and all around me, women were constantly warning me about men: don’t go out after dark, don’t wear skimpy clothing, don’t leave your drink unattended. I spent an inordinate amount of time protecting myself from sexual assault and harassment – time that I could have spent doing other things. But what no one told me was that no matter how hard you work to protect yourself, you ultimately can’t, because it’s not up to you. Whether you get assaulted is someone else’s choice. Meanwhile, all of these warnings were mixed with misinformation and prejudice. The never-ending warnings about rape culture – which subtly shifted the blame onto women – were intermingled with normalized racism, typified in the mantra of ‘stranger danger,’ the myth that rapists are mysterious and unknown ‘others’ as opposed to people you know, members of your family and community and social circle, politicians, teachers, governors, senators, religious leaders. Warnings about stranger rape mixed the scapegoating of women with the scapegoating of People of Color (POC), especially migrants and immigrants. These warnings, ostensibly designed to protect women, did nothing more than protect the white patriarchal order. This isn’t to dismiss women’s feelings. Women’s fear was rational – gender-based violence was both normalized and legal under many circumstances. But the culture of the ’80s was a rape culture and, at the same time, a white supremacist order, in which sexism and racism were inextricably linked. Sexist and racist myths interacted to protect white men’s access to women’s bodies (with or without consent), to silence women, and to justify violence against Communities of Color. The racist rape myths of the 1980s created a climate of fear for women and POC, and, more than anyone, Women of Color. This is perhaps nowhere as evident as in Indigenous communities, where women have been subjected to a genocide co-perpetrated by the colonial state – a genocide involving rape and violence and a failure of government accountability. But statesanctioned violence is a factor in many Communities of Color in the

Foreword

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West, not just Indigenous ones. Sadly, these dynamics of gender-based violence and colonial oppression continue to this day. (Consider, for example, Donald Trumps’ dual statements that Mexicans are “rapists,” and that he, a white businessman, is entitled to “grab women by the pussy” without a word of consent (Phillips 2017). This is a symptom of a deeper problem). I do not want girls to grow up in the climate of fear and sexism and racial scapegoating that I did – and the fact is that none of these issues has been resolved after more than three decades. I wrote this book in part because I hate the culture that I grew up in, and I hate the people who created it. I don’t want the next generation of girls to inherit this social order – a social order that tells them that they’re a second sex or a second race, or both; that positions them as ‘other’ and inferior relative to the white male subject – the ‘ultimate source of knowledge.’ I want girls to grow up with a sense of dignity and value independent of the white masculine gaze. So, I also wrote this book out of love for the girls and women who are fighting against patriarchal and racial oppression, and all forms of subordination. I wrote this book out of love and respect for their speech, experiences, knowledge, narratives, and relationships with each other. This book is a labour of love dedicated to all the girls and women who are dismantling systems of power and domination, and a labour of hatred against the proponents of those systems. In 2008, Sally Haslanger wrote an indictment of philosophy’s treatment of women, which began, There is a deep well of rage inside me. Rage about how I as an individual have been treated in philosophy; rage about how others I know have been treated; and rage about the conditions that I’m sure affect many women and minorities in philosophy, and have caused many others to leave. This introduction was subversive because expressing rage isn’t consistent with philosophy’s image as a ‘rational’ and ‘temperate’ discipline – one in which expressions of emotion are considered informal fallacies, not reasons or arguments. But emotions are epistemically valuable; they provide evidence of social inequalities and epistemic asymmetries of power; they help us understand the social ontology and our relationships with each other (Frye 1983; Bell 2013). That is, they reveal things about society, our relationships, and ourselves. Haslanger’s rage makes sense because philosophy is one of the most male-dominant and whitedominant disciplines in the Humanities (Haslanger 2008; Cherry & Schwitzgebel 2016). But this is just a microcosm of a larger ecosystem – a social ecology structured by patriarchal and racist relations, and other dynamics of power and domination. Oppressed people’s rage is epistemically valuable, appropriate, and deserving of uptake; it deserves to be

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written into the cultural record, represented in books, movies, TV shows, and scholarship. Rage is a reasonable and expectable response to unrelenting, intergenerational oppression. And rage isn’t, as Nietzsche said of ‘ressentiment,’ an essentially corrosive and immobilizing emotion. Rage is compatible with – perhaps even dependent upon – hope: hope for recognition, uptake, change, solidarity, a better future. The opposite of hope isn’t rage or anger or contempt, but hopelessness, resignation, and complacency. Expressions of rage are ameliorative – they seek recognition, respect, and change. Women’s anger is informative, and potentially transformative. This is why it is so feared and stigmatized within academia as well as mainstream society. Women’s rage contains the potential to overturn systems of oppression. This book is based on rage and hope, hatred and love. It condemns hierarchies of power and demands a better future for humanity. It holds agents of oppression in contempt and calls for solidarity and support amongst members of oppressed groups. This book is an ethic of ambiguity – a hope for a better state of affairs, and a fear that this hope will not be realized.

References Bell, M. (2013). Hard feelings: The moral psychology of contempt. Oxford University Press. Cherry, M., & Schwitzgebel, E. (2016). Like the Oscars, #PhilosophySoWhite. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/ la-oe-0306-schwitzgebel-cherry-philosophy-so-white-20160306-story.html Cohen, S. (2016, Apr 11). A brief history of sexual harassment in America before Anita Hill. Time Magazine. Retrieved from: https://time.com/4286575/ sexual-harassment-before-anita-hill/ Frye, M. (1983). The politics of reality: Essays in feminist theory. Crossing Press. Haslanger, S. (2008). Changing the ideology and culture of philosophy: Not by reason (alone). Hypatia, 23(2), 210–223. Kilpatrick, D. G. (2000). Rape and sexual assault. National Violence against Women Prevention Research Center. Retrieved from: https://mainwebv.musc. edu/vawprevention/research/sa.shtml Phillips, A. (2017). ‘They’re rapists.’ President Trump’s campaign launch speech two years later, annotated. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/16/theyre-rapists-presidentstrump-campaign-launch-speech-two-years-later-annotated/ Planty, M., Langton, L., Krebs, C., Berzofsky, M., & Smiley-McDonald, H. (2013). Female victims of sexual violence, 1994–2010 (pp. 3–4). Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Introduction An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Moral Responsibility

1. Preliminaries This book develops an intersectional feminist approach to moral responsibility.1 It aims to accomplish four main goals. The first is to outline a concise list of the main principles of intersectional feminism. The second is to use these principles to critique prevailing theories of moral responsibility. The third is to develop an account of moral responsibility that is compatible with the ethos of intersectional feminism. And the fourth is to use intersectional feminist principles to critique culturally normative responsibility practices (or ‘the responsibility system’). This is the first single-author book to provide an explicitly feminist approach to moral responsibility, and the first to provide an explicitly intersectional feminist approach to moral responsibility. Classic responsibility theorists were primarily concerned with the possibility of reconciling responsibility with determinism, an analysis that said nothing about our interpersonal relationships and normative concerns. Strawson shifted the focus by introducing an interpersonal model of moral responsibility that conceived of responsibility as a social practice. Contemporary Strawsonians have been mainly concerned with elaborating the conditions under which blame and praise are warranted. But these analyses have left Strawson’s background assumptions entirely intact. So far, no one has offered a comprehensive analysis of the malignant asymmetries of power that structure our interpersonal relationships, resulting in unequal distributions of blame, praise, respect, and uptake. The purpose of this book is to fill this gap in the literature, using intersectional feminist analysis to diagnose asymmetries of power in the responsibility system. On scrutiny, these asymmetries aren’t simply glitches that can be rectified with minor tweaks: they’re a systemic part of the normal operations of that system. No theory that accepts our responsibility system as basically adequate will provide a satisfactory diagnosis of its structural inequalities. A minimally normatively acceptable theory must assume that the system is broken and aim to rectify its deeply entrenched flaws.

2

Introduction

2. Intersectional Feminism I take intersectional feminism (henceforth, IF for short) to be a system of analysis and praxis that embodies feminist concerns and is suitably sensitive to multiple, overlapping intersections of power and oppression. To construct an intersectional feminist framework along these lines, I have drawn from five philosophical subdisciplines that share a set of emancipatory goals, but focus on different axes of oppression (see Chapter 2 for my full account). These subdisciplines are (1) feminist philosophy, (2) critical race theory, (3) queer theory, (4) critical disability theory, and (5) intersectionality theory. I’ll briefly outline the commitments of each subdiscipline here: (1) Feminist philosophy seeks to combat sexism and patriarchal oppression, but early feminist critiques undermined these goals by privileging the standpoint of white women (Gary et al. 2017). Contemporary feminist philosophers have tried to rectify this bias by incorporating a more diverse range of standpoints. (2) Critical race theory is a subdiscipline that embodies many of the same concerns as feminist philosophy, but seeks to analyze and combat various axes of racial oppression. It therefore lends an important dimension of intersectionality to feminist thought. (3) Queer theory, in a similar vein, aims to diagnose and combat cisheteronormativity, or systems of power that privilege heterosexual, cisgender identities.2 (4) Critical disability theory, in a nutshell, aims to deconstruct ableist ideologies and ableist privileges. And (5) intersectionality theory, which emerged in the 1980s as an antidote to marginalizations and exclusions within feminist philosophy, seeks to integrate all of these concerns and to combat multiple forms of prejudice simultaneously. It recognizes that not all oppressions can be analyzed at once, but it aims to avoid single-factor analyses that neglect the evaluatively salient intersections between relevant axes of oppressions. I use these five subdisciplines to ground my account of intersectional feminism (to be outlined in Chapter 2). Specifically, I use their shared methodological and substantive commitments to develop an intersectional feminist framework – one that is sensitive to a plurality of oppressions and exclusions. I then use this framework to evaluate the normative acceptability of the dominant academic paradigms of responsibility, as well as mainstream culture’s responsibility-structuring assumptions and practices. Against these systems of responsibility, I defend an intersectional feminist approach, which treats blame and praise as communicative entities that can be used to ameliorate injustice and oppression by resisting and protesting against hegemonic norms and schemas, mobilizing members of oppressed groups around shared aims, and disseminating counterhegemonic and transformative ethics and vernaculars. My analysis is neither complete nor comprehensive, but this is a necessary and anticipated feature of intersectional feminist analysis: no

Introduction

3

intersectional feminist inquiry can foreground, simultaneously, every axis of oppression in our society, nor adequately diagnose every dimension of oppression. Intersectional feminism is, by design, a work in progress and a constantly evolving critique. My hope in writing this book is to start a constructive conversation on inequalities in the responsibility system, not to have the final say. One of my aims is to provide a point of entry for early career-stage researchers interested in ameliorative approaches to moral responsibility, of which there are currently very few examples, so that they can contribute to the field using their own experiences and identities as reference points. At present, very few scholars approach responsibility from an emancipatory perspective, whereas political activists are deeply immersed in the politics of holding responsible. Responsibility theory provides an entry point for these activists to systematize their intuitions and develop innovative, community-based approaches to responsibility. It’s not possible to enumerate all of the commitments shared by the subdisciplines that I take to be internal to intersectional feminism, so I have instead compiled a list of five central aims that an intersectional feminist approach should be committed to realizing or promoting. These aims are: 2.1. foregrouding and diagnosing (especially systemic) intersectionaly of injustice, oppression, and adversity 2.2. actively combating injustice, oppression, and adversity 2.3. using an ameliorative method 2.4. using a relational method 2.5. using a non-ideal theoretical method I will briefly outline and defend these commitments, with further elaboration to follow in subsequent chapters. 2.1. Foregrounding and Diagnosing Intersections of Injustice, Oppression, and Domination Across the disciplines that I take to be central to intersectional feminism, a shared, central aim, at least in recent years, has been to diagnose multiple intersections of injustice, oppression, and domination. Although classic feminist thought privileged a white standpoint, efforts have been made to diversity feminist philosophy and integrate non-traditional standpoints. The incorporation of voices from the margins – even if necessarily an incomplete enterprise – is a central aim of any theory that labels itself as coherently feminist. To exclude minorities from feminist thought is to go against feminism’s ethos as an anti-patriarchal ethic, invested in deconstructing the binary divisions and ranking systems created and enforced by patriarchal culture. Hence, the recognition of multiple intersections of oppression is part of a coherent feminist method – one that empowers

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Introduction

all women. To reproduce the exclusions internal to a patriarchal (binary, hierarchical) logic would be to go against feminism’s interest in dismantling patriarchy, which would be a form of hypocrisy. 2.2. A Commitment to Actively Combatting Injustice, Oppression, and Adversity Intersectional feminism is not confined to academic inquiry, but seeks to undermine oppression across multiple social spaces. As Ange-Marie Hancock observes, “twenty-first century intersectionality is both an analytical framework and a complex of social practices, including solidarity and collective contestation” (2016: 6). In the same spirit, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, queer theory, and critical disability theory are all committed to transformative goals. They are not satisfied with the Cartesian method of ‘armchair philosophy’ and inquiry for its own sake. They seek to realize their commitments in the world through transformative change. Consistent with this, contemporary feminists have argued that we have a standing duty to resist, protest, and combat oppression (e.g., Cudd 2006; Hay 2013; Boxill 2010). Accepting and participating in oppression, or allowing it to continue without intervening, is not compatible with feminism’s emancipatory ambitions. 2.3. A Commitment to an Ameliorative Method Ameliorative analysis, as described by Sally Haslanger (2006), is a method of inquiry that defines (or redefines) concepts by reference to ameliorative aims (such as the mitigation of oppression). This method of inquiry differs from the classic philosophical approach, which consisted of defining concepts using introspection (the ‘conceptual method’) or linguistic analysis (the ‘descriptive method’). These approaches don’t contest cultural stereotypes about historically disenfranchised groups, thereby (tacitly) reproducing those stereotypes. In contrast, an ameliorative method defines concepts partly by reference to normative goals that challenge the status quo. To illustrate this, Haslanger says that ‘race’ should not be defined as a biological trait or an essential feature of persons, even if this is what most people take it to be; it should instead be understood as a feature of group membership that positions certain groups as subordinate relative to others on the basis of bodily markers designated as racial by the dominant culture. This definition allows us to recognize that race is a constructed ground for discrimination on the basis of group membership, not a biological fact or an individual essence. An ameliorative analysis of responsibility would similarly define responsibility as a normative system structured by asymmetries of power between social groups, not a natural state of affairs. Responsibility, as a hegemonic social practice, emerges as a result of of asymmetrically structured social dynamics.

Introduction

5

2.4. A Commitment to a Relational Method Ameliorative analysis goes hand-in-hand with relational analysis, which focuses on the relations of power and domination that structure modern societies, and that we have an interest in ameliorating. An individualist analysis leaves unanalyzed the systems of power and domination that are the main focus of feminist, critical race, queer, and critical disability scholarship – systems comprised of collectives and groups. By the same token, individualist analysis neglects the roles that we play in these collectives, which, properly understood, bear on our liability for blame and praise. A corporate owner might seem to be a nice person when considered as a private citizen, but if he runs one of the top-polluting corporations in the world, he’s not as benevolent as a superficial, individualist analysis would suggest. The trouble with individualist analysis is that it doesn’t have the resources needed to examine people’s non-transparent roles in systems of power and domination, and their impact, via the collective, on social groups. The corporate owner isn’t just polluting: he’s disproportionally harming POC, women, and other marginalized groups. Individualist analysis doesn’t have the resources to identify these grouplevel effects. It doesn’t allow us to identify people as perpetrators of collective harms like environmental racism and sexism.

2.5. A Commitment to Non-Ideal Theory By virtue of 2.1–2.4 above, IF is a form of non-ideal theory, as defined by Charles Mills (2017). Non-ideal theory, very briefly, avoids abstractions that misrepresent reality (‘the social ontology’) as an approximation to a moral, political, or social ideal. Non-ideal theory homes in on axes of oppression that structure our society, and theorizes modes of resistance. This method was developed in response to the dominant (ideal) logic in academic philosophy, which conceives of society as a close approximation to an ideal (e.g., perfect liberalism), and seeks to bring us closer to that ideal while leaving the majority of interpersonal relations and structures in place. Some common idealizing assumptions within political theory, as identified by Mills, are: that society is very nearly egalitarian, that human capacities are very nearly rational, that oppression is very nearly nonexistent, that institutions are very nearly just, and that human beings are nearly fully compliant with and responsive to principles of cooperation, coordination, and mutual respect. The same idealizations are mainstays within responsibility theory, which, for the most part, depicts interpersonal relationships as nearly egalitarian, just, and fair, and as such, structured by near-perfect rationality, cooperation, and mutual respect. My analysis deconstructs and debunks these idealizations by identifying oppression and domination as the norm within moral conversations. In fact, ordinary conversations are systematically tilted in favour of the privileged.

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Introduction

It may surprise the average reader to learn that the preeminent philosophers of our time are ideal theorists who imagine society to be nearly perfect. As Mills puts it, “how in God’s name could anybody think that this [ideal theory] is the appropriate way to do ethics?” (2017: 77). Well, most philosophers did (and largely still do) think that this was (and is) the appropriate way to do ethics, partly because they have historically been (and still are) more privileged than the average person (e.g., predominantly white, predominantly male, predominantly cisgender, highly educated). To be fair, most privileged laypeople exhibit a very similar ‘just world bias,’ which supports the exact same idealizing assumptions. Do most white people think that we live in a racial liberalism (as Mills describes it), in which social institutions function to reproduce white supremacy through the commodification and exploitation of racialized bodies? It’s not obvious to most white people that, to quote Donald Glover, “this is America.” Because we have been raised in a white supremacist – as well as patriarchal, ableist, cisheteronormative, and oligarchic – culture, these dynamics of oppression are not epistemically transparent to all of us, particularly if we’re not on the receiving end of them. The cultural myths that make us ignorant to systems of power and dominations are unsurprisingly replicated, and even justified, in philosophical scholarship.

3. Moral Responsibility Scholarship on moral responsibility predates intersectional feminism by millennia. In the 20th century, multiple competing perspectives emerged, but the discussion was largely focused on the putative threat of determinism to the very possibility of responsible agency (e.g., Campbell 1957; van Inwagen 1978; Chisholm 1982). Peter Strawson helped turn the tides in favour of compatibilism (the notion that responsibility is compatible with determinism), and away from the “panicky metaphysics of libertarianism” (1963: 27). This shift allowed Strawson to focus on the interpersonal dynamics involved in holding-responsible. Subsequent ethicists focused on delineating the normative conditions that must be satisfied in order for someone to be held responsible in a justifiable or ethically fitting way (e.g., Watson 1987; McKenna 1998, 2012). To hold someone responsible, on Strawson’s view, is to deem the target worthy of the ‘reactive attitudes,’ which include resentment, gratitude, indignation, approbation, and hurt feelings. Post-Strawsonians focused predominantly on explaining what makes someone an apt target of (or ‘apt for’) these attitudes. To simplify Strawson’s account of the reactive attitudes, some philosophers have substituted ‘blaming attitudes’ and ‘praising attitudes’ (or simply ‘blame’ and ‘praise’) to cover the range of negative and positive moral emotions, respectively. I adopt this simplification in spite of its drawbacks

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(viz., Holroyd 2018), mainly to keep the analysis within reasonable limits. This isn’t too much of a sacrifice, as I am more concerned with how positive and negative attitudes are shaped by cultural biases, than in specific nuances within a given category of attitudes (e.g., blame). Another trend in philosophy is to focus on blame more than praise (as Strawson did in “Freedom and Resentment”), which I also follow for purposes of simplicity, and with similar reservations. While I focus on blame, I believe that the same biases affect blame and praise in a symmetrical way, in that they make members of marginalized groups seem more blameworthy, and members of privileged groups seem more praiseworthy, than they really are, even when they perform the self-same action (e.g., theft, murder). Strawson said that, when we don’t regard someone as a responsible agent, we suspend or withdraw the participatory attitudes and adopt ‘the objective attitude,’ wherein we regard the target is an object of intellectual understanding, management, treatment, and control, but not participatory engagement. Contemporary Strawsonians are interested in understanding when someone deserves the reactive attitudes as opposed to the objective stance. Philosophers have offered a number of responses to this question, and I think that these responses can be separated into five camps, with five individuating commitments, as follows: (a) The attributability view says that to merit blame is to have negative traits that are connected to yourself in the right way. (b) The control view says that to merit blame is to have performed a transgression that was under your control. (c) The answerability view says that to merit blame is to be answerable (or capable of answering) to blame. (d) The functionalist view says that to merit blame is to be capable of being influenced by blame in a positive (typically agency-enhancing) way. (e) The group agency view, on one formulation at least, says that to share in the blame for a collective transgression is to have contributed to a group agent that acted on a joint intention to do wrong. These are all very rough sketches of much more complex theories, but they are meant to offer a useful map of the compatibilist literature, which we can then evaluate under an intersectional feminism lens.3 Each camp identifies a different locus of normative concern – more precisely, a different normative adequacy condition that licenses blame, which, in each case, is a feature of the blamee’s self or agency. If S acted on her deep self, S is blameworthy on paradigm (a). If S is answerable for action A, S is blameworthy for A on paradigm (c). If S held and acted on a joint intention A in common with a group, S shares in the blame for A on

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paradigm (e). And so on. Each paradigm provides a potential solution to the question: when does a perpetrator merit blame, as opposed to a suspension or withdrawal of the reactive attitudes? The answer, according to (a)–(e), ultimately depends on features of the perpetrator’s agency – the person’s ability to (a) act on self-constitutive motives, (b) control herself, (c) answer to moral claims, (d) respond positively to blame and praise, or (e) act on joint intentions shared with other members of a group agent. In this way, all five paradigms direct our attention to the wrongdoer and the relationship between this agent and her agency, howsoever conceived. Something that all of these paradigms inherited from Strawson is a failure to address the asymmetries of power that structure our responsibility system. It wasn’t until 2018 that distinguished philosophers started applying feminist rubrics to responsibility. Most notably, Katrina Hutchison, Catriona Mackenzie, and Marina Oshana published a landmark edited volume on “social dimensions of moral responsibility” (2018), which drew from three perspectives popularized by feminist philosophers, namely: (1) interpersonal and social notions of agency, (2) relational autonomy, and (3) social and feminist epistemologies of oppression and domination (2018: 1).4 These approaches are examples of the type of non-ideal lens that I will also apply in this book. But this book offers a specific type of non-ideal analysis: an intersectional feminist one. Thus, it differs from the feminist critiques currently on offer.

4. An Intersectional Feminist Account of Blame What is an intersectional feminist account of blame? To answer this question, I first have to distinguish between two concepts. One is blame simpliciter, and the other is normatively adequate blame. Blame simpliciter has certain core features, but it can be normatively adequate or not. (Henceforth, I will use ‘apt’ and ‘inapt’ as shorthand). To illustrate the difference: I can blame someone by slut-shaming her, which is clearly an inapt use of blame by IF standards. A token of blame simpliciter is apt if it satisfies conditions 2.1–2.5 above – that is, if it foregrounds axes of oppression, aims to ameliorate them, diagnoses relations of power and oppression, assumes that ecological conditions are non-ideal, and so on. A token of blame simpliciter won’t necessarily satisfy these aims (i.e., it may be inapt), but it needs to be capable of satisfying these aims if it is to play a constructive role in an intersectional feminist system of interpersonal practices. Howsoever I conceive of blame simpliciter, it should be something capable of promoting IF aims, so that I can eventually come out with an IF-conducive theory of responsibility. Blame shouldn’t be, for example, an effluence of emotions, because non-norm-governed emotional effluences can’t contribute to IF aims. Of all of the paradigms of blame described above, I take two of them to be compatible with intersectional feminist aims, with certain modifications. They are the communicative model and the functionalist model (suitably

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revised). On my view, apt blame is a communicative practice (expressing representational and normative content) that functions to realize or promote IF norms, and blame simpliciter is a communicative entity that transmits normative information. This normative information may be apt (IF-conducive) or not, depending on its role in moral conversations and its coherence with IF aims. In developing my account, I will also retain some elements of the Strawsonian model, particularly the notion that blame expresses a negative attitude towards a transgressor. I cannot go into all of the details here, but I will briefly outline and motivate these core features. Blame Simpliciter 4.1. Marks someone as a norm violator or perpetrator (in a suitably relational and ameliorative sense) 4.2. Communicates that representation (of someone as a perpetrator) to a respondent 4.3. Seeks uptake from the respondent (who may be the blamee or a third party) 4.4. Expresses a negative attitude (e.g., resentment, indignation, disdain, scorn, rage5) towards the perpetrator in light of the perpetrator’s action and its role in hierarchies of power Apt Blame 4.5. Satisfies 4.1–4.4 4.6. Functions to realize or promote intersectional aims as encompassed in 2.1–2.5 (above) My reasons for adopting these conditions, in brief, are as follows. Blame Simpliciter 4.1. Marks someone as a norm violator6 Philosophers generally agree that blame, at a minimum, marks someone as a norm violator (or, as I will sometimes put it, a perpetrator of a norm violation). This distinguishes blame from phenomenologically similar attitudes, such as anger, disappointment, and irritation, which are negative responses to a wide range of stimuli. Blame, by contrast, is a response to wrongdoing. We can gain clarity on the significance of this distinction by considering Bruce Waller’s discussion of the “strike-back emotions” (2014: 10), which he takes to be the basis of blame. Strike-back emotions are common to human and non-human animals, and can be observed in rats, which, when (inhumanely) placed in a cage with an electrified floor and then shocked . . . attack one another. When a rat is hurt, its immediate desire is to strike back

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Introduction at something: its assailant, or an innocent bystander, or a gnawing post if nothing else is around.7 (2014: 10)

Waller takes this example of rat hostility to illustrate blame’s inability to regulate relationships constructively: blame, as structured by strike-back emotions, is too punitive and too arbitrary to be of any real social value. Blame ‘strikes back’ at anyone or anything when triggered by an aversive stimulus. Partly for this reason, Waller says that we should abolish blame. In contrast, the vast majority of responsibility theorists distinguish between ‘strike-back emotions’ and blame proper by appeal to the latter’s distinct normative content – its representation of norms and norm violations. Blame, on the standard view, isn’t just an expression of negative emotionality towards a stimulus; at a minimum, it’s a response to someone perceived as a norm violator. A lab rat that attacks a fellow torture victim isn’t blaming its cage-mate; it’s simply expressing distress in the most convenient way possible. Similarly, if I stub my toe on a chair and exclaim, “bloody chair!” I’m not thereby blaming the chair, even if I am expressing a strike-back emotion – a hostile emotion trigger by an aversive stimulus. Blame simpliciter may contain emotional content such as strike-back emotions, but it’s not reducible to those emotions. Essentially, blame identifies norm violators. One of the reasons IF is committed to a normative account of blame (on which blame contains normative content) is that a purely affective account of blame doesn’t advance ameliorative aims, since arbitrary expressions of negative emotions – towards rats, chairs, children, torture victims, and what have you – aren’t socially constructive reactions. This is one of the reasons Waller is an eliminativist – his definition of blame as a basic fight-or-flight response doesn’t allow blame to play a constructive role in society. An intersectional feminist doesn’t blame rats, chairs, children, and innocent bystanders in response to aversive stimuli, as this would do nothing to advance IF aims. Thus, blame simpliciter, within an intersectional feminist framework, must, at the very least, track norms and target norm violators. 4.2. Communicates a representation of someone as a norm violator to a respondent Communicative accounts of blame have become quite popular, largely due to McKenna’s (2012) influential account of responsibility as part of a conversational exchange. The advantage of the communicative view is that it explains what blame is: a communicative act (e.g., a speech act), or the basis of a communicative act (e.g., a private judgment) that would be voiced under uptake-conducive circumstances. (I may blame someone in my mind, but refrain from vocalizing my blame in the moment

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because I would be ignored or dismissed or punished.) The communicative approach explains how blame can influence people’s normative behaviour and normative understandings. According to communication theory, a speech act is a type of communication that instructs someone to do something. Blame, as a type of speech act, can instruct someone to take responsibility for a transgression by offering an explanation, apology, or restitution. Blame can (surely) also convey normative information to witnesses and critics who have nothing to atone for. If I say “don’t slut-shame women,” I may be saying this to reprimand the slut-shamer, or to support the victim, or to seek recognition from a witness, or for some other purpose. Blaming someone can instruct, inform, protest, challenge, and serve many other communicative functions, which in turn can promote IF aims by disseminating IF-conducive values and ideals. Essentially, blame’s message about perpetrators, transgressions, and norms can be transmitted to a varity of interlocutors. (At least, this is what I shall argue.) The communicative account is a good fit for an intersectional feminist model because it explains how blame can realize and promote intersectional feminist aims: by transmitting normative information. If I say “don’t slut-shame women,” I’m sending an IF-enforcing message. This still leaves open many questions about blame’s structure, and to answer these I will lean on Colleen Macnamara’s (2015) communicative account. She says that blame is analogous to a message, in that it has two core features: it represents someone as a norm violator, and it seeks uptake for that representational content from a respondent. One of the advantages of this account is that it explains how we can blame people in silence, or without saying anything. Because blame is akin to a message, it can exist prior to being sent. By analogy, the instructions on a syllabus exist before any student has read it, and even if no student ever reads it. This doesn’t mean that blame doesn’t seek uptake. We tend to vocalize blame in uptake-conducive circumstances – circumstances in which someone can hear or will listen. If someone is, say, sexually harassing all the women at my workplace, I might not blame him to his face for fear of repercussions, which isn’t to say that I don’t blame him at all. I might blame him in my mind. And then I might blame him by warning other women about him, commiserating with colleagues about him, reporting him to Human Resources, etc. Blame is an uptake-seeking message, and, as such, we tend to communicate it to uptake-capable respondents or ‘epistemic peers,’ people who share similar normative concepts and experiential standpoints. The ‘message account’ explains how, e.g., women can blame uptake-incapable sexual harassers without getting fired, or how African-Americans can blame hostile police officers without getting shot – by blaming them behind their backs, in dialogue with others. Unlike me, Macnamara thinks that blame “invariably” elicits uptake from the blamee (2015: 223), never a third party (a friend, parent, colleague, etc.). In contrast, I side with Macalaster Bell (2013), who says that blame

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can seek uptake from a third party, such as a witness or a potential critic. From an intersectional feminist perspective, blame transmitted to third parties is invaluable because it reinforces and validates the lived experiences of oppressed people whose lives are erased by mainstream ideologies, and it provides sources of epistemic confidence and courage within these marginalized communities. If POC couldn’t blame racist police officers amongst each other in the age of racially-prejudiced mass incarceration, then how could they have ever blamed them at all? Members of oppressed groups normally need to construct and reinforce their own normative understandings and vernaculars within their own communities before they can command uptake from privileged gatekeepers. The fact of the matter is that Black people could blame police officers for race-based violence before the press was willing to investigate or publicize their experiences and grievances. Indeed, #BlackLivesMatter was a grassroots movement. Henceforth, I will assume that blame is ‘communicative’ in roughly Macnmara’s sense, viz., it contains representational content, and it seeks uptake for that representational content from others.8 But I side with Bell in seeing third parties as potential recipients of blame’s message. 4.3. Seeks uptake from the respondent (the blamee or a third party) Condition 4.3 follows from condition 4.2. Communication theorists generally agree that communication, by its very nature, seeks uptake. Most responsibility theorists take the proper recipient of blame’s message to be the perpetrator. I demur from the majority and adopt Bell’s position, on which blame’s recipients (or ‘illocutionary targets’) include uptakecapable third parties. This allows that we can blame uptake-incapable transgressors, such as racists who cannot recognize Black people’s testimonial authority due to identity prejudice. If we were to deny that third parties can be illocutionary targets, then we would be saying, in effect, that racialized minorities can’t blame racists who don’t recognize them as credible speakers, which would be to silence their moral testimony. Indeed, this would be to silence the moral testimony of any minority discredited and smothered by epistemic injustice. An intersectional feminist theory aims to validate marginalized people’s blame, especially under conditions of injustice and oppression. Therefore, we want to find ways to increase the epistemic standing of oppressed groups, irrespective of society’s entrenched prejudices. 4.4. Expresses a negative reactive attitude towards the perpetrator or the perpetrator’s action There is a divide in the literature between those who treat blame as involving reactive attitudes such as resentment and indignation (Strawsonians) and those who treat blame as a mere judgment with no emotional

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content (cognitivists). If blame is a mere judgment, then I can blame someone by indifferently recognizing him as a norm violator, or even by admiring him in light of the norm violation that he has committed. I might, for instance, ‘blame’ a serial killer by recognizing him as having violated a social norm, without resenting or condemning him. I deny cognitivism because it allows us to remain passive in the face of perceived transgressions, whereas IF aims to actively combat wrongdoing. To blame in an intersectional feminist spirit, I can’t just recognize someone as a wrongdoer: I must also take a stand against him. That is, I must look on his action in a spirit of resentment, contempt, or suchlike. A second reason to reject cognitivism is that it doesn’t speak to the phenomenological experiences of many victims of oppression – experiences that deserve uptake. In later chapters, I will cite Rachel Flowers’ defense of Indigenous women’s right to express “decolonial emotional responses” such as resentment, indignation, and rage in response to the “ongoing violence and dispossession” of Indigenous women (2015: 33). These are normal and natural responses to state-sanctioned genocide, and they are IF-conducive insofar as they serve to contest and overturn colonial hierarchies of power. Even if not every victim of persecution experiences these emotions, persecution victims are entitled to feel and express them, meaning that these emotions have a rightful place within an anticolonial system of interpersonal relationships. Flowers argues further that these emotions can convey self-love and love for one’s community in opposition to the state’s colonialist logic. This understanding of the ameliorative roles of anticolonial and anti-oppressive emotions in interpersonal life fits with a (suitably revised) emotional/attitudinal account of blame, on which blame conveys negative attitudes towards, or about, certain perpetrators. For this reason, I do not subscribe to a cognitivist view on which emotions play no role in responsibility. I favour a modified (expanded) reactive-attitude model on which blame involves ameliorative emotions ranging from resentment to indignation to contempt to rage. Apt Blame 4.5. Satisfies 4.1–4.4 Apt blame is a type of blame, meaning that it satisfies the above conditions of blame simpliciter. 4.6. Functions to realize, advance, or promote intersectional principles 2.1–2.5 A token of blame simpliciter is apt insofar as it functions to satisfy 2.1– 2.5, that is, insofar as it seeks to diagnose and combat axes of oppression,

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to identify asymmetrical power relations, to understand and take a stand against the perpetrator’s roles in systems of oppression, and so on. A few clarifications are in order. I intend my account of aptness to be a functionalist one, not a consequentialist one. A functionalist account identifies apt blame by its designated role in a designated system of practices (Coates & Tognazzini 2013: 15–18), not by its actual or expected consequences. Apt blame, on my view, functions to realize or promote IF aims under uptake-conducive circumstances. Thus, blame can be apt even if it fails to obtain the uptake it seeks. In other words, anti-oppressive blame is still valid when it is silenced or smothered. Communicative theories in general tend to have a functionalist flavour. For example, McKenna sees blame as a conversational contribution that functions to elicit a response from a blamee, and Macnamara sees it as a communicative entity that functions to incite guilt in a blamee. Both philosophers treat blame as a form of communication that serves a specific purpose in moral conversation. On my view, blame’s function is to realize and promote IF aims. However, I don’t take my view to be a consequentialist one. This is because I don’t think that apt blame must advance IF aims in a given conversation, or a potential future conversation. Suppose that the world is about to come to an end. This doesn’t mean that my blame is inapt, even though it’s unlikely to advance IF goals due to the impending apocalypse. (This scenario isn’t too hard to imagine in the current circumstances.) Now, suppose that most people don’t recognize my testimonial authority because I’m a woman living in a highly patriarchal order. This, too, doesn’t mean that my blame is inapt, even though it’s unlikely to garner uptake and have an impact on the normative landscape. Blame seeks uptake, but it doesn’t always get it, and whether it does or not isn’t fully under any individual’s control; it depends heavily on how uptake is distributed in society. I don’t want to be committed to saying that epistemically marginalized people’s blame is inapt only because their identities are culturally stigmatized, distrusted, and disvalued. Nor do I want to say that, when a man and a woman utter the same blaming judgment, the man’s is more apt than the woman’s only because male identities are epistemically privileged (i.e., men receive more uptake than women for the same speech due to identity prejudice). To avoid this upshot, I hold that apt blame would garner uptake in uptake-conducive circumstances, even if it won’t and can’t obtain uptake in the asymmetrically structured conditions in which we live. In brief, then, I take apt blame to be blame that seeks uptake for IF norms, and that would receive uptake in uptake-conducive circumstances, in which identity prejudice is absent. This makes my view a functionalist one as opposed to a consequentialist one. To bring the difference into better relief, consider an analogy from biology. The heart functions to pump oxygen-rich blood throughout the

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body, but it won’t perform this function well if your arteries harden, if you have a heart attack, or if you get shot in the heart. The function of the heart is defined by what the heart does in circulation-conducive conditions, not what it does in conditions of atrophy, biological decay, or homicide. Along the same lines, apt blame, in functionalist terms, serves IF aims in uptake-conducive circumstances, not conditions of asymmetrical credit. Therefore, incipient but suppressed blame can still be apt. I favour the functionalist approach because it explains why members of oppressed groups can aptly blame members of privileged groups even if their speech is epistemically marginalized. It explains why Black people could blame racist police officers before Black Lives Matter disseminated knowledge about racial profiling, why women could blame rapists before Me Too popularized knowledge about rape culture, and so on. These blaming practices were fully valid before Black people and women were capable of commanding uptake for these kinds of claims. In sum, my account of blame is both communicative and functionalist. It defines blame simpliciter as a communicative practice that seeks uptake for normative content, and it defines apt blame as any token of blame simpliciter that realizes or promotes IF aims under uptake-conducive circumstances (free from identity prejudice). My reason for adopting these two paradigms – one communicative and one functionalist – is that they jointly provide a model of blame that is capable of promoting IF aims by disseminating IF-conducive norms.

5. Revising Strawson Strawson’s landmark essay, Freedom and Resentment (1963), was a crucial point of departure for responsibility theory, and I wouldn’t want to diminish its significance. Strawson provided one of the first constitutively social models of responsibility, bringing responsibility theory closer to feminist perspectives on autonomy and selfhood. This is an invaluable contribution to the discipline. But Strawson failed to recognize that uptake is unevenly distributed within our interpersonal relationships. He didn’t realize, for example, that the same blaming speech (e.g., ‘you shouldn’t have done that’), and the same excuses (e.g., ‘I couldn’t help it’), receive different levels of uptake when uttered by different people only because of identity prejudice. Nor did he realize that members of marginalized groups are stereotyped as having epistemic defects (such as irrationality in women and POC), making them vulnerable to biased blame. These are the focal points of recent feminist analyses. Though I reject many of Strawson’s assumptions, I still subscribe to his understanding of blame as involving negative attitudes. To distinguish my view from his, I will briefly outline the main differences between us, as well as the considerable similarities.

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5.1. Blame tracks and reinforces cultural norms and also tracks and reinforces agency (objectively construed) Katrina Hutchison (2018) notes an inconsistency in Strawson’s thought. Strawson assumes, on the one hand, that blame generally tracks and reinforces cultural norms, and, on the other hand, that blame tracks the normatively salient features of people’s agency, and enhances moral agency in general. The problem is that blame can’t possibly do both in conditions of inequality like ours. If blame is structured by cultural norms – norms, properly understood, of patriarchal control, white supremacy, cisheternormativity, and so on – then it can’t also accurately track the normative features of people’s agency, which are misrepresented through the lens of salient cultural biases. To borrow Hutchison’s example, if blame tracks culturally normative disdain towards Aboriginal women, then it can’t also be sensitive to Aboriginal women’s objective agential features, given that the dominant racial schemas of western culture misrepresent Aboriginal women as agentially defective. This pervasive racial prejudice is one of the reasons behind Aboriginal women’s massive overrepresentation in Australia’s prison system (Russell & Cunneen 2018) – they are presumed agentially deficient and thus incapable of fulfilling ordinary civilian obligations (e.g., observing the law, cleaning and feeding themselves), unlike the white-dominant majority. Hutchison’s analysis shows that Strawson was wrong about the value of cultural norms: we shouldn’t, in fact, try to enforce and reproduce them because they’re prejudiced against certain groups. We should instead try to blame people based on the objective features of their actions and qualities of will. I agree with Hutchison that we should reject conventional constraints on apt blame, and that we should try to see people for who they are instead of how they are stereotyped. But I deny that agency is blame’s main target, the reason being that people can violate norms even when their ‘agency’ isn’t implicated in their action – put differently, even without expressing ill will. A ‘benevolent sexist’ may harbour no ill will towards women, but his ‘chivalrous’ actions still reinforce patriarchal gender relations. Because of these kinds of cases, I think that blame should track people’s contributions to hierarchies of power, regardless of the quality of their will, or their will’s relation to their overt behaviour and social systems. My preferred systems-focused approach is substantively relational: it takes blame to track people’s status-conferring roles9 in hierarchies of power, not their individual wills, intentions, or actions. The locus of concern is a person’s action as embedded in a salient hierarchy of power, not an individual’s will as expressed in an individual, unassisted action. 5.2. Blame ought to track agency Most Strawsonians, in fact, endorse an agency constraint, and I will briefly explain why I reject it. While ‘agency’ is a contested notion, Strawson

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identified it with a person’s ‘quality of will,’ which he regarded as the proper locus of blame. Quality of will, in turn, has been interpreted variously as a matter of character, control, and answerability. Elinor Mason (2018) raises a compelling objection to the notion that blame should track ‘quality of will’ in any of these senses.10 Her objection, in essence, is that people sometimes contribute to systems of oppression in will-bypassing and will-excluding ways. For example, a married cisgender man might ‘forget’ to pick up the milk on the way home from work, and he might dismiss this as an innocent mistake. Maybe most people would see it this way. He didn’t mean it, and he couldn’t have avoided it given his social position. These are valid excuses to Strawson’s mind, so the husband should be off the hook. The wife has no reason to blame him, and would be acting unreasonably if she did. But Mason points out that, when we consider the man’s ‘omission’ against a system of similar omissions (of domestic obligations) disproportionally committed by men, it begins to look less like an ‘innocent mistake’ and more like a sustaining feature of a gendered division of labour that allocates the majority of domestic duties to women. If a lot of men ‘forget’ to pick up the milk – and to do the housework, pick up the kids from school, and suchlike – then these ‘forgettings’ aren’t innocent omissions, but structural features of a patriarchal order that relegates domestic duties to women, thereby limiting their ability to play an equal role in social and political life. This isn’t true only of ‘omissions,’ but of other transgressions similarly deemed ‘innocent’ according to the culture’s gender schemas: sexual harassment can be interpreted as ‘innocent flirting’ under a patriarchal lens; pursuing a male vanity project that objectifies women can be parsed as ‘having artistic integrity’ under the same lens; and so on. These actions may not convey ‘ill will,’ but they contribute to a gendered distribution of power and privileges that intersectional feminists have an interest in identifying, analyzing, and deconstructing. In sum, because people participate in systems of oppression without investing their ‘will’ (howsoever conceived) in their actions, we cannot take ‘ill will’ to be a constraint on blame. 5.3. Blame involves a set of negative reactive attitudes (including gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings) that, by their very nature, seek a response from a blamee. On the standard interpretation of Strawson, blame addresses a negative reactive attitude to an ill-willed person, and seeks a response from that person. The kinds of attitudes that can play this role in interpersonal exchanges are “gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love . . . hurt feelings,” and similar emotions (1963: 5). Many philosophers take psychopaths to be exempt from blame because they’re not capable of responding to

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the negative reactive attitudes with uptake or moral recognition (e.g., Macnamara 2015). A smaller group of philosophers take epistemically deformed people, like racists and sexists, to be exempt from blame because they’re epistemically incapable of recognizing themselves as prejudiced, and therefore of responding reasonably to accusations of prejudice (e.g., Levy 2018). In each case, the person can’t give the blamer’s testimony the uptake it deserves. On that basis, the person isn’t eligible for blame. In contrast, I think that psychopaths, racists, and sexists are all eligible for blame, because I don’t take blame to depend on the agency of the blamee in any sense. (I recognize that these individuals have different deficits, but I deny that these differences are responsibility-relevant in the way that most philosophers assume.) Why should we blame psychopaths, racists, and sexists who can’t appreciate or respond appropriately to IF blame? Because we have an interest in upholding and enforcing IF norms, even if not everyone can, or will, respect them. And when we blame uptake-incapable people, we influence (empower, recognize, commiserate with) victims, witnesses, critics, and others. In this sense, we can blame uptake-incapable perpetrators in conversations with our epistemic peers. Perhaps we can scorn or disdain these perpetrators. Such ‘hard feelings’ may convey that the blamee is participating in asymmetries of power that are an affront to intersectional feminist values, and that warrant contempt, disdain, rage, along with disengagement, avoidance, or refusal. 5.4. Blame functions to elicit a response from a perpetrator Because I am committed to 5.3, I am also committed to 5.4, the notion that blame, particularly as expressed in contempt, scorn, and their cognates, doesn’t necessarily seek uptake from a perpetrator. Blame could instead seek uptake from a third party – a friend, a colleague, a parent, a neighbour. Sometimes blame can’t elicit uptake from a transgressor because the person doesn’t have the right agency, and sometimes it can’t reach an uptake-capable person due to circumstances. Can I blame Paul Manafort for supporting totalitarian regimes even though I’ve never met him and never will? I can tweet at him, but he probably won’t notice. On my view, I can blame him even though I can’t communicate with him, because blame doesn’t seek or require perpetrator recognition. There are other things for blame to do. ***** The above departures from the Strawsonian orthodoxy are needed to acknowledge the fact that blame can promote IF aims without engaging with, let alone garnering recognition from, specific perpetrators. In some cases, it would be a terrible mistake to engage with a perpetrator. Should I blame a serial killer to his face? In other cases, it would be

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humiliating, pointless, or costly. Should I engage in a ‘debate’ with a sexist who doesn’t recognize me as an epistemic agent? In reality, we blame people without engaging with them all the time, in conversations with our epistemic peers – people who can appreciate the normative content of our speech. These are also the best people with whom to exchange norm-laden speech, because they are sources of experiential confirmation, epistemic confidence, and courage.

6. Anticipated Objections In this section, I will briefly respond to anticipated questions about the viability of my project. 6.1. Intersectional Feminism Intersectional feminism is a controversial approach, both amongst feminists and non-feminists. One of the main objections from both sides is that intersectional feminism replicates and reinforces the very intersections of oppression that it seeks to ameliorate. Along these lines, Naomi Zack argues that intersectional feminism reifies “intersections as incommensurable identities” (2005: 18), creating rifts between members of different groups, and marginalizing certain groups within its own analysis of power and domination. This line of objection is my greatest concern, and one that I cannot fully answer. The best that I can do is to explain why I chose this approach. The simple answer is that I wanted to develop a feminist theory of responsibility (along the lines laid out by feminist autonomy theorists, feminist moral psychologists, and feminist ethicists), without foregrounding my standpoint as a white woman, thereby replicating the racial exclusions (and other biases) already ingrained in classic feminist thought. Intersectional feminism, whatever its drawbacks, is a better model than canonic white feminism. I also wanted to address non-racial axes of oppression, such as homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, with which I have relatively little direct experience (living, at the present moment, as an ostensibly abled woman in an opposite-sex romantic pair-bond).11 An intersectional feminist approach gives me the means to do this. It allows me to overcome my experiential limitations by drawing on testimony from people with different experiences, rooted in different social marginalizations. Whether this is the best solution to white feminism is, to some extent, a moot point. Since no one has provided any other book-length ameliorative analysis of responsibility, this is as good a starting point as any. Whatever flaws there are in the current analysis can hopefully be addressed by critics who share my ameliorative aims. Next, in using demographic data as part of my analysis, I must acknowledge that I have reified U.S. census categories, thereby excluding

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intersections within census categories (e.g., North Asian, East Asian), as well as intersections across census categories (e.g., Asian-African American). I cannot fully justify these exclusions. The best line of defense that I can offer is that I felt that census data provide good evidence of the magnitude of identity prejudice, and I unfortunately didn’t have the time or resources needed to develop my analysis beyond its current limitations. I hope that other philosophers, particularly early career-stage researchers, can expand my inquiry beyond what I was able to accomplish in this book. 6.2. Incompleteness One question that I’ve struggled with is whether intersectional feminism is a stand-alone framework that positions us to arbitrate every norm violation, or a partial account, i.e., a potential supplement to another theory. Classic paradigms purport to be exclusive and exhaustive. For example, control theory takes control considerations to decide all questions of responsibility. Control theorists (as far as I can tell) don’t take their theory to be compatible with character theory or any other paradigm. Control explains whether and when someone is responsible in full. I think that IF might be compatible with some aspects of other theories. For example, a more controlled act of sexism may be more blameworthy than a less controlled (e.g., implicit) act of sexism, all else being equal. Control, in other words, may be relevant to questions of proportionality or magnitude. What I deny that is that responsibility requires control (or answerability or enhanceability or any other capacity). If control is relevant, it is only relevant insofar as it helps us judge the extent to which intersectional feminist blame is apt. Still, one might question whether IF covers every type of norm violation, since not every norm violation is an act of systemic oppression, amenable to remediation through resistance and activism. One example that raises this kind of question is a much-discussed scenario presented by Angela Smith (2005), in which someone (let’s call her Fran) forgets about her friend’s birthday. Forgetting a birthday doesn’t seem to be an act of oppression or injustice, so how can IF decide whether Fran is blameworthy? There are a couple of possibilities. One is to see Fran’s ‘forgetting’ as a kind of low-key injustice, in which case it would warrant minor blame on IF’s first principle, which proscribes injustice. Intersectional feminism is interested in remediating injustice, even if it isn’t systemic in nature. Another possibility is to see Fran’s forgetting as something other than a transgression, or as too trivial a transgression to warrant blame in an intersectional feminist sense. Perhaps Fran’s friend is entitled to feel disappointment or anger, but not blame. Of course, this scenario is quite different from omissions that involve asymmetries of power, the bread and butter of intersectional feminism.

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Fran and her friend are supposed to be on equal footing – at least, asymmetries aren’t mentioned in Smith’s analysis. Since most relationships do involve asymmetries of power, this friendship is, perhaps, an aberration. In contrast, recall Mason’s scenario (2018) in which a cisgender husband ‘forgets’ to pick up the milk. On close inspection, the reason behind his ‘forgetting’ is his role in a patriarchal order that designates men as ‘breadwinners’ and women as ‘caregivers.’ Thus, his omission, unbeknownst to him, plays a sustaining role in a patriarchal order that limits women’s autonomy by increasing their domestic workload. These two ‘forgettings’ are quite different. Fran’s (if we take Smith’s description at face value) is an individual transgression, whereas the husband’s is a collective one – part of a collective injustice against women as a group. Such collective (or systemic) violations are the focal point of intersectional feminist analysis, an analysis that foregrounds hierarchies of power, which necessarily involve collectives or groups (e.g., men, women). These transgressions are also weightier and more harmful because they sustain hierarchies of power that harm not just individuals, but entire social groups. I think that IF has the resources to allocate blame for both types of violation – both individual and collective ones – even if it’s not always clear how to decide these cases. (Maybe Fran is marginally blameworthy or maybe she’s blameless.) However, IF is clearly oriented towards collective transgressions which reinforce systems of oppression. This is a sharp contrast to the dominant paradigms, which are oriented towards (what I would call) petty infractions, such as friends forgetting about birthday parties, roommates stealing food from shared refrigerators, and workers falling asleep on the job. This preoccupation with petty infractions is echoed in most other disciplines, and it obfuscates the asymmetries of power that structure the majority of our relationships in a postindustrial, global society. For example, Lockean political philosophy focuses on the wrongness of petty theft while ignoring the wrongness of genocide, slavery, and colonialism committed by the state (see Chapter 3 for details). So, I think that IF can arbitrate petty transgressions, but it sees them for what they are – both rare and relatively insignificant. IF asks us to diagnose the systems of oppression behind most interactions and relations in a global, asymmetrically structured world. One might think that blame by its nature can’t adequately address collective infractions, but I disagree. A colleague from Southern Illinois University (Edwardsville) recently asked me if IF is capable of assigning blame for anthropogenic climate change, a massively collective and epistemically complex problem. My answer is yes. To assign blame for climate change, we need to identify the culprits and the victims. While this calculation is complicated, we do have the resources needed to identify the principal contributors as well as those most harmed. At a first pass, we can note that 100 corporations are responsible for 71% of greenhouse gas emissions (Riley 2017), and that climate change disproportionally

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harms POC and women (NAACP 2019; Halton 2018). So, we can blame the directors of the top 100 contributing corporations for committing acts of environmental racism and sexism, which solidify the white supremacist and patriarchal order in which we live. This is just one part of the analysis, of course, but it is an important part, and it shows how IF enables us to blame individuals for their roles in collective harms, which affect entire groups. Notably, this is precisely the kind of blaming practice modelled by environmental activist Greta Thunburg, who promoted the importance of blame at the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos: We are facing [an] existential crisis, the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. If everyone is guilty, then no one is to blame, and someone is to blame . . . Some people, some companies, some decision makers in particular know exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money, and I think many of you here today belong to that group of people. (Landy 2019, emphasis mine) Thunburg is saying: we know who is to blame and we should blame them. Thunburg’s speech is an excellent example of how we can blame people for collective harms in ameliorative ways. In sum, IF can deal with individual and collective transgressions alike, but because of its first commitment (to foreground systems of injustice and oppression), it is naturally oriented towards systemic violations. And it treats these violations as the effects of individual perpetrators, effects for which these individuals can be blamed. IF first and foremost blames people for their roles in hierarchies of power and the impact of those collective transgressions on social groups. It identifies individual perpetrators and situates them in collectives, and holds them responsible for the effects of those collectives on specific groups. 6.3. Perpetrators and Victims Another anticipated objection is to my preferred terminology for norm violators and their victims. Blame, on my description, involves a representation of someone as having committed a norm violation against someone else, the ‘victim.’ I will refer to the perpetrator interchangeably as the norm violator, wrongdoer, and offender. I take these various usages to be fairly standard and uncontroversial. However, I should note that when I call someone a ‘perpetrator,’ I don’t mean to imply anything about the person’s agency; I just mean that the person has violated a norm. (And I take norm violations to be embedded in social systems or collectives. When someone violates a norm, it is against a background of hierarchies of power.)

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The more contentious usage is of the term ‘victim’ to refer to the person who has been wronged. Debates about the terms ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ revolve around the cultural connotations of these terms, with ‘victim’ stereotypically associated with passivity, powerlessness, and innocence, and ‘survivor’ stereotypically associated with agency, resilience, and guilt (McCaffrey 1998; Papendick & Bohner 2017). Each term has different positive and negative connotations, and neither is ideal or uncontroversial. While many women have adopted the term ‘rape survivor’ as a symbol of resilience, others, such as Roxanne Gay (2017), prefer the term ‘victim.’ Some theorists have adopted the hyphenated term ‘victimsurvivor’ (e.g., Jean-Charles 2014) to convey that no one is a consummate ‘victim’ in the stereotypical sense, nor a consummate ‘survivor.’ Rather, everyone is a ‘victim’ and a ‘survivor’ at the same time. People are, as Beauvoir said, always both ‘subjectivity’ and ‘facticity,’ as this is the human condition (1949). In designating someone as the recipient of a transgression, however, I don’t want to imply anything about the person’s agency, since transgressions have ambivalent and unpredictable effects on agency. Testimonial injustice, for example, can impair a person’s epistemic confidence (Fricker 2007), or increase a person’s knowledge of dynamics of oppression (Mills 2017), or both (Pohlhaus 2014). In general, the effects of epistemic injustice are complex, highly subjective, and context-specific. To avoid making problematic generalizations about the relationship between transgressions and agency, I’m simply going to use the term ‘victim’ in a stipulative sense, to designate someone as the target of a transgression, without intending to imply anything about the effects on the person’s agency. 6.4. Identity Prejudice and Similar Terminology In this book, I refer variously to identity prejudice, cultural biases, and discrimination as sources of asymmetries of power in our responsibility system. These terms can have different meanings, but I use them interchangeably to refer to the same phenomenon, which is (essentially) what Miranda Fricker calls ‘identity prejudice’ – prejudice against someone in virtue of their identity as a member of a marginalized group. As such, not everyone can be a victim of (a type of) identity prejudice. As a white person, I cannot be a victim of racial identity prejudice, because my racial identity (white) is not culturally marginalized, disadvantaged, or disvalued. (To put it differently, I am not racialized by the culture’s white-supremacist logic.) Privileged identities cannot experience identity prejudice because they are not victims of systemic discrimination – they are beneficiaries of systems of domination that oppress other people. As a white person, I have never faced racial prejudice, but I have benefited from racial privilege since before I was born – from the moment that my mother received better prenatal care than the average Black mother, to

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the moment that I wrote this sentence on a laptop that my white privilege helped me to afford. This book aims to diagnose and combat asymmetries of power that disadvantage people within moral conversations in virtue of their identities as members of marginalized groups. Thus, it seeks to combat identity prejudice, the kind of prejudice experienced by the culturally oppressed. This means that I do not treat every bias or exclusion as equal. To illustrate the difference: a Women in Philosophy (WIP) group, on my view, is acceptable, but a men’s philosophy group is not. A Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) group is acceptable, but a white’s only philosophy group is not. These two types of ‘exclusion’ are not equivalent because one involves identity prejudice and the other doesn’t. The WIP and MAP groups are positively ameliorative because they seek to mobilize members of underrepresented groups around shared insights and shared aims of inclusion and diversity, and they help them promote each other’s work, which is good for the entire profession. These groups help to distribute epistemic respect more fairly and to generate more objective (less biased) knowledge (Harding 2015).12 A men’s or ‘whites only’ philosophy group would do the opposite – hamper the production of objective knowledge by reinforcing the status quo. 6.5. The White, Cisgender, Masculine Gaze A final anticipated objection concerns my focus on the standpoint of white cisgender masculinity, particularly in Chapters 10 and 11, where I analyze the negative impact of this standpoint on marginalized groups. Arguably, my focus on marginalized groups (women, POC, etc.) neglects the negative impacts of the white-cisgender-masculine standpoint on the powerful – those whose acculturated frame of reference comprises the standpoint itself. In reality, the white-cis-masculine frame of reference harms everyone in one way or another; it constructs people’s identities around rigid cultural schemas, limiting their existential possibilities, social roles, and relationships. But cisgender white men are harmed by this framework less than other groups on average, which is why I don’t focus on their plight. Consider just one aspect of the dominant frame of reference: masculinity. According to the cultural stereotype of masculinity, men are good at making money and bad at caregiving. Accordingly, we should expect men to receive more credit for performing masculine-coded roles and less for assuming feminine-coded roles. But this doesn’t pan out, if financial rewards are any indication. Men out-earn women in both traditionally male occupations (e.g., business) and traditionally female occupations (caregiving) (Dishman 2015). And there’s evidence that single fathers, who should be judged negatively according to gender conventions, are actually judged more favourably than single mothers (Haire & McGeorge 2012). That is, men are given more credit (and money) in feminine-coded

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roles as well as masculine-coded roles. In contrast, women who take on traditionally masculine roles make less money than men, and when they migrate into historically male industries in large numbers, the average salary drops (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2017). This implies that, even if everyone is harmed in one way or another, women are hit harder by patriarchal gender schemas. This explains why I focus on the adversity experienced by marginalized groups rather than privileged groups, though I would not deny that cultural schemas harm everyone, often in unquantifiable ways. They harm us in our capacity to be full persons, to enter into reciprocal relationships with one another, to participate equally in friendships and families, and so on.

7. Final Words Strawson’s model of responsibility was invaluable for its role in shifting the discussion away from metaphysics towards the ethics of holding responsible. But it didn’t recognize (let alone foreground) the role of malignant asymmetries of power in the responsibility system. Contemporary Strawsonians have tried to provide a normatively adequate and psychologically realizable account of the reactive attitudes, but they haven’t been able to do this because they haven’t (for the most part) focused on the asymmetries of power that shape our interpersonal practices. In this book, I aim to provide an ameliorative alternative to the Strawsonian orthodoxy, one that is both more psychologically tenable and more normatively adequate that its competitors, because, unlike the Strawsonian model, it foregrounds the asymmetries of power that structure interpersonal interactions so as to marginalize certain people.

Notes 1. Henceforth, all uses of “responsibility” should be taken to denote moral responsibility. 2. Mad studies and critical fat studies also deserve to be mentioned. I don’t include them in my account of intersectional feminism because I don’t have the space to do them justice, which is one of the drawbacks of an intersectional feminist analysis. That said, I address some of the key themes of these subdisciplines throughout the book. 3. This is my own personal mapping of the literature, which is contestable. Even so, this breakdown should, at the very least, shed light on some the commitments held by some of the leading scholars in the field. 4. I wrote most of this book before Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility was published, but I went back and inserted relevant content into my arguments. I believe that these changes strengthen my position. In philosophy, we have to stand on the shoulders of giants, even if they are few and far between in our areas of specialization. 5. I subscribe to an expansive list of the responsibility-structuring attitudes. In my view, blame can involve resentment, indignation, and other classic Strawsonian attitudes, as well as contempt, scorn, disdain, rage, etc.

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6. Or a perpetrator of a suberogatory action. Michael McKenna argues that a person can be blameworthy both for norm violations and for less serious, suberogatory actions which don’t violate a norm, but fall short of a reasonable expectation (2012). I agree, but I do not explicitly cite suberogatory actions in my analysis simply because it’s too cumbersome to continuously name both. I take my account to apply to both norm violations and suberogatory actions, but norm violations are the more serious concern, which is why I give them precedence. 7. I consider these types of ‘psychology’ experiments on nonhuman animals to be useless and inhumane. See Singer (1975) for a thorough account of the scope of useless, torturous ‘psychology’ experiments on nonhuman animals. 8. Aside from this, I do not necessarily subscribe to any other of Macnamara’s conditions. 9. Henceforth, when I speak of blame tracking people’s ‘roles’ or ‘participation’ in hierarchies of power, I will be referring specifically to their statusconferring roles and participation – those that confer high status according to conventional social norms. (For example, slut-shaming women confers status according to patriarchal norms.) 10. She is specifically responding to attributability and control accounts, but her objection applies equally well to answerability accounts. I will show this in Chapter 3, in which I critique all of these paradigms of responsibility. 11. My identity is more complex than this, but the point is that I haven’t experienced oppression because of my outward appearance, and because I haven’t experienced it I can’t write about it from a first-person standpoint. 12. To clarify, I’m not saying that men and white people don’t do good work: I’m saying that a men-only and whites-only philosophy groups would not produce objective knowledge because they wouldn’t have the experiential insights needed to correct their identity-based biases. For more on the epistemic value of diversity, see Ciurria (2017).

References Beauvoir, S. (1949). The second sex. Vintage, 2012. Bell, M. (2013). The standing to blame: A critique. In Blame: Its nature and norms, eds. Coates & Tognazzini. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Boxill, B. R. (2010). The responsibility of the oppressed to resist their own oppression. Journal of Social Philosophy, 41(1), 1–12. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2017). U.S. department of labor. Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey. Retrieved Nov 2, 2018, from: www. bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm Campbell, C. A. (1957). Has the self ‘free will’? On Selfhood and Godhood, London: George Allen & Unwin. Chisholm, R. M. (1982). The foundations of knowing. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Ciurria, M. (2017). Objectivity, diversity, and uptake: On the status of women in philosophy. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 3(3), 1–23. Coates, D. J., & Tognazzini, N. A. (2013). The contours of blame. In Blame: Its nature and norms, eds. Coates & Tognazzini. Oxford University Press. Cudd, A. E. (2006). Analyzing oppression. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Dishman, L. (2015, Apr 4). The other wage gap: Why men in female-dominated industries still earn more. Fast Company. Retrieved from: www.fastcompany.

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com/3044753/the-other-wage-gap-why-men-in-women-dominated-industriesstill-earn-more Flowers, R. (2015). Refusal to forgive: Indigenous women’s love and rage. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(2). Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Gary, A., Khader, S. J., & Stone, A. (eds.). (2017). The Routledge companion to feminist philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. Gay, R. (2017). Hunger: A memoir of (my) body. HarperCollins. Haire, A. R., & McGeorge, C. R. (2012). Negative perceptions of never-married custodial single mothers and fathers: Applications of a gender analysis for family therapists. Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, 24(1), 24–51. Halton, M. (2018, Mar 8). Climate change ‘impacts women more than men’. BBC News. Retrieved from: www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43294221 Hancock, A. M. (2016). Intersectionality: An intellectual history. Oxford University Press. Harding, S. (2015). Objectivity and diversity: Another logic of scientific research. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Haslanger, S. (2006, June). I-Sally Haslanger: What good are our intuitions? In Aristotelian society supplementary volume (Vol. 80, No. 1, pp.  89–118). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hay, C. (2013). The obligation to resist oppression. In Kantianism, liberalism, and feminism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Holroyd, J. (2018). Two ways of socialising responsibility: Circumstantialist and scaffolded-responsiveness. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. Oxford University Press. Hutchison, K. (2018). Moral responsibility, respect, and social identity. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. Oxford University Press. Jean-Charles, R. M. (2014). Toward a victim-survivor narrative: Rape and form in Yvonne Vera’s Under the Tongue and Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga. Research in African Literatures, 45(1), 39–62. Landy, H. (2019, Jan 25). A 16-year-old tells Davos delegates that if the planet dies, she’s blaming them. Quartz. Retrieved from: https://qz.com/1533904/ greta-thunberg-blames-davos-delegates-for-climate-change/ Levy, N. (2018). Socialising responsibility. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. Oxford University Press. Macnamara, C. (2015). Blame, communication, and morally responsible agency. In The nature of moral responsibility, eds. Clarke et al. New York: Oxford University Press. Mason, E. (2018). Respecting each other and taking responsibility for our biases. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. Oxford University Press. McCaffrey, D. (1998). Victim feminism/victim activism. Sociological Spectrum, 18(3), 263–284. McKenna, M. (2012). Conversation & responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. (1998). The limits of evil and the role of moral address: A defense of Strawsonian compatibilism. The Journal of Ethics, 2(2), 123–142. Mills, C. W. (2017). Black rights/white wrongs: The critique of racial liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

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NAACP. (2019). Environmental & climate justice. Retrieved from: www.naacp. org/issues/environmental-justice/ Oshana, M., Hutchison, K., & Mackenzie, C. (eds.). (2018). Social dimensions of moral responsibility. Oxford University Press. Papendick, M., & Bohner, G. (2017). ‘Passive victim-strong survivor’? Perceived meaning of labels applied to women who were raped. PLoS One, 12(5), e0177550. Pohlhaus, G., Jr. (2014). Discerning the primary epistemic harm in cases of testimonial injustice. Social Epistemology, 28(2), 99–114. Riley, T. (2017, July 10). Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian. com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investorsresponsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change Russell, S., & Cunneen, C. (2018, Dec 10) As Indigenous incarceration rates keep rising, justice investment provides a solution. The Conversation. Singer, P. (1975). Animal liberation: A new ethic for our treatment of animals. HarperCollins. Smith, A. M. (2005). Responsibility for attitudes: Activity and passivity in mental life. Ethics, 115(2), 236–271. Strawson, P. F. (1963). Freedom and resentment. In Freedom and resentment and other essays. London & New York: Routledge, 2008. Van Inwagen, P. (1978). Ability and responsibility. The Philosophical Review, 87(2), 201–224. Waller, B. N. (2014). The stubborn system of moral responsibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Watson, G. (1987). Responsibility and the limits of evil: Variations on a Strawsonian theme. In Free will and Reactive attitudes, eds., McKenna & Russell. Ashgate: Surrey, England, 2016. Zack, N. (2005). Inclusive feminism: A third wave theory of women’s commonality. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

1

Intersectional Feminism

1. Introduction There is not, to my knowledge, an existing philosophical account of intersectional feminism, though many feminists purport to be intersectional feminists, and the term is increasingly prevalent in public discourse. Since there is (to my knowledge) no comprehensive model in the philosophical literature, I will construct my own using resources from some of the most relevant philosophical subdisciplines – namely, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, queer theory, critical disability studies, and intersectionality theory. My motive for adopting an intersectional feminist framework is to move away from classic feminist perspectives and towards a more diverse and inclusive feminism that speaks to a range of experiences and aims. Before trying to distill these subdisciplines into a concise rubric, I should note that it’s not possible to provide a complete, comprehensive, or uncontroversial set of intersectional feminist principles. As Ange-Marie Hancock attests, the project of developing an intersectional framework “is always incomplete and shot through with politics” (2016: 4). Thus, any intersectional approach should be seen as fallible, evolving, and contestable. Having said this, philosophers have provided helpful summaries of some of the core tenets of the subdisciplines that I take to be relevant to ‘intersectional feminism,’ understood as a feminist method suitably sensitive to multiple intersections of power and domination – that is, a coherent and inclusive feminism. These subdisciplines share a set of core assumptions that can be used to construct an intersectional feminist framework. The subdisciplines that I will focus on are: (1) feminist philosophy, (2) critical race theory, (3) queer theory, (4) critical disability theory, and (5) intersectionality theory. These are not the only schools of thought relevant to intersectional feminism, but they are representative examples of a mode of ameliorative/relational analysis that fits with an intersectional feminist ethic, and can therefore be used to structure that ethic. Other subdisciplines committed to this mode of criticism include LatinX philosophy (e.g., Vargas 2018), mad studies (e.g., LeFrançois et al. 2013), fat studies (e.g., Gay 2017), and several other emancipatory

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fields that I unfortunately do not have time to cover here (though I will refer to them when relevant in subsequent chapters). In this chapter, I’ll outline the five selected subdisciplines, focusing on consolidating their shared central commitments. In subsequent chapters, I’ll keep these commitments in mind when analyzing dominant paradigms of responsibly in academia and beyond.

2. Feminist Philosophy In this section, I’ll outline the core commitments shared between feminist philosophy and other emancipatory subdisciplines. In later sections, I will explain how these commitments figure in other subdisciplines. The current section will be the longest only because I don’t want to repeat myself in later sections. I don’t mean to imply that feminist philosophy is the main source of intersectional feminist commitments – some of these commitments originate in other sources. But I’ll give the most detailed exposition of these shared commitments here. 2.1. Intersectional Analysis Feminist philosophy is a system of analysis and praxis that seeks to combat sexism and patriarchal oppression. In early feminist scholarship, the “voices of white, Western feminist, often those working in ‘analytic’ or Anglo-American philosophy .  .  . prevailed within these debates” (Gary et al. 2017: 1). One of the central aims of contemporary feminism is to incorporate a diversity of perspectives, interests, and normative aims into feminist thought. 2.2. Ameliorative Analysis Recently, feminist philosophers have begun to espouse a method of analysis that is more responsive to historical exclusions than the classic approach. This is an ‘ameliorative’ method. Sally Haslanger defends this method as an alternative to the ‘conceptual’ and ‘descriptive’ paradigms, which define relevant concepts using “a priori methods such as introspection,” and analysis of the “objective types [that] our epistemic vocabulary tracks,” respectively (2006: 6). Both approaches are strongly informed by common sense (i.e., the dominant schemas that structure mainstream thinking). The first method defines concepts by appeal to common-sense intuitions, and the second defines them by appeal to the cultural lexicon – our widely-shared cultural vocabulary. In contrast, an ameliorative analysis defines concepts by reference to a set of emancipatory aims, which may or may not be ‘common-sensical.’ To be more precise, it begins by asking, “What is the point of having the concept in question?” and then

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constructs a definition anchored in ameliorative goals, such as mitigating racial injustice (Haslanger 2006: 7). Haslanger illustrates this method by offering an ameliorative analysis of race that departs from the classic understanding of race as a biological trait or fixed essence of persons. Instead, she proposes that we define ‘race’ by reference to concepts that can play an ameliorative role in our system of social meanings. These ameliorative concepts are ones that recognize the connection between race and dynamics of oppression that mark certain bodies as ‘racial.’ (Similarly, concepts of ‘gender,’ ‘sex,’ ‘ability,’ and so on, should be defined in relation to relevant systems of oppression.) Haslanger proceeds to define ‘race’ by reference to racialized groups . . . [whose] members are positioned as subordinate or privileged along some dimension . . . and the group is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographical region. (2006: 4) This definition, unlike the alternatives, is sensitive to the relationships between race and systems of power that ‘racialize’ certain bodies and treat them as proper objects of subordination. It makes it impossible to conceive of race outside of dynamics of oppression. 2.3. Non-Ideal Analysis Another recent addition to feminism’s methodological toolkit is nonideal theory. As discussed in the introduction, Charles Mills (2005, 2017) advances non-ideal theory as an antidote to the standard idealizations in political philosophy which represent the social ontology as nearly perfectly liberal. The classic analytic lens erases the reality of dynamics of oppression, including the white supremacist social order that structures race relations in the American mainstream. Elizabeth Anderson similarly argues that political philosophers should adopt a non-ideal methodology, together with a “group relations methodology” that focuses attention on the normative significance of groups and relationships (2009: 130). She argues further that the relational approach is continuous with the nonideal approach because it brings to light androcentric and other power structures that are impossible to locate on an individualist framing, i.e., one that neglects structural inequalities and their effects on entire groups (as opposed to discrete individuals). Androcentrism, for instance, affects individual women, but it also affects all women, and an individualist analysis fails to capture these group-level effects of androcentric prejudice, as well as the androcentric system itself.

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Though non-ideal theory receives perhaps its best articulation in Mills, it was present in incipient form in the works of feminist philosophers such as Carole Patement, Marilyn Friedman, and Alison Jaggar. In fact, Mills studied under Pateman, and took her award-winning book, The Sexual Contract (1988), as inspiration for his own book, The Racial Contract (2014). All of these philosophers develop something along the lines of a non-ideal analysis of social relations focused on systems of oppression. 2.4. Relational Analysis The relational standpoint may complement non-ideal theory, but it predates the latter, having emerged in classic feminist critiques of ‘the self,’ a notion that was (mis)understood by Kant and J. S. Mill as “transparent, unified, coherent, and independent,” rather than dynamic, largely irrational, and structured by asymmetrical power relations (Willett et al. 2015). The relational approach zeroes in on the structures and collectives that comprise hierarchies of power and that enable asymmetrical power relations, which an individualist analysis leaves unanalyzed and essentially invisible. Feminist philosophers reject individualistic analysis in favour of structural and collective analyses, which bring to light systems of oppression and their group-level effects. That said, they don’t reject the ontological reality or normative significance of the individual.1 They believe, rather, that there are discretely embodied individuals who act, enter into relationships, and either support or resist systems of power and domination. But they see these individual actors as component parts of systems and collectives, and as enhanced or impaired by those relationships and interdependencies. On this basis, they see individual responsibility as essentially informed by our relationships and social positions. To properly understand individual agency, we must see the embodied individual as embedded in, informed by, and integral to social systems and collectives. 2.5. Activist Goals Feminist philosophers aren’t content with theorizing and diagnosing systems of oppression – they believe that we should actively combat them. Consistent with this, many have defended the notion that we have a duty to resist our own oppression (Hay 2013; Boxill 2010), a duty to protect others from oppression (2003), and a duty to protest systems of oppression (Cudd 2006). In other words, feminist philosophers do not accept ‘passive bystanderism’ as a defensible moral position in the face of injustice and oppression, which are structural features of our society. There is no instance in which ‘going with the flow’ is morally acceptable. Indeed, feminist philosophy is deeply indebted to activist philosophers like W. E. B. Dubois, Angela Davis, and Cornell West, who have integrated

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emancipatory concepts into the academic vernacular, and have promoted those concepts more broadly through community outreach and political activism. I take these activist philosophers to be exemplars of intersectional feminism as an ameliorative ethic.2 They’re academics who practice what they preach. My reason for wanting to include active intervention in systems of power and domination as a desideratum of IF is that third-parties are a critical part of the responsibility system, even though they are not in the perpetrator or the victim role. Yet third parties still share a moral ecology with perpetrators and victims – an ecology shaped by our responsibilityholding relationships and norms. As Macalester Bell points out (2013), third parties are implicated in responsibility exchanges as witnesses and potential critics, and are in a position to intervene for better or for worse. People who don’t intervene in oppressive dynamics are not innocent: they are complicit in the dynamics of oppression that they enable through their inaction. Far from being morally acceptable, inaction is an example of the banality of evil (Arendt 1963). It is a necessary condition for systemic oppression. In this connection, many philosophers have argued that we have a duty to combat oppression (e.g., Yankah 2019; Miller 2013). Perhaps most famously, Carol Hay has defended this duty on both consequentialist and deontological grounds. Failing to resist oppression, she says, can cause harm by “making oppression appear acceptable, or, even worse . . . mak[ing] oppression appear not to be oppression at all” (2013: 22). Thus, failing to intervene can be positively harmful. Secondly, failing to resist oppression, even when it doesn’t cause any harm to anyone, may violate duties that we have to ourselves and others. When I, as a woman, fail to resist patriarchal oppression, I am (says Hay) violating a duty to myself as a rational agent entitled to respect, recognition, and self-esteem. As a rational agent, I have a self-regarding duty to resist oppression against women, a group to which I belong. On the same basis, we can infer that we have other-regarding duties to combat oppression as it affects other rational agents (by virtue of their identity or group membership). When I, as a white person, fail to protest racial oppression (i.e., a system of power that privileges me as a white person), I am failing to respect racialized minorities as rational agents entitled to the same respect, recognition, and self-esteem to which I’m entitled, and that I can normally command from others by virtue of my white privilege. Thus, I have consequentialist and deontological reasons to combat oppression, not only as it affects me (as a woman), but as it affects others (e.g., racialized minorities).3 Hence, the duty to combat oppression applies both to the victims of oppression and to those who reap the rewards. Having said this, I should point out that the duty to combat oppression should not be understood as distributed evenly across all social groups. This is because combating oppression imposes asymmetrical costs on

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different social groups, something that Hay doesn’t mention.4 To illustrate this, imagine that a white employee calls his Black colleague the N-word in front of his white boss. It’s less costly for the boss to rebuke the offender than for the Black employee to do so due to the power differentials between the two. The CEO can’t be fired for intervening, and his rebuke is very unlikely to be dismissed or contested due to the epistemic clout conferred by his professional rank and white privilege. Because the costs of intervening are unevenly distributed across social groups, the duty to combat oppression must be unevenly distributed as well. Mind that this isn’t because of the principle of ‘ought implies can.’ Oppressed individuals (often) can resist oppression, but their resistance is (often) very costly. Thus, the duty to intervene is unevenly distributed because the costs of intervening are so much more onerous for members of oppressed groups, and because imposing even more burdens on them would reinforce existing asymmetries of power and privilege. African Americans already live under burdens such as the racial wealth gap, employment discrimination, and educational inequality, to name just a few, and, as if this weren’t enough, upward social mobility appears to cause adverse health effects in African Americans but not white people (via a phenomenon known colloquially as ‘John Henryism’) (Hamblin 2017). This isn’t to say that racialized minorities shouldn’t resist racial oppression, but that if they don’t, they don’t necessarily deserve blame, and they’re certainly not as eligible for blame as white people who (all else being equal) can so easily stand up to racists and racist collectives at so little personal cost. For these reasons, the obligation to intervene in various kinds of oppression is asymmetrically distributed across groups based on the costs of intervening.

3. Critical Race Theory Critical race theory is a system of analysis and praxis that seeks to analyze and combat racial oppression. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic describe critical race theory as committed to five central propositions, which largely overlap with the tenets that I ascribed to feminist philosophy above. The first proposition says that racism is “ordinary, not aberrational . . . the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country” (Delgado & Stefancic 2001: 7). That is, we live in non-ideal social conditions, not conditions of racial justice. Second, “large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate [racism]” (ibid.). In contrast to these segments, critical race theorists are interested in diagnosing and actively combating racism: “unlike some other disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It not only tries to understand our social situation, but to change it” (2001: 3). The third proposition says that race is produced by “social thought and relations,” not “objective, inherent, or fixed” features of persons (ibid.). That is, race is partly defined by asymmetrical

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power relations, and therefore requires relational analysis to be properly understood. Fourth, members of different racial groups are differently racialized: for example, African Americans and Asian Americans both face racial discrimination, but they face very different types of racial discrimination. This speaks to the need for intersectional analysis as a way of analyzing the effects of different axes of oppression on different people. Fifth, racialized minorities have “presumed competence to speak about race and racism” because they have experiences of oppression that are not directly accessible to white people, which are obfuscated by what Mills calls white ignorance (Delgado & Stefancic 2001: 9). That is, racialized minorities have epistemic authority on the topic of racial oppression. This brief summary of critical race theory reveals a number of commitments in common with feminist philosophy – in particular, the commitment to non-ideal theory, relational analysis, ameliorative analysis, intersectionality, and activism in the face of injustice and oppression.

4. Queer Theory Queer theory was originally a system of analysis and praxis that sought to combat heteronormativity, a system of norms and schemas that privileges heterosexual identities and relationships. Contemporary queer theory has expanded beyond its original mandate, to analyze and problematize cisgender privilege (Haraway 1988), racial biases that intersect with and amplify heterosexism (Zack 1997), and other asymmetries of power that marginalize certain identities under the LGBT+ umbrella. Consistent with other emancipatory subdisciplines, queer theory rejects the notion that gender identity is an essential, static, or fixed property of individuals, and sees it instead as a product of asymmetrical power relations that mark certain bodies as ‘queer’ and ‘other’ relative to the cisheteronormative majority. Queer theory originated in activist groups such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation (Illinois Library 2018), and continues to engage with and draw insights from activist communities that challenge cisheteronormative laws, policies, and presumptions. Thus, queer theory shares with feminist philosophy and critical race theory a commitment to diagnosing and ameliorating multiple axes of oppression, challenging hegemonic norms, analyzing relations of oppression, and actively combating hierarchies of power. In other words, it shares the same ameliorative, relational, non-ideal, and activist principles.

5. Critical Disability Theory Critical disability theory focuses on asymmetries of power that privilege abled people. It treats disability as a result of asymmetrical power relations as opposed to a biological feature of individuals or a diagnosable medical condition, and it deconstructs ableist privilege. For instance,

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it explores the ways in which ableist ideologies and structures inform popular understandings of personhood, agency, and autonomy, and how these associations impair our ability to make non-disablist (autonomous) choices (e.g., Tremain 2017; Ho 2008). Contemporary critical disability scholarship is also concerned with intersections between ableism and other axes of oppression that amplify the adversity experienced by those who exist at these crossroads. As such, critical disability theory shares with feminist philosophy, critical race theory, and queer theory an interest in diagnosing and combating multiple asymmetries of power, deconstructing oppressive ideologies, and dismantling hierarchies of power. It subscribes to the same basic ameliorative, relational, non-ideal, and activist commitments.

6. Intersectionality Theory Intersectionality theory emerged as a response to mounting concerns within emancipatory subdisciplines about the perpetuation of systems of power and domination within these spaces, which were theoretically meant to be inclusive and egalitarian, but in fact replicated and reproduced conventional dynamics of power and privilege. Intersectionality theory is meant to bring subtle (because normalized) dimensions of power and oppression into clear focus. Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016) provide the following helpful summary: Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences. The events and conditions of social and political life and the self can seldom be understood as shaped by one factor. They are generally shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways. When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other. Intersectionality as an analytic tool gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves. (2016: 1–2) Collins and Bilge emphasize that intersectionality theory is both an inquiry and a practice, and these theoretical and practical dimensions are interrelated: intersectional analysis helps us solve real-world problems and problem-solving helps us refine our intersectional concepts and methods. To illustrate the application of intersectionality theory to a (perhaps) seemingly mundane context, Collins and Bilge analyze the 2014 FIFA World Cup. While some people would see the World Cup as an ‘apolitical’

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soccer game, it’s actually a highly political space in which disciplinary, cultural, and structural asymmetries of power intersect. As such, the World Cup is far from an even playing field. Amongst the asymmetries of power that inform professional soccer are the fact that men and women don’t compete against each other; that men are systematically afforded opportunities that are denied to women (Collins & Bilge 2016: 8); that intersex athletes are excluded by the binary sex classification system; and that women, the elderly, and people from poorer communities don’t have the same access to training and facilities as men, young people, and members of wealthier communities (ibid). Yet FIFA’s public narrative represents athletic differences as the results of individual inferiority, lack of discipline, or brute bad luck, rather than the inevitable products of systemic inequality, both within soccer and in the wider culture. In addition, the organizers of FIFA have been indicted for rigging the bidding process, fraud, money laundering, and other crimes that exacerbate inequality and injustice in the sport (Collins & Bilge 2016:12–13). This analysis reveals the applicability of intersectionality theory to even the most mundane of contexts. The FIFA World Cup is just one example of a general truth: no space is a truly even playing field. Every sphere of life is structured by interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural, and structural dynamics of power. Even feminist and anti-racist spaces involve hierarchies of power that are less-than-transparent to their members, in spite of their shared (explicit) commitment to full equality. Our interpersonal responsibility practices are no different – they’re shaped by the same asymmetries of power that structure the FIFA World Cup. Another phenomenon examined by Collins and Bilge is economic inequality. This subject is a central locus of philosophical concern, but it cannot be explained in the standard way, i.e., in purely economic terms. This is because economic hardship “does not fall equally on everyone . . . Social divisions of race, gender, age, and citizenship status, among others, position people differently in the world, especially in relation to global social inequality” (2016: 15–16). Because of these non-economic divisions, a ‘class-only’ explanation of economic inequality is fundamentally inadequate, as it negates the ways in which financial inequalities differentially impact members of different social groups, irrespective of financial status. Hence, “both the neoclassical economics accepted in US venues and Marxist social thought more often found in European settings” are flawed explanatory paradigms, in that they omit relevant intersections of non-economic oppression (2014: 15). This is also an important lesson for responsibility theorists, who, like economists, tend to neglect the racial, gender, sexual, ableist, and other dimensions of inequality that structure our perception of ‘economic responsibility,’ i.e., of who deserves a bank loan, a mortgage, a job, and other economic opportunities that accrue disproportionally to white cisgender men. An adequate theory of responsibility cannot neglect the multiple intersections of power and

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domination that structure our various transactions, and our perceptions of desert, capacity, agency, and identity. Recently, intersectionality theory has come under attack from detractors who see it as a form of ‘identity politics,’ which, as Cressida Heyes observes, has become “something of a philosophical punching-bag for a variety of critics” (2016). Intersectionality theory shares with identity politics an understanding of identity as constructed by relations of power and domination. As Heyes notes, critics tend to “fail to make sufficiently clear their object of critique, using ‘identity politics’ as a blanket description that invokes a range of tacit political failings” (ibid.). While there are better and worse forms of identity politics, the notion that identity has a political dimension should be fairly uncontroversial. Indeed, many people who criticize identity politics unwittingly engage in it by claiming that they are being attacked by identity theorists and ‘social justice warriors’ on the basis of their (typically white and male) identity. Ultimately, the central premise of identity politics (that identity emerges from political contestation and epistemic negotiation) is not as controversial as critics allege. To conclude, intersectionality theory shares central commitments with feminist philosophy, critical race theory, and other emancipatory subdisciplines. It assumes that we live in non-ideal conditions, construes oppression as relational and structural, rejects hegemonic understandings, and is committed to actively combatting oppression and injustice.

7. Core Principles Based on the foregoing analysis, I take the following five commitments to be central to intersectional feminism understood as a system of theory and praxis sensitive to intersections of racial, gender, heteronormative, ableist, and other dimensions of oppression. In brief, an intersectional feminist approach aims to: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v)

Foreground intersections of injustice, oppression, and adversity Actively combat axes of injustice, oppression, and adversity Use an ameliorative method Use a relational method Use a non-ideal theoretical method

In the next chapter, I will use these five principles as a basis for critically evaluating some of the most influential philosophical and cultural paradigms of responsibility. For the rest of the current chapter, I will briefly address some anticipated objections to the current proposal. 7.1. Principlism Feminist philosophy is sometimes contrasted against ‘principlist’ moral theories like Kantianism and utilitarianism, which derive moral duties

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from abstract principles. In contrast, feminist philosophy is (often) taken to be rooted in concrete relationships and situations rather than principles (viz., Munson & Lague 2013). Thus, one could object that a principled approach (which outlines a set of principles to apply or follow) is methodologically incompatible with feminist philosophy per se. In response, I would say that the contrast between principles and practice is something of a false dichotomy. It can be traced to Carol Gilligan’s (1993) distinction between principles of justice, which are supposed to be abstract and acontextual, and principles of care, which are supposed to be relational and concrete. Notice, however, that principles of care, while relational and contextual, are still principles: they simply contain different content than principles of justice. When we care for people in a principled way, we do so consistently and sensitively, not as a ‘fair-weather friend’ would. I can act on the principle of care while still caring for my friend for her own sake, with sensitivity to the contours of the relationship and the demands on the situation. The ‘principle of care’ instructs us to care for others well and consistently. It doesn’t require us to subordinate the value of the relationship to the value of duty. Still, there is an important difference between my framework and classic ‘principlist’ theories like Kantianism and utilitarianism, which is that, while I have offered a set of action-guiding principles, these principles are based on, and sensitive to, concrete relations of power and domination as they exist in the real world. My principles don’t simply identify a theoretical ideal and enjoin is to pursue it; instead, these principles train our attention on asymmetries of power in real social relations, and enjoin us to analyze and ameliorate them, seeking guidance from epistemic authorities along the way. Therefore, though I’ve reduced intersectional feminism to a set of principles, they’re not the abstract and acontextual principles of ideal theory: they direct our attention to specific contexts of oppression and relations of domination that we have an interest in ameliorating. For this reason, my position isn’t susceptible to the objections normally levelled against abstract versions of principlism. 7.2. Implementation Problems It can be difficult to know how to implement any theory, and IF is no exception. What should we do when we are unsure about how best to apply IF’s principles to a specific case? This is a problem that any theory faces, but intersectional feminism should provide a unique answer. As Delgado and Stefancic note, members of racialized groups should be presumed to have “competence to speak about race and racism” because they have experiences of oppression that are not directly accessible to white people (2001: 9). Their knowledge also tends to be omitted from hegemonic theoretical paradigms and explanations. Therefore, when trying to solve implementation problems against a backdrop of asymmetrical power relations (i.e., our actual social conditions), we should consult

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with people with relevant experiences of oppression. This differs from the classic reflective equilibrium method, which involves balancing our reflective beliefs against our principled judgments. The classic, Rawlsian method takes for granted the acceptability of our background assumptions, which, as Sally Haslanger points out, may be implicitly prejudiced (1999). To reduce the unforeseen effects of implicit bias on our moral reasoning, we should consult with differently positioned people. This method is more likely to yield what Sandra Harding calls “strong objectivity,” or objectivity based on a diversity of information (2015: 30). The ‘Strong Objectivity Approach’ (SOA) has a number of theoretical and empirical advantages over the classic Rawlsian approach, as Harding demonstrates in her critique of ‘scientism.’ First, SOA “starts with clear recognition of how science is actually practised in the real world today,” i.e., on the basis of implicit assumptions shared by privileged people; “It does not start from an abstract ideal of what would make perfect science” (2015: 30). Second, SOA incorporates achievements from marginalized epistemic communities into scientific knowledge. And third, SOA aligns with the social scientific understanding of theory as underdetermined by evidence and therefore intrinsically value-laden. Properly understood, scientific consensus is the result of “epistemic negotiations” between scientists, not value-neutral methods and judgments (Potter 1993: 168). Since value-neutrality is impossible, we should seek convergence around ameliorative aims, not (as many people think) the elimination of values from scientific inquiry. Harding’s objections to scientism apply just as much to moral inquiry: when deciding how to apply moral principles, we shouldn’t just compare our principled judgments against our reflective beliefs, trusting that our background assumptions are unbiased. We should instead assume that our background assumptions are biased in various ways, consult with differently positioned people who may hold different interests and insights, and use that information to bring to light our shortcomings. This method is also supported by research on problem-solving, which shows that diverse problem-solving groups outperform non-diverse groups in conditions of mutual uptake, because diverse groups contain “diverse information, knowledge, and perspectives,” which leads to optimal reasoning (Van Knippenberg & Schippers 2007: 527). This corroborates Haslanger’s theoretical proposal on which diversity supports optimal epistemic outcomes.5 7.3. IF and Responsibility I have extrapolated a set of intersectional feminist principles from an interrelated set of philosophical subdisciplines, which I plan to use as a basis for an IF critique of responsibility in ensuing chapters. In the next chapter, I’ll apply these principles to five philosophical paradigms

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of responsibility, and I’ll show that all of these paradigms run afoul of IF principles in one way or another. Then, I’ll elaborate on the intersectional feminist model of responsibility that I outlined in broad strokes in the introduction. In later chapters, I’ll examine the production of asymmetries of power in our responsibility system through dominant epistemic communities, ranging from literature to film to stand-up comedy. Finally, I’ll defend an ameliorative approach against an eliminativist one, which seeks to abolish responsibility altogether.

Notes 1. I can’t name a single feminist philosopher who is an eliminativist about individual agency or identity. 2. Of course, not everyone is equally positioned to engage in political activism. As a migrant worker, I myself feel the pressure to silence myself for fear of scrutiny and reprisals from the government of my country of residence, America. 3. Daniel Silvermint (2012) provides a complementary wellbeing-based account of our duty to resist oppression. 4. Emmalon Davis gave an excellent presentation on this topic at the APA in 2018, but she has informed me that the print version is unfortunately unavailable at this time. 5. Viz., Ciurria (2017) for a thorough discussion of these issues.

References Anderson, E. (2009). Toward a non-ideal, relational methodology for political philosophy: Comments on Schwartzman’s ‘challenging liberalism’. Hypatia, 24(4), 130–145. Bell, M. (2013). The standing to blame: A critique. In Blame: Its nature and norms, eds. Coates & Tognazzini. Oxford University Press. Boxill, B. R. (2010). The responsibility of the oppressed to resist their own oppression. Journal of Social Philosophy, 41(1), 1–12. Ciurria, M. (2017). Objectivity, diversity, and uptake: On the status of women in philosophy. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 3(3). Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality: Key concepts. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Cudd, A. E. (2006). Analyzing oppression. Oxford University Press. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York: NYU Press. Gary, A., Khader, S. J., & Stone, A. (eds.) (2017). The Routledge companion to feminist philosophy. Routledge. Gay, R. (2017). Hunger: A memoir of (my) body. HarperCollins. Gilligan, C. (1993). In a different voice. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press. Hamblin, J. (2017, Jan 27). Why succeeding against the odds can make you sick. New York Times. Retrieved from: www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/sunday/ why-succeeding-against-the-odds-can-make-you-sick.html Hancock, A. M. (2016). Intersectionality: An intellectual history. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Harding, S. (2015). Objectivity and diversity: Another logic of scientific research. University of Chicago Press. Haslanger, S. (2006, June). I-Sally Haslanger: What good are our intuitions? In Aristotelian society supplementary volume (Vol. 80, No. 1, pp. 89–118). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ———. (1999). What knowledge is and what it ought to be: Feminist values and normative epistemology. Philosophical Perspectives, 13, 459–480. Hay, C. (2013). The obligation to resist oppression. In Kantianism, liberalism, and feminism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Heyes, C. (2016). Identity politics. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from: https://seop.illc.uva.nl/entries/identity-politics/ Ho, A. (2008). The individualist model of autonomy and the challenge of disability. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 5(2–3), 193–207. Illinois Library. (2018). Queer theory: Background. Retrieved from: https:// guides.library.illinois.edu/queertheory/background LeFrançois, B. A., Menzies, R., & Reaume, G. (eds.). (2013). Mad matters: A critical reader in Canadian mad studies. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Miller, M. S. A. (2013). Freedom in resistance and creative transformation. Lexington Books. Mills, C. W. (2017). Black rights/white wrongs: The critique of racial liberalism. Oxford University Press. ———. (2005). ‘Ideal theory’ as ideology. Hypatia, 20(3), 165–183. Munson, R., & Lague, I. (2013). Intervention and reflection: Basic issues in bioethics. Cengage Learning. Pateman, C. (1988). The sexual contract. Stanford University Press. Potter, E. (1993). Gender and epistemic negotiation. Feminist Epistemologies, 161–186. Silvermint, D. (2012). Resistance and well-being. Journal of Political Philosophy, 21(4), 405–425. Tremain, S. (2017). Foucault and feminist philosophy of disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Van Knippenberg, D., & Schippers, M. C. (2007). Work group diversity. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 515–541. Vargas, M. (2018). Latinx philosophy. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/latinx/ Willett, C., Anderson, E., & Meyers, D. (2015). Feminist perspectives on the self. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from: https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/feminism-self/ Yankah, E. N. (2019). Whose burden to bear? Privilege, lawbreaking and race. Criminal Law and Philosophy, 1–16. Zack, N. (1997). The American sexualization of race. In Race/sex: Their sameness, difference and interplay, ed. Naomi Zack. Oxon & New York: Routledge.

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Intersectional Feminism and Five Theories of Moral Responsibility

1. Introduction This chapter compares intersectional feminism’s core commitments against five prevailing theories of moral responsibility in order to assess the extent to which they are mutually compatible, if at all. Intersectional feminism, as I have described it, is committed to the principles of: (i) foregrounding intersections of injustice, oppression, and adversity; (ii) actively combating axes of injustice, oppression, and adversity; (iii) using an ameliorative method; (iv) using a relational method; and (v) using a non-ideal theoretic method. The five paradigms of responsibility that I will analyze under this lens are: (1) attributability theory, (2) control theory, (3) answerability theory, (4) functionalism, and (5) group-agency theories of collective responsibility. None of these approaches is a monolith, but each subscribes to certain commitments that distinguish it from other camps. To simplify the discussion, I will simply focus on the most influential versions of each paradigm, noting that not every version is necessarily amenable to the same objections. My aim isn’t to show that these paradigms say nothing of value about responsibility, but that they each involve commitments that are incompatible with IF principles, and that can’t be included in an IF model of responsibility.

2. Moral Responsibility In what follows, I will outline the five dominant theories of responsibility, and then raise objections to these theories from an IF standpoint. My objections will focus mainly on the normative adequacy and the epistemic tractability of the theories in question. I will argue, in short, that some theories don’t live up to IF’s principles, and others rely on notions that are epistemically intractable (e.g., ‘the self’) and tilt the epistemic landscape in favour of the privileged. 2.1. Attributability Theory According to attributability theory, an agent is responsible (blameworthy or praiseworthy) for an action if that action stems from mental states that

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can be properly attributed to the person’s ‘self.’ There are debates about the nature of the self, particularly surrounding whether the self is evaluative or non-evaluative. David Shoemaker (2015) defends an ‘ecumenical view’ on which the self includes both evaluative commitments (desires that the agent values) and non-evaluative cares (deeply held desires, which the agent may or may not value). The advantage of the ecumenical view is that it promises to resolve longstanding disputes between the Frankfurtian, deep-desire camp and the Watsonian, evaluative-commitment camp. On the proposed reconciliation, an agent is attributability responsible for both her commitments and her cares. So, if I’m watching The Good Place (TGP), I’m responsible for watching it if I think this is a good use of my time, or if I think that it’s a waste of my time but I want to watch it anyways because I have nothing better to do. Either way, I’m responsible for my viewership on the ecumenical view. While this model is more inclusive than either the Frankfurtian or the Wastonian view alone, it still excludes “compulsions, obsessions, and whims,” which Shoemaker calls “psychic junk” (2015: 139). So, if I’m watching TGP only because I’m obsessed with it, but I wish I weren’t watching it and I don’t think this activity has any redeeming value, I’m not responsible for my viewership. a. Counterexamples Even though attributability theory has expanded the scope of the self beyond the traditional boundaries, it still excuses people for overt manifestations of ‘psychic junk,’ even when these manifestations contribute to asymmetries of power. Suppose that Kathy makes a racist remark on a whim. She doesn’t value racist speech and doesn’t want to make a racist remark, but she does anyhow, purely on impulse. On the ecumenical view, Kathy’s not blameworthy for her racist speech. This is true even if blaming her would incite her to be more cautious in the future, or signal to witnesses that racism isn’t acceptable, or serve some other purpose. No matter! On the attributability view, the only thing relevant to Kathy’s eligibility for blame is the relation of her speech to herself. If the remark comes from herself, she’s eligible for blame. Elinor Mason raises some similar objections to the attributability view (as well as the control view, to be considered in a moment). One example is the ‘forgetful’ husband who doesn’t want to be sexist and doesn’t value sexism, but still commits an omission (‘forgetting’ to pick up the milk on the way home from work) that reinforces patriarchal gender relations. Another example is taken from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), which has attracted a great deal of attention from feminist epistemologists in recent years. In Highsmith’s play, Herbert Greenleaf dismisses the testimony of his daughter-in-law Marge Sherwood as ‘women’s intuition,’ even though her testimony is accurate – she correctly suspects Ripley of murder. Most feminist epistemologists think

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that Greenleaf is epistemically innocent even though he falsely dismisses Sherwood’s testimony due to internalized gender bias. He’s epistemically innocent because he lacked the ‘interpretive resources’ needed to give her testimony proper uptake, which makes him, not a culpable perpetrator of epistemic injustice, but a hapless victim of “epistemic bad luck” (Fricker 2007: 33). Mason grants the standard interpretation on which “Greenleaf’s ignorance is non-culpable. His attitude towards Marge is not hostile or contemptuous on a personal level. He believes, and is justified in believing, that her perspective is inferior” (2018: 169). But Mason denies that this makes him morally blameless. She takes Greenleaf to be blameworthy (even if epistemically innocent) because we have a practical interest in blaming people who enforce (disrespectful) patriarchal relations through their actions. If we can blame people for epistemically innocent transgressions, we can grant that, if Sherwood had understood Greenleaf’s dismissal as an instance of gender bias, she would have been justified in blaming him. That is, we position ourselves to give uptake to women who blame men for oppressive transgressions. While Fricker describes Greenleaf as a victim of epistemic bad luck (and Mason accepts this construal), I don’t believe that this is an accurate description of the epistemic situation. (Though, even if it were, Mason’s argument shows that there would be grounds for holding Greenleaf morally responsible.) Though Greenleaf is described as an epistemic victim, the real victim is clearly Sherwood, and every woman stereotyped as ‘intuitive rather than rational’ under the patriarchal schemas of credibility that Greenleaf casually brandishes. These gender schemas allow men to control conversations and silence women’s credible testimony, as Greenleaf did. Properly understood, Greenleaf is a beneficiary of patriarchal asymmetries of uptake. And he takes advantage of this position by using gender stereotypes to silence Sherwood. Far from being an innocent victim, he’s actively capitalizing off of his position of male privilege, using it control conversations in which women disagree with him. Although Fricker holds that “no one perpetrates hermeneutical injustice – it is a purely structural notion” (2007: 159), recent critics have argued that this claim misrepresents the bidirectional relationship between epistemic agents and epistemic environments. In fact, individuals construct, and are informed by, the ‘hermeneutical climate.’ In this connection, Alyssa Cirne argues that individuals can produce and reinforce hermeneutical injustice by “obstructing or withholding hermeneutical tools from those agents who need those tools the most,” thereby perpetrating hermeneutical injustice and epistemic marginalizations (2012: 45). Recognizing this “subspecies” of hermeneutical injustice, says Cirne, allows us to acknowledge the “agency and culpability” inherent in acts of wilful “hermeneutical marginalization” (2012: 52). Similarly, Jose Medina argues that communities construct their local hermeneutical resources

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and therefore “share a collective responsibility to do everything they can to facilitate everyone’s ability to participate in meaning-making and meaning-expressing practices” (2012: 210). Those who don’t facilitate epistemic inclusion and equality are, in effect, committing acts of hermeneutical marginalization in roughly Cirne’s sense. Medina emphasizes that, even if we are not aware of the gaps in our shared hermeneutical climate, we “have an obligation to actively find out what those gaps might be” (2012: 2116). Because people construct and reinforce gaps in hermeneutical resources, they can be held responsible for those contributions to hermeneutical inequality. In general, we are responsible for either perpetrating hermeneutical injustice, or combating it. Greenleaf contributed to hermeneutical inequality by dismissing Sherwood, and for this he is blameworthy. This is true regardless of the configuration of his self – of whether he acted on self-constituting motives or psychic junk: he is blameworthy for reinforcing asymmetries of power, whether he meant it or not. Impressively, Cheshire Calhoun (1989) raised an argument similar to Mason’s 30 years ago, but in defense of reproach rather than blame. She defended reproach in response to epistemically non-culpable perpetrators on grounds that this attitude could motivate them to change, discourage others from following their example, and improve interpersonal relationships in other ways. But if reproach can play these constructive interpersonal roles, then why not blame? Why not, for instance, the Strawsonian stance of disapprobation, resentment, or indignation on a victim’s behalf? It’s implausible to think that reproach is the only attitude that can play the ameliorative interpersonal roles that Calhoun attributes to it. Blaming attitudes like disapprobation, resentment, and (arguably) contempt seem like comparably useful mechanisms for the kinds of social changes that Calhoun endorses. If blame can ameliorate epistemic inequalities, then Calhoun’s arguments should transfer to blame. b. Epistemic Problems My second criticism is that attributability theory is difficult to apply in practice because it requires an ability to distinguish between a person’s proper self and extrinsic states such as ‘psychic junk.’ Concerns about the epistemic tractability of the ‘self’ come in a variety of forms, ranging from debates about what the self is, to objections turning on the construct validity of the self, to concerns about who gets to decide whether someone’s actions reflect their self or not. Beginning with the first criticism, there’s nothing approaching consensus on the nature of the self. Shoemaker (2015) provides an ecumenical theory in an attempt to resolve longstanding debates between Frankfurtians and Watsonians, but these are only two theories amongst many. Others include evaluative self theories (e.g., Smith 2015) and whole self theories (e.g., Arpaly & Schroeder 1999; Arpaly 2015), each of which carves up

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the self in a different way. Aside from this, there are empirically-minded philosophers who argue that there is no such thing as a robust (situationally invariant) self, and hold that attributability theory depends on the validity of this construct (e.g., Doris 2002, Forthcoming; Harman 1999). But even if we set this worry aside, we must ask who is in the best position to decide whether someone’s action is a genuine reflection of their self (howsoever understood). Most laypeople assume that we have privileged access to our internal states (Carruthers 2011), which implies that we are in the best epistemic position to say whether our actions stem from our selves. If we grant the privileged-access view, then we have to grant that prejudiced people are the ultimate authorities on whether they’re ‘really’ prejudiced (i.e., at the level of their deep selves); and, of course, they’re going to deny it, because people don’t like to think of themselves as prejudiced, or to face the consequences of being labelled as such. Even white supremacists deny being prejudiced because prejudice is, by definition, not based on reason or evidence, whereas they take their racist ideologies to be ‘reasonable’ and ‘scientific.’ Thus, the natural combination of the attributability view and the privileged-access view supports a general inference that prejudiced people are the best source of knowledge about who is prejudiced and who isn’t, which in turn supports the general belief that almost no one is prejudiced, not even white supremacists.1 Put differently, the attributability theory combined with other common-sense intuitions leads to the conclusion that perpetrators have testimonial authority in conversations with victims, which in turn makes it very difficult for victims to persuasively blame wrongdoers, especially when the transgression is a culturally normative one rooted in a victim-blaming logic (e.g., rape, racism, class bias). This cluster of epistemic problems is not easily resolved, and the best solution might be to dispense with selfhood criteria of responsibility entirely and focus instead on people’s (properly contextualized) actions. When someone’s actions contribute to hierarchies of power, he might be blameworthy even if he ‘wasn’t really himself’ or ‘didn’t really mean it.’ c. Stereotypes About Selves While there may be no such thing as a self, we have preconceived notions about people’s ‘selves’ based on stereotypes about their identities. Katrina Hutchison gives a pertinent example. She notes that Aboriginal women receive harsh sentences and abusive treatment in Australian prisons. Some judges are overeager to incarcerate Aboriginal women because they see it as a matter of ‘welfare,’ on the assumption that Aboriginal women can’t care for themselves. In prison, Aboriginal women are often denied the very welfare for which they were allegedly imprisoned in the first place. In one documented incident, an inmate died due to lack medical attention after police officers “called her a ‘fucking junkie’ and told medical

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staff that she was faking her illness” (Langton 2016, cited in Hutchison 2018: 223). The justice system also fails Aboriginal women by refusing to investigate and prosecute sexual violence against them, which is more prevalent than for white women (Australian Government 2018). One explanation for the high rate of sexual violence perpetrated on Aboriginal women is cultural associations between white femininity and ‘sexual purity’ on the one hand, and racialized femininity and ‘sexual impurity’ on the other hand (Berthold 2010) – associations that serve to justify the rape of women designated as ‘impure’ under these racial-sexual schemas. These schemas signal that rape cannot demean a racialized body in the same way that it can a non-racialized body, signalling that raping a racialized body is okay. This analysis demonstrates how Aboriginal women’s agency is racialized as less competent (e.g., Aboriginal women are seen as ‘less capable of caring for themselves’), less trustworthy (Aboriginal women are seen as ‘liars’), and less innocent (Aboriginal women are seen as ‘sexually impure’ and therefore deserving of rape or incapable of being demeaned by rape). In sum, myths about racialized minorities affect perceptions of selfhood as a function of identity. d. Orientation Problems Attributability theory (as described here) defines blame as an attribution to a person of a negative self-constitutive trait – something other than psychic junk. Because blame merely attributes a trait to a person, it can’t serve any ameliorative aims, since ameliorative aims seek to change people and social relations, not to describe people’s selves. Since attributability theory hinges responsibility on considerations about how someone is (or once was), it’s not compatible with an ameliorative methodology that seeks to transform relations of power and domination. 2.2. Control Theory Control theory is the view that people are responsible for actions over which they are capable of exercising control (Fischer 2006, 2011). To be responsible for an action, one must have control over that action, or to have had control over a previous choice leading up to that action. Thus, responsible actions can be ‘traced back’ to a previous moment of controlled choice (Vargas 2005). In addition, to be responsible for the outcome of an action, one must be capable of foreseeing that outcome with coarse-grain precision, and therefore of having ‘epistemic control.’ a. Counterexamples Control theory diverges from IF’s commitments in a number of ways. To see this, let’s start with an objection from Manuel Vargas (2005), which

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shows that we have an interest in blaming people for ‘uncontrolled’ actions. Vargas introduces us to Jeff the Jerk, a rude and inconsiderate middle-manager of a mid-sized company who enjoys callously firing his employees without cause. Jeff isn’t a self-reflective person, so he doesn’t have good insight into his ‘jerky’ character, nor was he able to predict his descent into jerkdom as an equally unreflective adolescent. That is, Jeff lacks control over his jerkiness as an adult, and he lacked sufficient foresight to satisfy the epistemic control condition as a teenager. He seems to be a paradigm case of an uncontrolled person. But Vargas thinks that Jeff is obviously blameworthy. In fact, Vargas and Fischer agree on this diagnosis of Jeff’s responsibility status: both take him to be clearly responsible for his workplace bullying, but Fischer denies that Jeff (as a ‘normal person’) could possibly fail to satisfy the control condition in any sense. Rather than rely completely on Vargas’ argument, I would urge that we shift the focus away from Jeff’s inner states, towards the perspective of Jeff’s employees – the victims of his callous behaviour. Do they have any practical interest in blaming Jeff? Seemingly, yes. They might use blame to warn each other about Jeff’s callousness, to commiserate and build protective social networks, to report Jeff to upper management, and so on. Blame, as a vehicle for moral information, can serve quite a few purposes from the standpoint of the victims of a workplace bully, and these purposes are significant on an IF analysis. Vargas didn’t introduce Jeff to validate an intersectional feminist analysis, so it’s unsurprising that his example doesn’t exactly speak to how workplace bullying actually works in the vast majority of cases. To make Jeff a more believable ‘jerk,’ let’s assume that he doesn’t bully his employees indiscriminately, but instead specifically targets the Hispanic women in his office, subjecting them to sexual harassment and racist comments, while treating all of his white employees with the basic respect that they expect from a middle manager. As an unreflective and ignorant person, Jeff doesn’t realize that he’s committing sexual harassment, or that his sexual harassment (properly understood) is implicitly racially motivated – these facts are epistemically unavailable to him. Even if he reflected to the best of his ability, he would not understand himself or the significance of his actions. On Jeff’s understanding, he’s just engaging in some ‘innocent flirting’ with women who should ‘appreciate attention’ from someone like him. In fact, these women should thank him for the opportunity for professional advancement that he’s providing, conditional upon a bit of ‘reciprocity.’ In other words, Jeff thinks that he’s doing them a favour and deserves their praise. As a teenager, Jeff hadn’t even heard of sexual harassment because the phrase didn’t exist, and he grew up thinking of unsolicited sexual advances on women as romantic overtures, a form of flattery and positive attention. So, Jeff couldn’t possibly have foreseen his future as a workplace sexual harasser. If Jeff the Jerk isn’t responsible on the control view, then Jeff the Racist Sexual Harasser surely isn’t responsible on that view, either. He doesn’t satisfy either the control condition or the epistemic

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condition. And yet, I think that Vargas and Fischer would want to say that Jeff is responsible for his transgressions, since he’s analogous to Jeff the Jerk, only much worse. He’s not just an indiscriminate bully, but a textbook sexist. This form of workplace harassment is much more common than untargeted bullying, because bullies don’t want to get caught, so they go after the most vulnerable people. But they don’t necessarily know what they’re doing. On my view, Jeff is responsible for harassment even if he lacks control. This judgment is based on the reasons that the Hispanic women in his office have to blame him, reasons such as warning and empowering each other, affirming each other’s knowledge, boosting each other’s confidence, affirming their right to equal treatment under the law, eliciting support from their unharassed colleagues, and so on. These reasons justify the women’s decision to blame Jeff, and they underwrite a claim to epistemic respect and uptake. b. Epistemic Problems As noted above, Fischer (2006) rejects the premise that Jeff doesn’t satisfy the control condition. He specifically denies that Jeff, as an ordinary teenager, could have lacked the foresight needed to predict his evolution into a jerk over the course of his adult life. Thus, while Fischer grants that Jeff is patently responsible for his misconduct, he denies that ‘ordinary people’ like Jeff could lack sufficient foresight as teenagers to predict their character development over time. In response, Vargas denies that ordinary people are, in fact, capable of predicting their future selves: Our epistemic powers tend to degrade very rapidly when they have to be projected more than a little into the future. For any theory that relies heavily on self- and character-forming accounts, it seems extremely unlikely that those prior moments of self-formation were of the sort that included foreseeing the full range of downstream effects that would flow from that character. Even when we are at our epistemic best, our powers of prognostication are extremely limited. (Vargas 2005: 227) Jeff, then, probably couldn’t have foreseen the evolution of his character over time, nor can the average teenager. There is, in fact, a large body of psychological literature in support of Vargas’ defense of our epistemic limitations. Studies show that ordinary people aren’t good at predicting future events, at understanding their own character, or at comparing their moral dispositions to other people’s, due to such universal cognitive distortions as self-serving bias, confirmation bias, and the fundamental attribution error (Doris 2002; Ciurria 2013). People are also susceptible to situational pressures that can influence them in subtle (Doris 2002),

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and even transformative (Paul 2014), ways. Prior to having a child, for example, people can’t easily predict how they’ll fare as parents. Transformative events tend to be unexpected. Because we don’t know ourselves very well and can’t accurately predict how we’ll change over time, we don’t actually have the level of control that Fischer ascribes to ordinary people. Moreover, the control view is susceptible to the same epistemic objections as the attributability view. There are unresolved, and possibly unresolvable, debates about what constitutes control. Some people think that there is no such thing as robust control, and take control theory to depend on the validity of this (tenuous) construct; and even if control is real, we need to ask who is in the best position to decide which people are ‘controlled’ in the relevant sense. If we grant the privileged-access view, then we have to accept that perpetrators have the final say on whether they’re responsible for wrongdoing, and they will naturally deny that they acted wilfully and with foresight, especially when their livelihood is at stake. The debate between Vargas and Fischer about whether Jeff had sufficient control to be held responsible for his jerky character speaks to the intractability of the problem. If two experts can’t agree on the state of Jeff’s control, it’s unclear how laypeople, with even less understanding of the relevant empirical literature, are supposed to resolve these disputes. I am proposing that this question is less important than questions about the value of blame for the victims of workplace harassment, and the roles that blame can play within their own epistemic circles – questions that don’t hinge on the capacities of the perpetrator. Victims of sexual harassment can blame people without understanding the psychology of ‘control,’ and without inquiring into whether the people who wronged them acted with control. c. Stereotypes About Control As with character, we have preconceived notions about who has control and who doesn’t, rooted in cultural stereotypes about people’s identities and demographic attributes. Returning to Hutchison’s example, the judge presiding over the Aboriginal women’s cases evidently saw them as incapable of exercising control over their health, which justified his decision to place them under the custody of the state. But once in prison, the same women were accused of wilfully lying and faking illness, which justified punishing them. This incoherent set of judgments stems from incoherent stereotypes about Aboriginal women as both ‘childish’ and ‘criminal.’2 Such paradoxical schemas rationalize and reproduce the use of state violence on this social group. In general, under the influence of identity prejudice, people tend to see privileged identities as ‘controlled’ when it comes to admirable behaviour and ‘uncontrolled’ when it comes to moral transgressions, and they tend to think the opposite of stigmatized

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identities – they’re in control of transgressions but not admirable behaviour. In this way, interactions between notions of control and identity prejudice give rise to racial prejudice. d. Orientation Problems A third worry about the control view is that it is, in Fischer’s words, ‘essentially historical,’ not ameliorative. To hold someone responsible for an action, we’re supposed to be able to trace that action back to a (possibly very distant) prior moment of control. In many cases, we can’t even trace a person’s action back to a recent moment of control because we don’t know the person well enough. Was Paul Manafort a particularly insightful teenager? I’m not inclined to read his autobiography before deciding whether to blame him, because I have reasons to blame him that have nothing to do with his adolescent psychology. Since the control view requires so much biographical information about a transgressor to justify blaming him, it ironically makes it easier for us to blame the people that we know the best – our closest friends – rather than the people who most deserve blame (e.g., dictators). But our friends are the people whom we would intuitively consider the least blameworthy (which is why they’re our friends). I wouldn’t be friends with someone like Paul Manafort, yet it’s harder for me to blame him for supporting dictators than to blame my friend for showing up late for coffee on the control view. This gets my blaming priorities completely backwards: I have a greater interest in blaming dictator lobbyists than unpunctual friends. Yet the control view perversely licenses blame for petty infractions more than legitimate evil (e.g., genocide). The requirement that we know biographical details about a person’s distant past before we can blame him gives rise to a distribution of blame that is both bizarre and non-ameliorative. 2.3. Answerability Theory According to answerability theory, an agent is blameworthy if she is capable of answering to a demand for a response. There are many versions of this paradigm, but amongst the most influential is Michael McKenna’s ‘conversational model’ (2012), on which responsibility is part of a (paradigmatically) three-stage moral conversation. A ‘moral conversation’ involves (1) a moral contribution, in which the blamee performs a morally significant action; (2) a moral address, in which the blamer expresses a reactive attitude; and (3) a moral account, in which the blamee responds to the blamer by taking or denying responsibility (e.g., apologizing, explaining, justifying). On this model, blame involves a perpetrator and a victim in a reasongiving exchange, and most philosophers follow McKenna in taking the blamer and the blamee positions to be occupied invariably by these two

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personas. Macalester Bell (2013) calls this the ‘positional view’ because it takes blame’s propriety to depend on the victim’s relation to the perpetrator (or position relative to the perpetrator). McKenna specifies that blame should advance conversation between the victim and the perpetrator, and if it doesn’t, then it’s not justified. Justified blame is a dialogueadvancing contribution to a moral conversation between a perpetrator and victim, involving an exchange of reasons between the two. a. Normative Problems (Especially the Positional Constraint) Mckenna’s conversational account is incompatible with IF in several respects. First, as Bell notes, the notion that blame’s propriety is exhausted by considerations about the reason-giving relationship between the victim and the perpetrator neglects blame’s communicative value outside of these specific conversations. This can be illustrated with an example. Suppose that Jack walks in on his boss Jeff while Jeff is sexually harassing one of his female employees, Jill. If Jack intervenes, then Jeff will most likely fire both of them, and Jack can’t appeal to upper management because the CEO is Jeff’s father, who is known to be a misogynist. Jack may want to blame Jeff, but since he can’t enter into a moral conversation with him, he can’t. More disturbingly, it doesn’t seem as if Jill herself is in a position to blame Jack. Suppose that Jill can reasonably assume that, if she were to criticize Jack for sexually harassing her, he would unceremoniously fire her and have her escorted off the premises by security guards, never to be seen by him again. Jill isn’t a position to advance any moral conversation with Jack, entirely due to Jack’s sexism. She can’t ‘blame’ him in the role of a moral addressor, since she can’t elicit uptake from him. Due to Jack’s intransigent sexism, neither Jill nor her co-worker Jack can blame Jeff, no matter how hard they try. Yet, as Bell observes, blame “is not necessarily rendered pointless by the target’s inability to give it uptake, and because of this, it is not necessarily rendered morally inappropriate” (2013: 272). Even if Jeff can’t respond favourably to Jill’s blame, this doesn’t make it pointless. One of the many things that it can do is to express disapproval of Jeff’s sexism. Bell enumerates several constructive roles that blame can play outside of perpetrator-victim conversations. She specifically identifies six roles that blame can play, only three of which are intrinsic to the perpetratorvictim relationship. The other three involve relationships between victims and third parties, or sets of third parties, and thus don’t involve perpetrators at all. (They are valid even when the perpetrator is uptake-impaired.) These six aims are: (A) marking the wrong done to the relationship by the perpetrator, (B) educating the perpetrator, (C) motivating the perpetrator to improve, as well as (D) educating third parties about moral reasons (i.e., blame’s epistemic value), (E) motivating third parties to respond to moral reasons (i.e., blame’s motivational value), and (F) enabling third

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parties to stand up for their moral commitments (i.e., blame’s intrinsic value). The last three aims don’t depend on uptake from a perpetrator, and aren’t necessarily of any value to the perpetrator. They might not enlighten the perpetrator, or they might make him worse off than he initially was. Indeed, socially valuable tokens of blame can be positively harmful to perpetrators. Suppose that Ron is a new employee and has been invited to an after-work networking party. He notices that there are no women at the party, and when he asks the organizer Don why, Don replies that women ‘are too high-maintenance’ and ‘don’t have a good mind for business’ in any case. There are no women present to blame Don, nor do the women in the office know about Don’s male-only networking parties. That is, there is no pre-existing moral conversation between Don and his woman-identifying coworkers, and thus no moral exchange that Ron can facilitate as a third party. Moreover, Ron’s blame doesn’t necessarily seek to improve Don’s situation in any way. On the contrary, it seeks to deprive Don of the professional advantages that he’s reaping by excluding women from networking opportunities, insulating him from fair competition with women; and, if Don is intransigently sexist, then he can’t gain any moral insights from Ron’s blame. He’ll be just as ignorant as before, and he may even double-down on his sexism, losing net moral knowledge. But this doesn’t mean that Ron’s blame is pointless. His blame can signal to witnesses that sexist networking parties are wrong and that he won’t be complicit in them. And if his male coworkers can’t appreciate his sentiment, he can convey it to the women in his office, enhancing their knowledge and their ability to navigate a patriarchal workplace effectively. One might think that this will spur a moral conversation between the women and Don, but Ron’s standing to blame Don surely doesn’t depend on Don’s ability (or inclination) to give a moral account. Even if the women in the office never confront Don, Ron’s moral testimony has value. As we saw in the introduction, Matthew Talbert and Angela Smith have made similar claims about blame’s value independent of its impact on perpetrators. These arguments specifically challenge the notion that a perpetrator must be answerable to be apt for blame. As Talbert says, Imagine the way prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp surely blamed and condemned their murderers. Certainly, the prisoners’ condemnation expressed the conviction that their treatment was impermissible and the demand for recognition of their moral standing as human beings. However, I do not think that these demands and claims lost their point when they failed to move hardened concentration camp executioners. (2008: 532) When people blame perpetrators who don’t recognize their moral authority, their blame can play a valuable (and ameliorative) role in interpersonal

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networks outside of the victim-perpetrator relationship. It can, as Bell says, educate third parties, motivate third parties to protest wrongdoing, speak to the moral dignity of victims, and advance other interpersonal aims. Jewish prisoners surely had the standing to blame Nazis, though this standing rested on facts other than the Nazis’ ability to recognize Jewish people as moral and epistemic agents. Their standing to blame, properly understood, rested in part on the roles that their blame could play within their own epistemic communities. Within these communities, their blame could serve such purposes as protesting asymmetries of power between Nazis and people designated as ‘non-Aryan’ under the Nazi racial classification system; affirming the moral dignity of racialized minorities; confirming the credibility of victims of the Holocaust; and a multitude of other aims consistent with IF principles. The standard conversational account, insofar as it subscribes to a positional constraint on blame’s warrant (which limits blame to a victim-perpetrator dialogue), denies the interpersonal value of these intersectional feminist goals amongst peers. A second issue with the conversational model is that it sees the ‘moral account’ stage as involving a demand for a restitutive response (e.g., an apology, an expression of guilt) from the perpetrator. This understanding excludes other, ‘non-demanding’ speech acts that could be more effective at eliciting a restitutive response, and that may be available to nonvictims. The common assumption that blame consists in a demand for restitution is tied to the assumption that only victims are in a position to blame (i.e., to demand restitution for wrongdoing). A third party cannot demand a restitutive response from a wrongdoer on their own behalf because the person hasn’t been wronged, and therefore isn’t entitled to restitution. But a third party can do other things with blame: she can protest injustice, challenge systems of oppression, stand with a victim, enhance a victims’ confidence, and so on. Indeed, the standard construal of the moral account stage has faced a number of recent objections. Macnamara (2015) argues that demands aren’t the only, or even the best, type of moral account. Demands, she says, intrinsically represent the blamee as subordinate to the blamer, which could provoke hostility as opposed to guilt or reconciliation (2015: 154). Other fitting responses include “inviting, recommending, entreating, and hailing” (2015: 154). These speech acts require less justification than demands because they impose less of a burden on the target; they don’t represent the person as beholden to the victim’s will. I am less concerned with this aspect of non-demand responses than in their availability to third parties. Third parties may not be in a position to demand restitution on their own behalf, but they are in a position to protest injustice, hail a victim as a moral equal, flag inequalities in a moral conversation, and perform other ameliorative tasks with blame. The demand-for-restitution construal of the ‘moral account’ stage precludes these ameliorative uses. If we can’t use blame for these purposes, then we can’t use blame to highlight asymmetries of power that prevent

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(some) perpetrators from recognizing that they owe restitution; or to hail victims as worthy of epistemic respect; or to invite third parties to intervene in asymmetrical conversations. In other words, we can’t use blame to restructure epistemic relations to position victims to command uptake and demand restitution on their own terms. In sum, an IF account of blame can’t conceive of blame as a contribution to a conversation between a perpetrator and a victim, can’t endorse the perpetrator-answerability constraint, and can’t define blame as a demand for restitution addressed to a perpetrator by a victim. b. Epistemic Issues Answerability theory faces many of the same epistemic objections as the control and attributability views, seen above. For one, the notion of answerability is contested, with theorists debating whether it requires dialogical competency or moral competency or both, and disagreeing further about the depth of conversational competency required. George Sher argues that McKenna’s view is implausible because it requires knowledge of “the rules and conventions that will govern each stage of whatever sequence of reactions may ensue,” meaning that I can’t blame someone for shoving me if I understand some of the rules and conventions concerning shoving but not others, or if I understand the rules and conventions concerning shoving in some contexts but not others (2015: 241). If blame-eligibility requires a full knowledge of all moral rules, then the scope of blame will be infinitesimally small. And these are just a few of the unresolved questions about the definition and scope of answerability. Even if everyone could agree on a definition, it would be difficult to tell whether anyone is answerable in the operative sense. People are quite proficient at hiding deficits, including dialogical and moral ones. Even if I’m not morally answerable, I might be able to convince people that I am by simulating normal moral conversation, as ‘psychopaths’ purportedly do. It’s quite difficult to tell who’s morally answerable and who isn’t. And if we assume (as many people do) that people are the best judge of their own capacities, then nearly everyone will be off the hook, since people don’t like to take responsibility for wrongdoing when much is at stake. c. Stereotypes About Answerability As with control and character, cultural perceptions of who is ‘answerable’ are shaped by culturally normative identity prejudices. For example, people who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE) are seen as less nice, helpful, kind, and intelligent than people who speak Standard English (SE) (Lewis 2015) (more on this in Chapter 8). These vernacular biases influence perceptions of answerability in AAVE speakers versus SE speakers: if speakers of AAVE are perceived as less nice and less intelligent, they’re liable to be seen as less answerable as a result. And if

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they’re seen as less answerable, they’ll be seen as less fit for interpersonal relationships and inclusion in moral and political conversations. This is just one example of the many prejudices that play a role in our acculturated perceptions of answerability in people with stigmatized identities or demographic attributes. 2.4. Functionalism Functionalist theories of responsibility see blame and praise as justified by their role in a designated set of interpersonal practices. IF is a form of functionalism in that it sees blame and praise as justified by their ameliorative role in our interpersonal practices. Apt blame, on my definition, functions to ameliorate injustice, oppression, and adversity. Other functionalist accounts share IF’s forward-looking orientation, but reject (or at least don’t endorse) its substantive normative commitments. In this section, I will look at three alternate versions of functionalism, and assess their degree of fit (if any) with intersectional feminism. The first two views that I will consider are probably the most influential in the functionalist literature: Manuel Vargas’ “circumstantialist view” and Victoria McGeer’s “scaffolded-responsiveness view” (as labelled by Jules Holroyd [2018: 137]). The main difference between these two functionalisms3 is that ‘circumstantialism’ excuses agents who are circumstantially incapable of responding to reasons, whereas the scaffoldedresponsiveness view treats circumstantially unresponsive agents as eligible for blame as long as they’re capable of adapting to the expectations of an audience (i.e., updating their agency). Thus, McGeer’s view admits more people into the remit of justified blame. For this reason, Holroyd endorses McGeer’s view, as it seems to be more compatible with her ‘ameliorative’ aim of enhancing agency as broadly as possible (2018: 139). She believes that Vargas’ view will allow too many defective agents to remain ‘unenhanced,’ whereas she wants to enhance as many people as possible. A third notable version of functionalism is Derk Pereboom’s (2015),4 on which blame and praise serve three aims: (P1) protecting potential victims, (P2) reconciling relationships, and (P3) enhancing moral character.5 Pereboom’s theory is a pluralist one that posits three main responsibilitystructuring aims. In this respect it is closer to IF (which is also pluralist) than the other functionalisms on offer. But the normative aims to which Pereboom subscribes are substantively different than IF aims. At the end of this section, I will challenge Pereboom’s substantive commitments, defending an intersectional alternative. a. Counterexamples For Vargas (2013), a ‘circumstantially unenhanceable’ person isn’t eligible for blame. Such a person has context-specific deficits that could

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be deactivated or repaired under different circumstances, but within the context, the person can’t be enhanced. Therefore, the person isn’t eligible for blame. Like the attributability view and the control view, Vargas’ circumstantialist constraint is vulnerable to counterexamples of an intersectional feminist flavour. This time, I’ll draw on Ta-Nehisi Coates for inspiration. Coates relates a personal anecdote in which he and his young son are on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a white woman abruptly shoves his son out of her way and exclaims, “come on!” Coates describes his response as the reaction of any parent when a stranger lays a hand on the body of his or her child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect [my son’s] black body. And more: There was my sense that this woman was pulling rank. (2015: 949) There is clearly a racial dimension to this encounter, with the woman treating the child as if he doesn’t have a right to be in the Upper West Side. Coates turns and rebukes the woman, his words “hot with all of the moment and all of my history” (ibid.). A white male bystander promptly speaks up in the woman’s defense, which Coates interprets as “his attempt to rescue the damsel from the beast” (2015: 954). When Coates defends himself anew, the man responds by coming closer, growing louder, and finally shouting, “I could have you arrested!” (ibid.). Race again plays a significant role in this encounter, together with gender. The man is challenging Coates’ right to be in a white-dominant neighbourhood through a display of emblematic masculinity, which enforces patriarchal relations. He sees himself, a man, as entitled to protect a woman, and a white person, as entitled to silence a Black person. For the sake of the current analysis, let’s suppose that when Coates rebuked the white Manhattanites, he blamed them. That is, he passionately communicated that they were in the wrong. Was his blame fitting in the circumstances? Coates didn’t succeed in eliciting respect from the two antagonists. On the contrary, his rebuke was met with increasing hostility and disrespect. In the end, he gave up trying to persuade his antagonists, mainly to shield his child from the (racial) spectacle of his father being arrested. The evidence suggests that the white people were insensitive to Coates’ blame, and incapable of recognizing Coates as a credible blamer on account of their racial schemas about epistemic authority: they couldn’t see a Black man as having the authority to blame them. On the circumstantialist view, the pair are exempt from blame because Coates can’t influence their agency, even if this is entirely their fault – that is, even if the reason he can’t convince them isn’t a matter of his own dialogical capabilities, but his audience’s epistemic deficits. If you

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read Coates’ book (which I highly recommend), you can’t deny that he’s an exceptional arguer and an exemplary reasoner. Yet this doesn’t affect his standing to blame on the functionalist view, because his standing to blame hinges on the agency of his audience, not his own agency. If the audience is racist, then a racialized minority isn’t in a position to blame them, because they can’t recognize the credibility of his eminently cogent arguments. One might object that Coates could perhaps have influenced the accosters if he had responded to them more civilly. Perhaps a polite overture (“excuse me, Madame”) would have persuaded the woman that she shouldn’t have shoved his son. But why on earth should Black people be held to a standard that no white person is expected to meet? White people can assume a basic level of epistemic respect from each other on the basis of their whiteness, and can therefore easily command epistemic respect from one another (all else being equal).6 Why should Black people be held to a higher standard of civility than white people? Coates’ rebuke deserved respect even if it didn’t address his antagonists with a tone of self-abnegating deference. Adopting a double standard on civility would only reinforce the racial asymmetries of power that structure our ordinary intergroup interactions, forcing Black people into a posture of constant deference to white interlocutors. Instead, white people should respect Black people’s speech when it contains good reasons, whether it’s ‘civil’ or not. I think that Coates’ blame was apt because it correctly identified the white Manhattanites as transgressors for shoving Coates’ son, for questioning his right to walk unharassed in a white-dominant neighbourhood, and for threatening to silence him with state-sanctioned violence. In blaming (as I construe it) the white Manhattanites, Coates affirmed to his son and himself that they deserve respect and freedom from violence, even if his antagonists can’t recognize their equal moral and epistemic standing – their basic humanity. Unlike Vargas, McGeer might grant that the white accosters are eligible for blame, provided that they’re responsive to the ‘expectations of an audience.’ It’s unclear whether McGeer has a real or a hypothetic audience in mind. (She refers to it as an “audience, actual or prospective” [2015: 170, cited in Holroyd 2018: 143]). If it’s a real one, then it wasn’t available during the Manhattan incident to certify Coates’ blame. On the contrary, Coates says that other white bystanders started intervening to defend the racists! So, the real audience wasn’t of any use because it was just as racist as the two perpetrators. If McGeer has in mind a potential audience, then one has to assume that, in Coates’ case, it must be an audience of white people, since the accosters don’t seem to respect Black people’s testimony (at least, not to the same extent as white people’s). So, perhaps Coates’ blame can be validated by a ‘prospective’ white audience, willing to translate and authorize his testimony for the edification

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of racists. That is, the validity of Coates’ blame depends on the potential existence of a group of ‘white translators,’ to borrow an expression from Donald Glover. Glover explains that when Black people interact with white people in the music business, they often need a ‘white translator’ to answer questions like, “‘What exactly did Kenya mean there?,’ and to be reassured [by the translator that Kenya is credible and trustworthy]” (Friend 2018). This source of warrant for Black people’s testimony isn’t ideal, to say the least. Surely we don’t want the validity of Black people’s moral testimony to depend on a real or potential group of white translators, positioned to translate Black people’s blame into white people’s moral vernaculars. Not only would the speaker’s original meaning be lost in translation (as it would have to be translated into a distorted, racialized understanding of social relations), but the notion that Black people’s moral standing must depend on a white translator reinforces the racial asymmetries of power that already give white people testimonial clout. In essence, the main problem with the agency-enhancement view is that it gets things backwards: it makes blame’s warrant depend on the receptivity of an audience rather than the blamer’s reasons and legitimate practical interests. Even if racists can’t appreciate the value of a racialized speaker’s blame, that doesn’t mean that the speaker’s blame doesn’t have any value. We need to reframe blame’s value by focusing on the standpoint of the blamee and the value of blame within the blamee’s epistemic community (especially if it is a marginalized one), not the value and credibility of the person’s blame according to racists, sexists, and the like. Louise du Toit defends this reframing of moral concern in A Philosophical Investigation of Rape (2009), in which she argues that the dominant paradigms of rape all foreground the rapist’s standpoint, and therefore (mis)represent the victim as seen through the eyes of the rapist: An understanding (a theory, a ‘truth’) of rape that is based mainly on the agent-rapist’s intentions and as such on the repression of the victim’s experiences, must therefore evoke our feminist suspicion. . . . Victims experience the trauma of rape as being echoed and reinforced, rather than inverted or corrected, by the dominant epistemological paradigms within medical, legal and law enforcement professional practices. An intersectional feminist theory of responsibility can’t ground blame’s warrant on the moral standpoints and moral vernaculars of agents of oppression. It must be sensitive to imbalances of power as experienced and interpreted by members of oppressed groups, and must position the marginalized to intervene to remediate those asymmetries of power, thereby enabling them to better command uptake. Something that McGeer and Vargas neglect is the fact that, even if we can tell when someone is

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enhanceable, we don’t necessarily care. Sometimes we blame perpetrators for reasons that have nothing to do with their agency or enhanceability. And in many cases, we simply don’t want our moral testimony translated into their (twisted) vernaculars. b. Epistemic Problems The same epistemic objections that we’ve already seen extend to the agency-enhancement view, on which the standing to blame depends on knowledge about a perpetrator’s agency. How do I know whether someone’s agency is amenable to enhancement? It’s not as easy as we might think, especially in the digital age, in which many conversations take place online. After I criticized a famous sexual harasser on Twitter, hundreds of Twitter users assailed me with sexist insults, calling me a “stupid b****” and a “dumb feminist.” Can I enhance their agency using well-crafted arguments? Frankly, I don’t care, because I have better things to do than enhance sexist cyberbullies. But if I were a moral saint willing to edify them about feminist values, I would have a hard time discerning which cyberbullies can give my arguments uptake and which can’t. Indeed, some might be sexist bots from troll farms. The agency-enhancement view seems to assume that if we can enhance someone’s agency, then we have a reason to, which is what gives us the standing to blame. (Otherwise our blame ‘has no point’ and is ‘uncivilized.’) But it’s wrong to think that if we can enhance someone, then we have a reason to do so. Sometimes what we have a reason to do is avoid the person. By engaging with people who show the slightest glimmer of enhanceability, we make ourselves vulnerable to verbal abuse, especially as members of marginalized groups. In this connection, Karen Kelsky offers some good advice for women who are cyberbullied on social media, and who might think that they have a reason, or even a duty, to edify the cyberbully.7 She advises, “please, don’t engage with trolls. And ‘trolls’ includes so-called ‘nice guys’ who are ‘polite’ but who persist in casting themselves as victims and respond to repeated engagements with self-pity and claims of unfairness” (2018). She continues, You have no obligation to educate any man at any time; he is not entitled to your time. But you must be on guard. Because he has a lifetime of practice in techniques that extract emotions and labor from you in the service of his care and comfort. Here are a few: But I’m just trying to learn; But I’m one of the good men; How can I be an ally if you won’t teach me; You are being unreasonable; You are special (for engaging politely with me), not like those *other*

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If we all assume that we should blame people only to educate them (otherwise blame ‘has no point’), then women are going to blame men in ways that increase their own vulnerability to misogyny and verbal abuse. Women will continue to give men the benefit of the doubt and try to edify them when those men are only interested in reinforcing patriarchal dynamics. We need to assume that blame can serve purposes other than enhancing the agency of wrongdoers, or we will be in thrall to ostensible duties of care and nurturance that don’t exist. Women have reasons to blame misogynists that have nothing to do with their edification. (Likewise for other vulnerable groups: their standing to blame is not exhausted by their ability to enhance epistemically deformed people.) And when it’s unclear if someone is enhanceable, this is when we are the most vulnerable to abuse, as misogynists (and other prejudiced people) will exploit this uncertainty to argue that they’re actually ‘nice guys’ and ‘decent people,’ mystifying well-meaning people into tolerating epistemically asymmetrical conversations that have no purpose. Neither uncertainty about someone’s agency, nor knowledge of someone’s enhanceability, are definitive reasons to engage with an antagonist. We can blame people without engaging with them at all, and sometimes this is the best course of action. c. Stereotypes About Enhanceability Just as there are stereotypes about selves, control, and answerability, there are stereotypes about enhanceability that distort our acculturated perceptions of blameworthiness. For instance, there is a cultural stereotype on which women are essentially worse at math than men, and this stereotype affects women’s performance on math tests through the operation of ‘stereotype threat,’ the tendency to conform to stereotypes about one’s identity (Spencer et al. 1999). If people assume that women are essentially worse at math than men, people will regard women as less amenable to math-related enhancement than men. A similar effect can be observed in moral domains. There is a stereotype on which women are essentially nicer than men (Davis 2017), and people who believe this essentialist myth will see men as less amenable to niceness-related enhancement than women. (The key factor isn’t the assumption that women are nicer but the assumption that women are nicer as an essential feature of their biological makeup or ‘fixed essence’.) Under this essentialist myth, when men aren’t nice, they will be seen as less blameworthy for their lack of niceness (or their positive meanness) than women, if enhanceability is taken to be a constraint on blame. In general, because

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identity prejudice interacts with internalized schemas about enhanceability, the agency-enhancement view will serve to propagate existing stereotypes about people’s eligibility for blame. This in turn will reinforce the asymmetrical distribution of moral credit that currently exists. d. Acontextual Pluralism Pereboom provides a version of functionalism that doesn’t hinge blame’s warrant on facts about the perpetrator’s agency, but it’s quite different from intersectional feminism as I have described it. Pereboom takes apt blame to advance three aims: (P1) protecting potential victims, (P2) reconciling relationships, and (P3) enhancing moral character. The first aim is victim-centric rather than perpetrator-centric, which is consistent with IF’s central locus of concern, and the second and third aims don’t explicitly refer to a perpetrator, though perhaps Pereboom has in mind reconciliation between a victim and a perpetrator, and the enhancement of a perpetrator’s character, for (P2) and (P3), respectively. Since he isn’t explicit, I’ll interpret his view broadly and assume that reconciliation and character-enhancement are not perpetrator-specific. This brings his view into closer alignment with an intersectional feminist one. There are still problems with Pereboom’s account from an IF standpoint, however, the main one being that it doesn’t say anything about the asymmetries of power that structure our interpersonal relationships, and that sometimes make reconciliation and character-building impossible in any substantive sense, and undesirable from the perspective of the victim. Louise du Toit’s analysis of rape helps to illustrate these concerns. Regarding (P2), du Toit’s analysis shows that we can’t assume that reconciliation is necessarily desirable, or even possible, when people don’t share the same basic normative concepts. As du Toit notes, The parties to reconciliation and forgiveness have to be approximate equals (i.e., the victims have to realistically experience that they are no longer as powerless as they were during the infliction of the harm) and the parties have to share the same moral language, at least. There is thus a sense in which the damage, the wrong done to women as women, most clearly exemplified in rape, but also in more ‘everyday’ experiences of ‘depersonalization’, cannot (yet) be expressed in the language of forgiveness because (a) the harm continues unaddressed within the political sphere and (b) there is no shared moral – political language in which to address the harm inflicted. (2009: 21) Du Toit’s analysis reveals that, when two people aren’t on equal epistemic footing, genuine reconciliation (through forgiveness) isn’t a realistic option. Indeed, even attempting to reconcile in conditions of inequality

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may be inadvisable, insofar as doing so grants credence to the perpetrator’s flawed understanding of what he has done and how he can make amends for it. For instance, if a rapist apologizes for ‘aggressive flirting’ when he has actually committed sexual assault, accepting his ‘apology’ could give false credibility to his distorted understanding of his transgression, and his culture’s distorted understanding of rape. It is often better to reject a flawed apology than to accept it and give it a veneer of respectability. The aim of character-building may also be undesirable or impossible in conditions of inequality. Du Toit argues that “the language of forgiveness presupposes on some basic intersubjective level a shared language of damage, of shared appreciation of the nature and degree of the violation” (2009: 23). If a shared normative vernacular between the victim and the perpetrator is missing, then genuine forgiveness isn’t possible because the perpetrator can’t understand what he’s done wrong, and can’t ask forgiveness for the harms that he’s actually caused. But this isn’t to say that the victim can’t improve the perpetrator’s character in some way: she might be able to improve it (howsoever slightly) by translating her complaint into his vernacular and using the closest approximation within his conceptual framework. Perhaps the victim can convince her sexual harasser that he’s ‘flirted a little too aggressively,’ and on this basis, persuade him to ‘flirt more modestly’ in the future. She’s improved him, but at the cost of validating his distorted understanding of what he’s done. In the same stroke, she’s accepted an insulting apology – one that denies the validity of her experience as a victim of sexual harassment. If she were to decide that improving the harasser’s agency isn’t worth the associated social and personal costs, this would be a perfectly reasonable judgment. Sometimes giving someone the finger is more reasonable, and validating, than affirming the person’s deranged worldview and perverse sense of entitlement. In sum, the issue with Pereboom’s account isn’t that its three aims are never valuable, but that they aren’t necessarily worth pursuing against a backdrop of asymmetrical power relations. Accepting an apology for ‘aggressive flirting’ from a sexual harasser isn’t necessarily worth the loss of self-respect and social standing that accepting that kind of apology would incur. We’re entitled to reject apologies that demean us and enforce hierarches of power. Blamers shouldn’t seek an apology at any cost – some apologies are worthless. Du Toit points out that procedures designed to promote reconciliation and forgiveness tend to do the opposite when background conditions of inequality are ignored. This was exemplified in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South African, in which women were asked to play a “prominent role in the performance of public forgiveness” (2009: 11), only to be marginalized by the Commission’s patriarchal demand that they offer forgiveness on behalf of their male family members, silencing their own grievances:

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The typical scenario during the hearings was that women were asked to forgive gross human rights violations perpetrated against their male family members – sons, fathers, husbands, brothers: those easily recognizable as political agents involved in the liberation struggle (or its repression). However, because women were almost never asked to forgive on behalf of themselves, and never asked to forgive rape as a political attempt to erase female sexual difference, the new political space, the new state, was (once again) built on the erasure of women as women. (2009: 11) By neglecting the role of (implicit) patriarchal norms within the reconciliation process, the Commission perpetuated asymmetries of power that privilege men in South Africa. This kind of outcome is a risk whenever a moral system promotes ‘reconciliation’ without acknowledging that the norms of reconciliation, in the real world, are structured by asymmetries of power; and it is a risk when a moral system promotes ‘character-building’ without acknowledging that attempts at characterbuilding sometimes enforce asymmetries of power. While reconciliation and character-building are worthy goals in certain contexts, we need to address the asymmetries of power that vitiate the value of those goals in our society. 2.5. Group Agency and Collective Responsibility On one popular notion of collective responsibility, people are responsible for collective actions if they belong to a ‘group agent’ structured by joint intentions – intentions to act on shared goals (List & Pettit 2011; Gilbert 2000). To share a joint intention is to intend to act on a shared goal, to know that other members of the group intend to act on the same goal, and to know that other members share the same common awareness of each other’s intention to act on that goal. Like the above paradigms, this account doesn’t say anything about asymmetries of power, so it doesn’t provide us with the resources needed to diagnose and combat those dynamics. In what follows, I’ll raise some objections to the group-agency account, drawing from resources in the responsibility literature that fit with an intersectional feminist critique. a. Counterexamples Larry May and Robert Strikwerda (1994) propose an alternative to the standard group-agency model of collective responsibility, as described above. They argue that a social group – such as white people, or men, or abled people – can be collectively responsible for a collective harm, even if the members of the group don’t share (explicitly represented) joint intentions or common awareness with each other. The authors make this

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argument in reference to collective responsibility for rape, which they attribute to “most if not all men” in western society. More specifically, they maintain that “in some societies men are collectively responsible for rape in that most if not all men contribute in various ways to the prevalence of rape, and as a result these men should share in responsibility for rape” (1994: 135). This is because “male bonding and socialization in groups contributes to the prevalence of rape in western societies,” which makes men jointly complicit in rape “in a way which parallels the collective responsibility of a society for crimes against humanity perpetrated by some members of their society” (ibid.). The fact that men are socialized into patriarchy-enforcing roles doesn’t imply that they all consciously intend to oppress women, or that they imagine other men to be jointly committed to the same goal (as per the joint intentionality and common awareness criteria); but failing to meet these criteria doesn’t mean that men aren’t collectively responsible for rape. Their collective responsibility, according to May and Strikwerda, is a function of their social position, their (potentially implicit) socialized dispositions, and their social privileges, which position them to contribute to and benefit from rape. The virtue of this model of collective responsibility is that it is sensitive to the fact that rape is a gendered violation that enforces patriarchal oppression, not merely an individual act perpetrated by individual men against individual women. List and Pettit’s account, in contrast, doesn’t explain how a social group (like men) can be collectively responsible for a system of oppression in which the group members are implicated, into which they are socialized, and from which they collectively benefit. Even if we grant the reasonable premise that not all men actively contribute to rape culture (i.e., some are feminist allies and resistors), List and Pettit can’t explain how some men can be more responsible for rape culture than others due to their social position, their (potentially implicit) socialized dispositions, and the social privileges they reap from their position in a rape culture, irrespective of their conscious intentions and explicit affinities. This is because men don’t count as a group agent on their definition; therefore, individual men can’t be more-or-less responsible for their role as members of a collective, or for their joint impact on a vulnerable group. The joint intentionality constraint only lets us hold people responsible for their contributions to highly structured groups, governed by shared intentions that are distributed across all members, which are epistemically accessible to all members – groups like corporations, political organizations, and clubs. We can’t hold people responsible for their roles in oppressive systems and collectives that don’t satisfy group agency criteria, even if they are socialized into, contribute to, and benefit from, these systems and collectives. I should note that, while May and Strikwerda’s analysis is an improvement on the joint-intentionality model, it doesn’t speak to the differential benefits and burdens that accrue to different men who are differently

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positioned within patriarchal culture – a culture that, we must remember, is also a white-supremacist order. Within this order, Black men, unlike white men, are stereotyped as rapists, and this results in differential penalties, such as higher prosecution rates and harsher sentences for Black rapists compared to white rapists, as well as social prohibitions against sexual relationships between Black men and white women – prohibitions that give white men easier access to white women’s bodies in general. Because of this interplay between patriarchal norms and white-supremacist norms, Black men don’t benefit equally from rape culture – indeed, they suffer under the myth of the Black Male Rapist. Thus, even if men in general benefit from rape culture, white men benefit much more than Black men, and Black women (who report higher rates of sexual violence than white women [Green 2017]) are harmed more than white women. That is, the benefits and burdens of rape culture are not evenly distributed across men and women with different racial identities. If socialization, social position, and social privilege influence responsibility, then white men are more responsible for rape culture than Black men in light of differences in privilege and power across these two groups. And white men’s role in rape culture disproportionally harms racialized women, who are more vulnerable to misogynistic violence. The same type of differential analysis can be performed for other groups affected by rape culture (e.g., Indigenous women, trans women), though I don’t have time for that here (but I will return to questions of sexual identity, privilege, and power in Chapters 10 and 11). Charles Mills offers another contrast to the standard group-agency model in his articulation of white ignorance. He describes “white ignorance” as a “structural miscognition” rooted in “racial privilege, an inherited racialized set of concepts and beliefs, differential racial experience, and racial group interest,” that results in “whites tend[ing] to get certain kinds of things wrong” (2017: xvii). Because white ignorance is a systemic phenomenon that structures white people’s agency, we can assume that it is present in most or all white people. On grounds akin to those offered by May and Strikwerda, we can infer that most or all white people are responsible for racial oppression because they share structural miscognitions rooted in their socialization history, their social position, and their social privileges relative to POC. All or most whites are responsible for racial oppression. The benefit of this ‘structural’ model of collective responsibility is that it explains why structural injustices like rape and racism aren’t individual transgressions perpetrated against individual victims, but they also aren’t blameless effects of faceless, non-agentic systems and processes, over which we have no control. Instead, collective transgressions are committed by social groups that are structured by socialization, affinity, and privilege, not by shared (conscious) intentions and goals. Individuals can therefore bear responsibility for the actions of collectives to which they

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contribute and from which they benefit, even if they don’t endorse, or even know about, the existence of those collectives. They don’t need to be aware of their contributions to a privileged social group to bear responsibility for the group’s actions.

b. Epistemic Problems The ability to identify a group agent might seem relatively uncomplicated, but it’s a task at which we as a culture are quite inept. To give just one example, we tend to label racialized mass shooters as domestic terrorists (especially if they’re Muslim), while classifying white mass shooters – who are the majority – as ‘lone wolves,’ with no joint intentions or shared ideological commitments in common (Victor 2018). This classification would be wrong no matter what definition of ‘collective responsibility’ we espouse, since white mass shooters typically do share ideological commitments, in addition to socialized dispositions and collective privileges. For example, most white mass shooters are misogynists with a history of domestic violence (Bosman et al. 2019), and many harbour illusory grievances rooted in an overblown sense of self-entitlement (Pierre 2015). In fact, some white mass shooters publicly declare themselves committed to ideological aims such as the ‘punishment’ of women who deny them the sex and attention to which they are rightfully ‘entitled,’ as Elliot Rodgers proclaimed in his video memoirs (viz., Manne 2018). Yet these clearly ideological-driven mass shooters are not labelled as domestic terrorists, presumably because they are white. And, ironically, white privilege is one of the main reasons they committed the mass shootings in the first place. Failing to label white mass shooters as terrorists only serves to reinforce their sense of entitlement and their celebrity within privileged affinity groups (e.g., ‘incel culture’). Society’s tendency to downplay the severity of the crimes of white men is contributing to the sense of entitlement that incites them to commit these crimes in the first place. Other examples of structural deficits in our ability to identify members of privileged collectives include a cultural inability to recognize violent intimate partners as perpetrators of gender-based violence (Cudd 2006), a cultural inability to recognize white moderates as perpetrators of racial liberalism (Mills 2017), and a cultural inability to recognize the owners of most major corporations as perpetrators of climate injustice, climate racism, and climate sexism. These are just a few examples of deficits in our culture’s general ability to blame people for their roles in collective wrongdoing. When a group is privileged (e.g., white men), we tend to label its members as ‘lone wolves’ when they do wrong, rather than identifying them as members of a collective structured by shared socialization, affinity, and privilege. Understanding this bias brings to light the importance of defining groups in intersectional feminist terms – that is, with an eye to diagnosing people’s roles in systems and collectives.

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3. Sketching a Normatively Adequate Theory of Blame and Praise Above, I compared five dominant paradigms of responsibility against IF principles, and I found all of them to be lacking in some way. They are not all lacking in the same way or to the same extent, of course. Some of these paradigms are more compatible with IF than others. The attributability view and the control view are irreconcilable with IF because they take the existence of a deep self and control, respectively, to be necessary for responsibility, and I have argued that blaming people who fail to meet these criteria can promote IF aims. This isn’t to say that selfhood and control considerations are in no way relevant to responsibility: they may be relevant to proportionality, to the extent that they can be measured. (For example, someone who seems ‘deeply sexist’ may be more blameworthy on IF principles than someone who seems ‘slightly sexist.’) But these conditions can’t be necessary for responsibility, if we think that blame and praise should advance IF aims. Sometimes blame advances IF aims when directed at people who act on ‘psychic junk’ or ‘uncontrolled impulses.’ We shouldn’t allow a perpetrator’s shortcomings to silence his victims. Next, answerability theory is incompatible with IF insofar as it takes perpetrator answerability to be a constraint on blame, thereby discounting the legitimacy of blaming practices that rectify imbalances of power without enhancing perpetrators, and that perform other functions outside of the context of perpetrator-victim relationships. But this isn’t to say that blame doesn’t communicate anything to anyone. I have argued that paradigmatic cases of IF blame communicate normative information to uptake-capable respondents – not necessarily perpetrators, but sympathetic third parties, witnesses, friends, and other epistemic peers. Standard versions of functionalism also run afoul of IF aims because they deny that blame can be warranted if it doesn’t enhance a perpetrator’s agency, and they also fail to foreground the asymmetries of power that exist in ordinary blaming interactions. That said, IF is a form of functionalism that seeks to advance certain aims – aims that ameliorate oppression and seek to rebuild the responsibility system on a basis of equality and non-domination. The aspects of the standard paradigms that are compatible with IF are the basic communicative structure of blame simpliciter, and the functionalist understanding of blame’s forward-looking orientation. But the focus on the perpetrator’s agency as the source of blame’s aptness has to be rejected. The aims that blame ought to advance, according to IF principles, are ameliorative and relational ones – specifically, the diagnosis and remediation of systems of power and oppression. IF, in sum, is a communicative-functionalist model on which blame seeks to realize and promote ameliorative goals through communicative interactions amongst epistemic peers, enhancing the moral-epistemic clout of the oppressed.

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Notes 1. A very similar objection is raised to the deep-self understanding of misogyny by Kate Manne (2017). I am indebted to her for this part of my objection to the attributability view. 2. See Tommy Curry (2018) for a similar analysis of the boogeyman of Black masculinity, which rests on a paradoxical construct combining childishness with criminality. 3. I should note that Holroyd’s characterization of these views is contentious, but I will follow it nonetheless. 4. I don’t think he calls it “functionalist,” but it has the characteristics of a functionalist approach. 5. Though Pereboom is a responsibility sceptic, he offers this forward-looking account as an example of a theory immune to the threat of determinism. Eliminativists in general tend to suspend their responsibility scepticism to offer plausible compatibilist options (e.g., Levy 2018). 6. I’m abstracting away gender differences and other differences that affect perceived credibility here. 7. Reproduced with Kelsky’s permission.

References Arpaly, N. (2015). Huckleberry Finn revisited: Inverse akrasia and moral ignorance. The Nature of Moral Responsibility, eds. Clarke, McKenna, & Smith. OUP. Arpaly, N., & Schroeder, T. (1999). Praise, blame and the whole self. Philosophical Studies, 93(2), 161–188. Australian Government. (2018). Family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia, 2018. Retrieved from: www.aihw.gov.au/reports/domestic-violence/familydomestic-sexual-violence-in-australia-2018/contents/summary Bell, M. (2013). The standing to blame: A critique. In Blame: Its nature and norms, eds. Coates & Tognazzini. Oxford University Press. Berthold, D. (2010). Tidy whiteness: a genealogy of race, purity, and hygiene. Ethics & the Environment, 15(1), 1–26. Bosman, J., Taylor, K., & Arango, T. (2019). A common trait among mass killer: Hatred of women. New York Times. Retrieved from: www.nytimes.com/2019/ 08/10/us/mass-shootings-misogyny-dayton.html Calhoun, C. (1989). Responsibility and reproach. Ethics, 99(2), 389–406. Cirne, A. (2012). Willful hermeneutical marginalization: An account of malicious agency in hermeneutical injustice. Aporia, 22(1), 45–57. Ciurria, M. (2013). Situationism, moral responsibility and blame. Philosophia, 41(1), 179–193. Coates, T. N. (2015). Between the world and me. New York: Text Publishing. Cudd, A. E. (2006). Analyzing oppression. New York: Oxford University Press. Curry, T. J. (2018). Killing boogeymen: Phallicism and the misandric mischaracterizations of Black males in theory. Res Philosophica, 95(2), 235–272. Davis, N. (2017, Oct 9). Stereotype that women are kinder and less selfish is true, claim neuroscientists. The Guardian. Retrieved from: www.theguardian.com/ science/2017/oct/09/stereotype-that-women-are-kinder-and-less-selfish-is-trueclaim-neuroscientists Doris, J. M. (Forthcoming).

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———. (2002). Lack of character: Personality and moral behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Du Toit, L. (2009). A philosophical investigation of rape: The making and unmaking of the feminine self. New York & London: Routledge. Fischer, J. M. (2011). Deep control: Essays on free will and value. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. (2006). My way: Essays on moral responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. New York: OUP. Friend, T. (2018, Feb 26). Donald Glover can’t save you. The New Yorker. Retrieved from: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/donald-glover-cant-save-you Gilbert, M. (2000). Sociality and responsibility: New essays in plural subject theory. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Green, S. (2017, July 13). Violence against black women-many types, far-reaching effects. Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Retrieved from: https://iwpr.org/ violence-black-women-many-types-far-reaching-effects/ Harman, G. (1999, January). Moral philosophy meets social psychology: Virtue ethics and the fundamental attribution error. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian society (pp. 315–331). Aristotelian Society. Highsmith, P. (1955). The Talented Mr. Ripley: Ripley under ground: Ripley’s game (No. 262). Everyman’s Library, 1999. Holroyd, J. (2018). Two ways of socialising responsibility: Circumstantialist and scaffolded-responsiveness. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. Oxford University Press. Kelsky, K. (2018, Oct 15). This is to those who identify as women. Retrieved from: www.facebook.com/TheProfessorIsIn/posts/1862578007122071 Langton, M. (2016, July). Two victims, no justice: Ms. Dhu, Lynette Daley and the alarming rates of violence against Indigenous women. The Monthly, 124, 36–39. Lewis, T. L. (2015). Exploring children’s perceptions of African American English. Retrieved from Digital Commons, Florida International University: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2317/ List, C., & Pettit, P. (2011). Group agency: The possibility, design, and status of corporate agents. New York: Oxford University Press. Macnamara, C. (2015). Blame, communication, and morally responsible agency. In The nature of moral responsibility, eds. Clarke et al. New York: Oxford University Press. Manne, K. (2017). Down girl: The logic of misogyny. Oxford University Press. Mason, E. (2018). Respecting each other and taking responsibility for our biases. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feministphilosophy/ May, L., & Strikwerda, R. (1994). Men in groups: Collective responsibility for rape. Hypatia, 9(2), 134–151. McKenna, M. (2012). Conversation & responsibility. Oxford University Press. Medina, J. (2012). Hermeneutical injustice and polyphonic contextualism: Social silences and shared hermeneutical responsibilities. Social Epistemology, 26(2), 201–220.

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Mills, C. W. (2017). Black rights/white wrongs: The critique of racial liberalism. Oxford University Press. Paul, L. A. (2014). Transformative experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Pereboom, D. (2015). A notion of moral responsibility immune to the threat from causal determination. In The nature of moral responsibility, eds. Clarke et al. Oxford University Press. Pierre, J. (2015, January 28). Running Amok. Aeon. Retrieved from: https://aeon. co/essays/does-a-culture-of-entitlement-explain-us-mass-shootings Sher, G. (2015). Responsibility, conversation, and communication. In The nature of moral responsibility, eds. R. Clarke et al., Oxford University Press. Shoemaker, D. (2015). Ecumenical attributability. In The nature of moral responsibility, eds. Clarke et al. Oxford University Press. Smith, A. M. (2015). Responsibility as answerability. Inquiry, 58(2), 99–126. Spencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. M. (1999). Stereotype threat and women’s math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35(1), 4–28. Talbert, M. (2008). Blame and responsiveness to moral reasons: Are psychopaths blameworthy? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 89(4), 516–535. Vargas, M. (2013). Building better beings: A theory of moral responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2005). The trouble with tracing. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 29(1), 269–291. Victor, D. (2018, Feb 17). Mass shooters are all different except one thing: Most are men. New York Times. Retrieved from: www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/us/ mass-murderers.html

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1. Introduction In this chapter, I refine my intersectional feminist model of moral responsibility and respond to anticipated objections. These responses are meant to provide clarity on my understanding of IF as a system of responsibilitystructuring norms and relationships. This is how this chapter will unfold. In section 2, I will differentiate between blame simpliciter and apt blame, and then identify three core characteristics of apt blame: (a) it satisfies IF conditions of normative adequacy, (b) it seeks uptake, and (c) it contains accurate representational content about a perpetrator’s socially embedded actions. I explore how ostensible cases of blame can depart from (a)–(c) in ways that may undermine their normative adequacy. In section 3, I will respond to a common objection to functionalism, which is that it can’t resolve the gap between its backward-looking (‘retrosert’) criterion and its forwardlooking (‘prosert’) criterion. I say that these two sets of criteria converge on my proposal because I take socially embedded actions, not agency, to be the locus of blame. Therefore, people who ‘retroserve’ blame for their participation in a hierarchy of power also ‘proserve’ blame for their participation in that hierarchy. In section 4, I will respond to a related objection, which is that functionalism obliges us to act on the ‘wrong reasons’ – reasons that alienate us from our moral selves. I deny that this is a problem for an IF account because one of the main aims of such an account is precisely to alienate people from their acculturated intuitions, which are deformed. Finally, in section 5, I revisit the objection considered in the introduction, viz., that IF is ‘too principled’ and we would be better off acting on ‘unprincipled virtue.’ I respond that most people’s unprincipled (pre-reflective) intuitions are so corrupted by acculturated biases that they will need to reflect assiduously on intersectional feminist principles to see things clearly. This reflective exercise should help the average person distance herself from the biases she has absorbed from mainstream culture.

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2. Blame Simpliciter vs. Normatively Adequate Blame Responsibility theorists are generally interested in delineating two notions of blame: first, a notion of blame simpliciter, and second, a notion of normatively adequate blame.1 We saw examples of this in Chapter 2. Blame simpliciter, on the attributability view, consists of an attribution of features of the self to a perpetrator; on the conversational view, it is a contribution to moral conversation; and on the standard functionalist approach, it is an agency-enhancing intervention. Tokens of blame simpliciter are normatively adequate on each theory if they satisfy a specific set of criteria. On the attributability view, they should accurately attribute aspects of the self; on the answerability view, they should elicit a moral account; and on the functionalist view, they should enhance the perpetrator’s agency. Each theory, then, includes a particular understanding of blame simpliciter, and a particular set of normative adequacy conditions that allow us to distinguish between licit and illicit blame tokens. I, too, subscribe to distinct notions of blame simpliciter and apt blame, as specified in the introduction. Let me reiterate and clarify that distinction here. Blame simpliciter, on my view, is a communicative practice that conveys representational and normative content (similar to McKenna’s and Macnamara’s views). More specifically, blame simpliciter represents someone as a perpetrator and seeks uptake for that representation from a respondent. For blame to be apt, its contents should play an IF-conducive role in our communicative exchanges. In particularly, these contents should serve to diagnose and combat people’s roles in systems of power and domination. Because blame, on my understanding, has these three dimensions (representational, normative, and communicative), it can go wrong in a number of ways. First, it can fail to seek uptake in the right way; second, it can fail to accurately represent its target; and third, it can fail to satisfy intersectional feminist criteria. A speech act that doesn’t have the right sort of representational content or illocutionary orientation might not count as blame, or it might not be apt. In the next three subsections, I’ll explore how blame can go awry across the three dimensions in question.

2.1. Normative Adequacy To begin, I’ve stipulated a set of normative adequacy criteria extrapolated from overlapping emancipatory subdisciplines that I take to be germane to intersectional feminism as an inclusive, non-hierarchal feminism. These criteria are met by apt (or IF-conducive) tokens of blame simpliciter. If Jeff blames Jill for ‘being a slut,’ he’s blamed her, simpliciter. That is, he’s represented her as a violator of a norm that he seeks to uphold. But his blame isn’t IF-conducive because it enforces patriarchal norms,

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which are incompatible with IF aims. In general, misogynistic, racist, heteronormative, and other prejudiced tokens of blame are inapt. 2.2. Uptake-Seeking Second, blame can fail epistemically if it doesn’t seek uptake. If I address my blame to a housecat, this isn’t the most informative or ameliorative use of my moral testimony. I ought to find an epistemic peer to validate, endorse, commiserate with, or otherwise ‘take up’ my blame. That said, we can blame unanswerable perpetrators on my view by seeking uptake from a well-positioned third party. If Jeff the Sexual Harasser isn’t sensitive to my blame, then maybe my colleagues will be. I should direct my moral testimony to someone capable of affirming it. Now, one might wonder: what if you live in a culture in which no one understands sexual harassment? In such a culture, blaming people for sexual harassment won’t enlighten anyone (ostensibly), since no one can understand the meaning or moral import of your moral testimony. In this connection, Miranda Fricker suggests that there are cultures and historical eras in which certain moral claims can’t elicit uptake because the ecology lacks the “collective hermeneutical resources” needed to parse and appreciate the claim’s content (2007: 7). On this basis, she suggests that people can’t be blamed for transgressions that aren’t recognized as such in a hermeneutically ‘gappy’ environment. Sexual harassment is a case in point. The term sexual harassment wasn’t coined until the mid1970s (Brownmiller 1993), and didn’t gain broad cultural recognition until much later. In Fricker’s view, people weren’t blameworthy for transgressions that fit the current definition of sexual harassment until the mid-1970s, if not much later. (Even after the term entered the popular lexicon, few people could understand its full extension or moral force.) So, perpetrators of sexual harassment were victims of “epistemic bad luck,” being in the wrong place at the wrong time (2007: 33). I don’t agree with this construal of blame’s limits, partly because I don’t agree with this picture of the epistemic ecology. Jose Medina offers an alternative construal of the situation, which recognizes a plurality of “epistemic communities and epistemic practices,” containing various interpretive resources and moral vernaculars, which only partially overlap in one society (2012: 202). Within a pluralistic society like ours, claims that are unintelligible within one epistemic context might be fully intelligible within another. So, even if the dominant (cisgender male) epistemic community couldn’t parse claims of sexual harassment in 1970, there may have been – indeed, there were – epistemic contexts in which this allegation made sense. Even if the term ‘sexual harassment’ wasn’t coined yet, the underlying concepts were already intelligible to members of epistemic communities with relevant lived experiences, experiences

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that alerted them to the wrongness of sexual harassment. Women had to build moral vernaculars and epistemic confidence amongst themselves for generations before they were in a position to wrest uptake and respect from mainstream society. Medina’s understanding of the epistemic landscape as pluralistic and ‘polyphonic’ fits with the understanding of knowledge developed by standpoint epistemologists, who hold that people gain knowledge, or insights capable of grounding knowledge, from shared experiences. (Hence the term ‘experiential knowledge.’) This standpoint view supports Medina’s observation that even if the mainstream vernacular lacks certain moral concepts, those concepts may be available and intelligible in the vernaculars of epistemic subcultures. This theory of knowledge production isn’t simply a theoretical abstraction: it is corroborated by research on knowledge transmission (and vernacular construction) within marginalized subcultures, in which members (often) share knowledge through ingroup channels. To give a few examples: women working in hostile environments often transmit knowledge about sexual harassers through “whisper networks,” without sharing that knowledge with their cisgender male colleagues or the broader society (Valenti 2017). These ingroup channels allow women to better navigate patriarchal spaces without facing sexist reprisals, threats, and violence. Similarly, African Americans share knowledge about racial oppression through subcultural practices such as giving their children “the talk,” or, as Jemar Tisby specifies, a series of talks: “There’s the talk about how people will fear you and consider you threatening no matter what you do. The talk about working twice as hard for half as much. The talk about how black kids don’t get second chances” (2018). These talks are not shared openly with white people because their main purpose is to protect Black children from the effects of white supremacy and to equip them to navigate a white supremacist culture without attracting negative attention. Disseminating this information broadly would defeat the purpose. In a similar vein, gay people, who were “threatened with police raids, harassment and the loss of their jobs, families and reputations” throughout the 20th century, shared knowledge with each other through “a sophisticated system of subcultural codes of dress, speech and style that enabled them to recognize one another and to carry on covert conversations” (Chauncy 1994). This ‘in-group vernacular’ allowed them to identify each other and share information discretely, without attracting the hostility of the cisheteronormative majority. These are just a few of the possibly innumerable examples of covert knowledge-transmission channels that enabled oppressed subcultures to share knowledge amongst themselves without attracting the attention of the cultural majority, which would only use that information to better persecute and oppress the minority group. The knowledge transmitted within marginalized epistemic communities amounts to a subcultural

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set of hermeneutical resources, and this set of resources is capable of underwriting the subculture’s moral testimony (including blame), even when that testimony can’t be translated into the dominant culture’s moral vernacular due to epistemic schisms. Because the hermeneutical climate in our society is pluralistic and polyphonic, women can blame sexual harassers even if the cultural mainstream denies the existence of sexual harassment; Black people can blame racist police officers before the white majority recognizes the existence of racist policing norms; gay people can blame homophobes before the cisheteronormative majority acknowledges the legitimacy of same-sex love, and so on. These subcultural moral claims are underwritten by the hermeneutical resources of the claimant’s epistemic community. Within that subculture, such claims are not only intelligible but authoritative. For this reason, members of marginalized groups can blame privileged people without the support of the majority. Still, one might ask: what if someone is in solitary confinement and can’t speak to anyone? Can this person blame anyone? This is where my notion of incipient blame (as described in Chapter 2) comes into play. Many communication theorists take ‘incipient blame’ to be a valid, albeit non-paradigmatic, instance of blame. Incipient blame, like overt blame, contains representational and normative content, and seeks uptake for that content, albeit counterfactually or prospectively. That is, it would (or will) seek uptake under felicitous epistemic conditions. Someone in solitary confinement can incipiently blame whoever subjected her to this inhumane condition (which is a form of psychological torture that can be accurately described as a “living death” and a human rights violation (Guenther 2012)), even if she can’t talk to anyone. Incipient blame occurs in contexts in which a person’s speech is suppressed or silenced, whether by physical barriers or epistemic oppression, though the person would speak up in more uptakeconductive circumstances. A victim of intimate partner violence might silence herself out of fear of violent reprisals, though she would blame the abuser if the threat of violence were lifted. This, too, is a case of incipient blame. These suppressed (‘incipient’) speech acts are valuable on an IF model because they contain conceptual and normative information that, if expressed, would (or will) challenge oppressive norms and power dynamics. Therefore, silenced and suppressed speech acts are valid cases of (incipient) blame by IF criteria, given their potential to dismantle hierarchies of power under more felicitous circumstances. Since we can’t always know when oppressive conditions will change, we should welcome any and all instances of IF-conducive blame, even if they are presently muzzled. The inclination to overtly blame a perpetrator is a valuable moral motive, which contains the representational and normative ingredients of intersectional feminist blame. We should give that impulse credit when we can.

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2.3. Representational Third, one of blame’s core features is that it represents someone as a perpetrator. If an utterance doesn’t contain representational content about a norm violation, it isn’t even blame simpliciter, let alone apt blame. It might be frustration or anger or some other emotion, but it isn’t blame. Now, since blame contains representational content, its representational content can be veridical or not. That is, it can represent its target accurately or inaccurately. When blame misrepresents the responsibilityrelevant features of its target, it mischaracterizes the person’s guilt or innocence, or degree thereof. These misrepresentations are problematic insofar as we think that blame should be fair and proportional; it shouldn’t slander innocent people, or present minor transgressions as if they were more severe. That said, one could argue that false allegations could potentially promote IF aims, even if they are intrinsically unjust. To see this, imagine that I could promote awareness about a specific transgression by falsely accusing someone of that transgression. Superficially, my false allegation may seem justified by its positive epistemic effects – increasing awareness about a species of harm. But this analysis neglects the role that false allegations in general play in our responsibility system, which is to exacerbate epistemic injustice. When an epistemically marginalized person makes a false allegation, that allegation is likely to sow distrust of the person’s social group. We can bring this into greater relief by examining a specific type of false allegation that has received an inordinate amount of public attention given how rare it is – false rape allegations. As Deborah Tuerkheimer states, although false rape reports are uncommon, law enforcement officers tend to default to doubt when women allege sexual assault, resulting in curtailed investigations as well as infrequent arrests and prosecutions. Credibility discounts, which are meted out at every stage of the criminal process, involve downgrades both to trustworthiness (corresponding to testimonial injustice) and to plausibility (corresponding to hermeneutical injustice). (2017) Thus, anyone who files a false rape report will exacerbate the epistemic injustice already experienced by rape victims, will make it harder for rape victims to file rape reports, and will make it harder for rape victims to elicit uptake for their reports in the form of trust, investigations, prosecutions, and so on. For these reasons, false rape reports don’t play a positive role in the responsibility system; rather, they serve to exacerbate epistemic injustice. This is an illustration of a general rule: false allegations exacerbate epistemic injustice overall.

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Prejudiced blame is doubly problematic because it contains both nonveridical content and prejudiced content. It represents its target inaccurately through a prejudiced lens. Slut-shaming is an example: it represents women as morally flawed because their sexual behaviour diverges from patriarchal ‘purity’ norms. In reality, there is no such thing as a ‘slut,’ but people label women as ‘sluts’ to maintain patriarchal norms regulating women’s sexual autonomy and restricting their freedom. Prejudiced blame harms minorities overall, too. For these reasons, non-veridical, and especially prejudiced, blame isn’t justified on an IF framework, insofar as these types of blame exacerbate asymmetries of power as a general rule.

3. Justification Gaps One of the main objections to functionalist theories is that they treat blame’s aptness as a function of its propensity to promote a certain outcome (greater moral agency), not a matter of what the agent deserves, and this creates a problematic gap between blame’s prospective justification (what is seeks to accomplish) and its retrospective justification (what it tracks). John Doris helps to clarify this distinction by labelling the forwardlooking justification of functionalist blame as “prosert,” and the backwardlooking justification of functionalist blame as “retrosert” (2015a: 2626). The ‘retrosert’ justification, says Doris, is the intuitive one, whereas the ‘prosert’ justification is counterintuitive and therefore strongly revisionary. He raises this objection specifically against Vargas’ agency-enhancement theory: Here Vargas departs the ordinary: punishing someone because they ‘had it coming’ looks a different kind of fun than punishing someone ‘for their own good,’ and while the first looks to integrally involve desert, the second need not; it certainly seems as though you can penalize me for my own good whether or not I’ve done something to deserve it. (2015a: 2626) Doris worries that the prosert justification isn’t ‘psychologically viable’ because it’s too detached from our common-sense intuitions about blame, so its adoption would ‘alienate’ us from our own moral reasons (ibid.). He drives home this worry with a sports analogy, which I will discuss in a moment. Doris’ psychological objection is related to a popular normative objection, articulated by Victoria McGeer (2015), on which the prosert justification licenses the blaming of innocent people (who don’t retroserve blame). The blaming of innocent people is not only psychologically alienating (because we recoil from it), but also normatively

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unacceptable (because it’s wrong) (2015: 2639). Indeed, Vargas’ prosert metric would seem to license false rape allegations if these allegations would somehow enhance the target, which they presumably could in some cases. For instance, if the allegations would motivate the target to learn more about the transgression for which he has been falsely accused, thereby enlightening him about the harms of rape, this would presumably justify falsely accusing him on agency-enhancement grounds. Seemingly, falsely allegations can be justified by their propensity to increase moral awareness in people who have been falsely accused. These related worries (one psychological, the other normative) are illustrated by a sports analogy provided by Doris. In the sports world, players aren’t awarded points based on considerations about how the distribution of points within the sport will improve players’ athletic agency. Rather, they win points based on the number of times they score according to the rules of the game. So, Maya April Moore wins points based on how many times she gets the basketball in the net, not considerations about how awarding her a point will affect the distribution of athletic agency in the WNBA. The problem with the ‘prosert’ metric is that it would have us award points to players who don’t score, and deduct points from players who do score, in order to enhance athletic ability across all members of the WNBA. This point distribution scheme would seem unfair to most people, which in turn would cause them to lose their confidence in the integrity of basketball. Players and fans alike would be alienated from the sport and would no longer want to play it or watch it under the new ‘prosert’ rules. Ultimately, the ‘sporting ecology’ would collapse due to a lack of investment and interest in basketball. This is the opposite of Vargas’ desired result, which is the improvement of the ecology. If people don’t get the moral credit they deserve, then many will be alienated from the moral ecology in the same way that people are alienated from a basketball ecology that awards point on the basis of athletic agency distribution, not points scored. The problem is actually much worse for the moral ecology, though. The prosert metric would licence the blaming of innocents in order to enhance their agency, which would alienate most people. This was in fact the reason most philosophers lost confidence in Smart’s utilitarian account: it lets you punish people who did nothing wrong to enhance utility. As Victoria McGeer points out (2015), the typical response to the alienation worry is to try to reduce or eliminate the gap between retrosert and prosert. The standard gap-reduction strategy is to argue that ‘deserved’ blame tends to enhance people’s agency, so the gap between desert and prosert is actually negligible. Since this strategy would only reduce the justification gap, not eliminate it, it wouldn’t satisfy most critics, particularly those who believe in an indefeasible principle of justice. (Blaming one innocent person for rape isn’t as bad as blaming ten, but it’s still unconscionable.) In any case, it’s not clear that the justification gap

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between desert and prosert (in Vargas’ senses) is that narrow. Suppose that falsely accusing Jeff the Sexual Harasser of rape would force Jeff to realize that he should stop sexually harassing his employees, even though he hasn’t raped any of them. On the agency-enhancement view, it seems that we’re licensed to blame Jeff for a transgression that he didn’t commit for the sake of enhancing his moral agency. Most people would find this unacceptable. Conversely, imagine that Jeff is an ideological misogynist and a workplace sexual harasser whose agency is impervious to improvement. Vargas’ circumstantialist constraint entails that we’re not licensed to blame Jeff for a transgression that he actually did commit, simply because he’s epistemically deformed. This is also troubling, for the very reasons that Vargas originally levelled at Fischer’s control theory: because we’re not allowed to give someone what he deserves, which is harmful to the victims. In sum, Vargas’ prosert criterion, in combination with his circumstantialist constraint, obliges us to blame people who did nothing wrong, and to excuse people who committed legitimate transgressions. These departures from ordinary morality won’t sit well with most people, including intersectional feminists who are committed to justice as a first principle. Notably, one of the naïve objections to intersectional feminism is that it’s invested in giving certain groups (such as women) special privileges that they don’t deserve. If this were true, then few people would have confidence in IF, because IF wouldn’t be fair. But in reality, IF is committed to distributing respect, credit, and power fairly by diagnosing and dismantling (genuine) asymmetries of power that give rise to unfair distributions of certain benefits and burdens. If IF did allow us to blame innocent people and excuse guilty people for unconvincing theoretical reasons, this would undermine people’s confidence in the theory. Fortunately, this isn’t what IF does. Instead, it seeks to blame people who actually contributed to hierarchies of power, in order to weaken and dismantle those systems of power. So much for the gap-reduction strategy. The gap-elimination strategy (as described by McGeer) is to claim that only agency-enhancing tokens of blame improve the moral ecology, and are therefore proserved as well as deserved. But it’s quite implausible to think that wrongdoers always have enhanceable agency, and I don’t think that Vargas himself believes this. If some wrongdoers don’t have enhanceable agency, then some wrongdoers aren’t eligible for blame. It’s also not very plausible to think that undeserved blame never enhances anyone’s agency. In some cases, false blame might enhance the entire moral ecology. Another issue with the gap-elimination strategy is that it makes the prosert metric redundant: we can now explain blame purely by reference to desert criteria (features of the wrongdoer’s agency, such as enhanceable psychological elements). This reduces the agency-enhancing view to a desert account, eliminating the need for a second (prosert) level of justification.

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I have a different answer to the justification-gap objection. On my view, retrosert doesn’t track features of the perpetrator’s agency – it tracks a perpetrator’s action(s), and their role(s) in systems of power and domination. Retrosert in this sense converges with IF’s prosert criteria, which enjoin us to diagnose and combat hierarchies of power. Retroserved blame serves to diagnose and combat systems of oppression by identifying people’s roles in those systems as a function of their actions. Thus, people deserve blame for their oppression-enhancing social roles, because blaming them in this way serves to diagnose and combat asymmetrical power relations – those to which they contribute. Since I reject the agency criterion, I’m not forced to excuse people who commit transgressions but lack enhanceable agency; I can blame them for their actions, even if their actions don’t reflect their agency. Nor am I forced to blame people who did nothing wrong, since blaming innocents (as discussed above) doesn’t serve to promote IF aims; it generally serves to discredit the epistemically marginalized, exacerbating asymmetries in the distribution of uptake and trust. In contrast to Vargas, I believe that an unenhanceable sexist retroserves blame because he legitimately performed a sexist action – a type of action that, on scrutiny, plays an enforcing role in a system of patriarchal norms and relations; and the sexist also proserves blame because diagnosing and combating acts of patriarchal oppression is one of IF’s central prospective aims. Retrosert is decided by an agent’s involvement in relations of power and domination via their actions, and prosert is decided by blame’s propensity to diagnose and combat such power dynamics, as they are enforced by specific individuals. This relational-ameliorative approach to blame eliminates the justification gap because retrosert and prosert are both a function of human contributions to asymmetries of power; one metric diagnoses those contributions (i.e., identifies and takes a stand against people’s contributions to systems of power), and the other metric seeks to ameliorate those systems of power. Because my notion of retrosert doesn’t track perpetrator agency – it responds to a perpetrator’s socially-embedded actions – it doesn’t oblige us to excuse or exempt unenhanceable perpetrators; nor does my notion of prosert allow us to blame people who did nothing wrong, as doing so wouldn’t help us diagnose people’s actual roles in real hierarchies of power, and combat them. This approach doesn’t reduce IF to a desert theory, though, because it doesn’t explain blame’s justification by reference to agential facts or individual actions; it explains them, irreducibly, by reference to people’s involvements in systems of power, which IF has an interest in diagnosing and combating. Thus, IF is still a functionalist theory, one on which apt blame functions to ameliorate injustice and oppression (by its impact on individuals and groups). If IF were a pure desert theory, it wouldn’t enjoin us to blame people in ways that ameliorate systems of oppression: it would simply oblige us to blame individual members of systems of

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power and domination. But the prosert metric identifies a long-term goal: blaming members of power systems in such a way as to dismantle those power systems in the long run.

4. Sports Analogies Let me use Doris’ sports analogy to better illustrate the differences between my view and Vargas’ view. In basketball, players are awarded points for baskets, no matter how they score them, short of breaking the rules. If a player tries to make a basket but fails, she doesn’t get any points. If a relatively unskilled player makes a basket on a fluke, she gets the designated number of points for that basket. Points correspond to baskets, not player agency. Similarly on my view, blame tracks actions, not agency. Making a sexist joke ‘by accident’ or ‘on a whim’ is blameworthy. Using a homophobic slur because everyone in your community is a homophobe is blameworthy. The state of your agency or self doesn’t absolve you from blame. Now, imagine that someone dunks the basketball by jumping on an opponent’s back for leverage. The person has made a basket, but only by injuring another player, which counts as a foul. Blaming an innocent person is like a foul: even if you’ve accomplished the desired result (promoting IF aims), you’ve done so at the expense of an innocent person. If fouls were permitted in basketball, privileged players would exploit this allowance to harass and intimidate other players – especially more vulnerable players – undermining the integrity of the sport. People would focus on cultivating better strategies to injure and intimidate other players instead of honing their athletic ability. Analogously, if people could make false allegations for prospective reasons, people would exploit this allowance to reinforce existing power differentials. More specifically, privileged people would use their privileged status to tilt the responsibility system further in their favour, using false allegations as a tool to silence people who would otherwise credibly accuse them. In response to allegations of racism, they would accuse people of ‘reverse racism.’ In response to allegations of sexual harassment, they would accuse women of being ‘sluts.’ In other words, the permissibility of false allegations would be exploited by the epistemically powerful to further marginalize the oppressed. This would alienate the marginalized, who wouldn’t be able to participate equally in the responsibility system – much like the current situation. In the end, this allowance would alienate everyone. People would see society as operating on a principle of might-makes-right, not principles of justice or care or equality. Permitting false allegations certainly wouldn’t help us diagnose and combat asymmetries of power – it would validate those systems. Besides fouls, there are, of course, behind-the-scenes manoeuvres that undermine the integrity of sports: steroid use, match fixing, and the kinds

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of exclusions and marginalizations identified by Collins and Bilge (2016). Intersectional feminists are interested in diagnosing and combating these ‘extrinsic’ asymmetries of power, as well as ‘intrinsic’ hierarchies and injustices. While Collins and Bilge are interested in bringing integrity and equality to the World Cup, they nowhere suggest that we should change the point system in order to achieve this; rather, they recommend that we scrutinize the asymmetries of power that allow some players to get points more easily than others, and that prevent some people from playing at all. An intersectional feminist analysis of responsibility should similarly recognize the validity of credible allegations, while diagnosing the asymmetries of power that prevent the epistemically marginalized from commanding the uptake and respect they deserve. I have proposed that we can accomplish this aim by blaming legitimate perpetrators in light of their roles in asymmetrical power relations, thereby effectuating a more equitable distribution of uptake, respect, and social power. This approach doesn’t involve the use of false allegations, but instead calls on us to scrutinize people’s actions, testimony, social position, and social privileges more carefully, positioning us to identify asymmetrical power relations that unfairly tilt blame towards some people and away from others.

5. Wrong Reasons The justification-gap objection is related to a similar objection called the ‘wrong-reasons argument.’ According to the wrong-reasons argument, functionalism enjoins people to act on the reasons that allegedly justify blame (e.g., enhancing a perpetrator’s agency), even if these are ‘the wrong reasons’ by the subject’s own lights. Because functionalism asks people to act on reasons that they don’t necessarily endorse, it alienates them from their ‘moral selves.’ As Doris puts it, “thinking about why to punish me, and thinking about why to have the practice of punishment, are disparate exercises: in the first case, backward looking considerations predominate, and in the second case, forward looking considerations do” (2015a: 2632). It’s not clear that people can entertain both reasons at the same time, or that they should if this exercise comes at the expense of their moral integrity. Again, there is a psychological worry and a normative worry: can we balance prosert and retrosert criteria in our internal moral accounting? And should we try to if it gives rise to a sense of alienation from our sense of self? For his part, Vargas takes this to be a superficial problem. He replies that “alienation does not obviously get going if there are just different questions here, with their own appropriate answers” (2015: 2665). There are two questions that we can consider separately. Unlike Vargas, I have tried to show that desert and prosert, in IF terms, are conceptually related and mutually compatible. But I will readily acknowledge a gap between the intuitive notion of desert, and the IF

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notion of prosert (as well as desert). That is, I grant that most people will take IF reasons to be the ‘wrong reasons’ to blame people, and will thus experience IF reasons as morally alienating. But I deny that this is a problem because, unlike Vargas, I want to alienate ordinary folks from their ordinary moral intuitions. Since we live in an asymmetrically structured society, many of our acculturated moral intuitions will be deformed, and adopting an IF framework will alienate us from those reasons. Good! Having said this, I don’t want to say that you need to be a principled intersectional feminist to blame people in an IF-conducive way. You might blame people in the right way by sheer accident. Suppose that Rena has never heard of intersectional feminism, but one day, in conversation with her friend Sheena, she blames Sheena’s boyfriend Don for being too controlling. Rena might not be a conscientious intersectional feminist, but since blaming men for curtailing women’s autonomy is compatible with IF, she has blamed Don in an IF-conducive way. Maybe Rena isn’t capable of connecting Don’s behaviour with the patriarchal norms and structures that it enforces, but this doesn’t mean that her blame is inapt: it’s simply not a maximally informative case of apt blame. We would be wrong to fault Rena for her blame, though we could constructively add to it by pointing out connections between Don’s controlling behaviour and patriarchal ideals about gender relations. This would add informative layers to Rena’s already-apt blaming judgment. Michael McKenna has raised an interesting version of the wrong-reason argument in personal correspondence (2018). Imagine that a woman is out shopping with her young sons and gets heckled by two men for being a single mother.2 She turns to the men and blames them for heckling her. McKenna worries that IF can’t accommodate the validity of the mother’s blame because IF principles require her to act on political motives, i.e., to be an activist: Her angry blaming of them it seems to me is not to be assessed in terms of her contributing to allyship or some sort of activism. It was about her and her dignity. Key is, it was about her. She needn’t have borne the burden of larger moral pressures. (McKenna, pers. comm.) My response is that defending one’s dignity against prejudiced insults is both inherently political and IF-conducive. Standing up for oneself against bigoted harassment is, in fact, an act of political courage, and an act that serves to promote intersectional feminist ideals. This is true whether the subject thinks she’s ‘being political’ or not. By challenging the bigots’ insults, the single mother is resisting oppression and injustice, consistent with IF aims. And, at the same time, she’s modelling IFconducive behaviour to her sons, discouraging them from growing up to think that these mundane acts of misogyny are normal or appropriate.

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The gist is that actions that seem personal are often, if not always, political. Or, as second-wave feminists put it, “the personal is political.” We don’t have to know that we’re acting as intersectional feminists to blame people in IF-conducive ways. But often, when we’re defending ourselves against persecution or oppression, we’re demonstrating political courage. Indeed, defending oneself against an oppressive ideology is a potent form of resistance.

6. Principlism Revisited Another possible objection to my account is that it is too principled. According to Nomy Arpaly (2015), acting on principles isn’t intrinsically virtuous or praiseworthy. Nazis act on Nazi principles, and this just makes them scrupulously evil. Being principled can lead one down the path to destruction and moral turpitude. Perhaps following one’s moral intuitions is safer than following one’s principled convictions, because moral intuitions are flexible. This is certainly true if one’s principles are corrupt, but not otherwise. Arpaly herself avows that deliberating on moral principles is generally useful. What she denies is that it is valuable for its own sake. Arpaly would agree that reflecting on genuinely morally relevant principles is a morally useful exercise. In conditions of oppression and systemic ignorance, it may be particularly important, as one’s pre-reflective intuitions will inevitable be deformed. To bring the value of principled reflection into relief, let’s reconsider Arpaly’s analysis of Huck Finn, an exemplar of unprincipled virtue (2015). In Mark Twain’s novel, Huck helps his friend Jim escape from slavery even though he believes that slavery is a justified social institution. That is, he thinks that he’s committing a transgression. But he helps Jim nonetheless because he considers Jim to be his friend. So, Finn was unwittingly acting on IF principles (which enjoin us to ameliorate oppression), even though his subjective reason for helping Jim escape was a feeling of friendship. Of course, Finn would have been a better intersectional feminist if he had consciously reflected on his beliefs about slavery through an intersectional feminist lens and denounced them. Had he done this, he would have been inclined to help not only his friend Jim, but every enslaved person, and to abhor the institutional of slavery itself. Helping one’s friend in spite of one’s racist convictions about the person’s status as property is better than not helping one’s friend at all, to be sure; but helping one’s friend (partly) because one sees him as a moral equal is even better. In fact, it makes one a better friend. A person can’t be a particularly good friend if he believes deep down that his ‘friend’ deserves to be treated as a piece of property rather than a human being with inalienable rights. This is because true friendship requires an element of mutual respect. In conditions of structural inequality, the assumption of mutual respect that grounds friendship may require deliberation on asymmetries of power

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that place ‘friends’ on asymmetrical footing. This principled deliberation may disabuse people of any false beliefs they have about their status relative to others, thereby enabling more robust friendships in general. Thus, while Arpaly is right that principled reflection isn’t valuable for its own sake, it might be necessary for the realization of true friendship in asymmetrically structured social conditions. And it may be necessary for many other things as well, such as blaming people in the right way and in the right spirit. When our folk intuitions emerge in conditions of injustice and inequality, critical reflection may be needed to correct our deformed values and ideals. Correct principled reflection, of course, isn’t a skill that you can acquire simply by going to university. In fact, taking certain classes might impair your moral reasoning ability, making you a worse person. Rather, moral reflection is an ability that you gain, not by reflecting on principles in your armchair, but by exchanging moral testimony with different people. Since everyone is a subject of certain privileges and certain disadvantages, deliberation based on conversations with diverse interlocutors can help us gain moral insight.

7. Concluding Remarks Most contemporary theories of responsibility, such as Fischer’s (2011) and Doris’ (2015b), purport to be moderately revisionary, and are therefore much less revisionary than intersectional feminism, which claims to be revolutionary. The closest competitor to IF, by my lights, is eliminativism, the view that the responsibility system is so broken that we should completely abolish it (Waller 2011, 2015). Unlike eliminativists, however, intersectional feminism favours an ameliorative solution. I am hopeful that we can transform the responsibility system by adopting a set of ameliorative aims, reflecting on them in our daily lives, and discussing them with a diversity of socially embedded subjects. Whereas eliminativists tend to think that fixing the responsibility system is impossible, I don’t think that we’ve ever really tried – at least, not on a large scale. If you look at the literature on moral responsibility, ameliorative approaches are almost completely lacking. This reflects a broader cultural ignorance about the severity of systemic inequality and the urgent need for ameliorative solutions and social transformation. People don’t think or talk enough about systemic inequality or the possibility of revolutionary change. In this chapter, I have argued that an IF approach isn’t internally inconsistent, psychologically untenable, or normatively inadequate – that is, there’s nothing stopping us from adopting it and incorporating it into our lives.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Michael McKenna for recommending that I distinguish between these two concepts.

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2. I’m paraphrasing here. These aren’t McKenna’s exact words, but this is basically the scenario he presented to me.

References Arpaly, N. (2015). Huckleberry Finn revisited: Inverse akrasia and moral ignorance. The Nature of Moral Responsibility, Oxford, 141–156. Brownmiller, S. (1993). Against our will: Men, women, and rape. Ballantine Books. Chauncy, G. (1994, June 26). A gay world, vibrant and forgotten. The New York Times. Retrieved from: www.nytimes.com/1994/06/26/opinion/a-gay-worldvibrant-and-forgotten.html Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality: Key concepts. Cambridge & Malden: Polity Press. Doris, J. M. (2015a). Doing without (arguing about) desert. Philosophical Studies, 172(10), 2625–2634. ———. (2015b). Talking to ourselves: Reflection, skepticism, and agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fischer, J. M. (2011). Deep control: Essays on free will and value. Oxford University Press. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press. Guenther, L. (2012, Aug 26). The living death of solitary confinement. The New York Times: Opinion Pages. Retrieved from: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2012/08/26/the-living-death-of-solitary-confinement/ McGeer, V. (2015). Building a better theory of responsibility. Philosophical Studies, 172(10), 2635–2649. McKenna, M. Personal Correspondence. Published with author’s permission. Medina, J. (2012). Hermeneutical injustice and polyphonic contextualism: Social silences and shared hermeneutical responsibilities. Social Epistemology, 26(2), 201–220. Tisby, J. (2018, Mar 20). The heavy burden of teaching my son about American racism. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/ 2018/03/heavy-burden-teaching-kid-american-racism/555995/ Tuerkheimer, D. (2017). Incredible women: Sexual violence and the credibility discount. Pennsylvania Law Review, 166(1), 1–58. Vargas, M. R. (2015). Desert, responsibility, and justification: A reply to Doris, McGeer, and Robinson. Philosophical Studies, 172(10), 2659–2678. ———. (2013). Building better beings: A theory of moral responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valenti, J. (2017, Oct 17). #MeToo named the victims: Now let’s name the perpetrators. The Guardian. Retrieved from: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2017/oct/16/me-too-victims-perpetrators-sexual-assault Waller, B. N. (2015). The stubborn system of moral responsibility. MIT Press. ———. (2011). Against moral responsibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

4

The Moral Psychology of Responsibility What It Means to Take a Stand Against Someone

1. A Brief Introduction In this chapter, I will clarify the range of emotions that can be involved in ‘taking a stand against’ a perpetrator, and I will depart from the standard Strawsonian understanding on which blaming attitudes consist of emotions and policies that seek recognition from an uptake-capable wrongdoer. I will argue that negative withdrawal-motivating emotions, like contempt, scorn, disdain, and rage, can be implicated in blame proper, and that these emotions are justified responses to uptake-impaired people who commit transgressions that warrant interpersonal withdrawal, as well as uptake-capable people who deserve these responses. I contend that we are licensed to hold such people in contempt for their contributions to asymmetries of power when those contributions are something that we have a stake in managing, controlling, treating, or avoiding, for intersectional feminist reasons. And I believe that these attitudes can contribute to a non-participatory type of blame. These revisions to the classic Strawsonian paradigm bring Strawson’s original notion of responsibility-structuring attitudes into better alignment with intersectional feminist aims.

2. Strawsonian Moral Attitudes In this section, I’m going to summarize Strawson’s understanding of the attitudes that structure responsibility, and I’m going to situate this understanding within the functionalist literature, which follows Strawson in taking uptake-capable wrongdoers to be exclusively apt for blame. Thereafter, I will raise a number of objections to the Strawsonianfunctionalist picture of blame’s scope and aims. In opposition to this picture, I will defend an expanded notion of ‘blaming attitudes’ on which blame can include both participatory (perpetrator-addressing) and nonparticipatory (perpetrator-bypassing) attitudes, depending on whether interpersonal engagement or withdrawal would be the best response in the circumstances. Non-participatory moral emotions, on my account,

90 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility include contempt, scorn, disdain, and rage. These emotions motivate policies of avoidance, withdrawal, self-defense, and self-care. ***** There are striking similarities between functionalist theories and Strawson’s model of blame. In particular, functionalists adopt the Strawsonian assumption that blame should operate on the rational faculties1 of the blame, or else it is illicit. McGeer specifically holds that blame must pass through the blamee’s “rational faculties,” such that these faculties are “the proximate causes of the [desired changes] in the agent’s beliefs”; therefore, blame should not include rationality-bypassing techniques such as “hypnosis, drugs, neural tinkering,” and “rhetorical tricks” (2013: 179). Vargas similarly holds that blame should impinge on the blamee’s rational (or reasoning) faculties, such that it produces “a kind of agency sensitive to and governed by moral reasons” (2015: 173). Thus, blame should exclude “cajoling, threatening, enticing,” and other “influencing” methods, that may be appropriate for use on “infants and most non-human animals” (Vargas 2013: 169) but not “normal adults” (Vargas 2013: 1). These rationality-focused accounts have a Strawsonian flavour, inasmuch as Strawson also (ostensibly) took the negative reactive attitudes to be appropriate only towards uptake-capable wrongdoers who are sensitive to moral reasons. Towards everyone else, we’re supposed to adopt “the objective stance,” which involves a “suspension of ordinary interpersonal attitudes” (of resentment, indignation, etc.), together with “the cultivation of a purely objective view” involving the use of “management, treatment, and control” (1963: 18). More precisely, within the objective stance, we’re meant to treat the target as an object of social policy; as a subject for what, in a wide range of sense, might be called treatment; as something certainly to be taken account, perhaps precautionary account, of; to be managed or handled or cured or trained; perhaps simply to be avoided. (1963: 9) The objective stance, then, involves a withdrawal of the negative reactive attitudes, and an adoption of various policies and techniques of behaviourregulation, to be imposed on the defective wrongdoer. Like McGeer and Vargas, Strawson holds that blame should not involve rationalitybypassing methods, but should instead be a genuine “expression . . . of our moral attitudes . . . not merely devices we calculatingly employ for regulative purposes” (1963: 27).2 One of Strawson’s rationales for rejecting behaviour-regulating modes of responsibility-holding was to distance himself from earlier consequentialist theories that had fallen into disfavor. This includes J.C.C. Smart’s once-popular utilitarian view (1961), on which apt blame motivates

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compliance with utility-maximizing norms by any means whatsoever, ranging from operant conditioning to physical abuse. Unsurprisingly, modern commentators (e.g., Bruce Waller 2014) have objected to Smart’s endorsement of the practice of caning students in order to enhance learning outcomes in “lazy” children but not “stupid” ones (Smart 1961: 302). Smart’s recommendation is incompatible with the contemporary consensus in developmental psychology on which corporal punishment impairs learning and emotional development in children and should never be used. Waller’s objection, however, doesn’t necessarily speak against utilitarianism per se, but is perhaps better understood as an argument against Smart’s mistaken belief that caning children and giving them ableist labels like ‘stupid’ could possibly enhance utility in a world like ours, in which these techniques are abusive, discriminatory, and harmful to children [though note that 19 states inexplicably still allow corporal punishment in schools (Caron 2018)]. If Smart had realized that these ‘pedagogical tools’ were actually child abuse, he wouldn’t have endorsed them, because child abuse doesn’t promote learning or utility. Having said that, the fact that utilitarianism would allow child abuse if it promoted utility has alienated most people from it. Strawson himself rejected utilitarianism because it allows us to abuse and manipulate rational agents for the sake of social utility. But he interestingly allowed manipulation (in the form of control, management, and treatment) within the ambit of the objective stance, ostensibly because proper targets of the objective stance are already ‘warped and deranged,’ ‘disordered,’ ‘underdeveloped,’ or ‘children,’ so we can’t insult them by manipulating their rational agency without their consent – they don’t have rational agency to begin with. On this basis, Strawson establishes a divide between those who can be justifiably manipulated with the use of rationality-bypassing interventions, and those who can’t: the participatoryobjective divide. There are some clear problems with this binary model from an IF perspective. I don’t have time to give an exhaustive breakdown of the problematic simplifications and glaring omissions involved in Strawson’s understanding of the participatory-objective divide, but I can highlight the elements that are particularly incongruous with IF aims, thereby starting this conversation. What I want to retain in my analysis is the notion that we can take different moral stances towards different people – stances of blame and praise, and of participation and withdrawal – but I want the boundaries between these stances to be more permeable than Strawson envisaged. To begin, then, I will argue that the division between the participatory stance and the objective stance isn’t as clear-cut as Strawson implied, since uptake-capable3 agents (who are supposed to be amenable to the objective stance) aren’t all cut from the same cloth. Strawson lumps together ‘children’ and the ‘warped and deranged’4 under the same category, but these agents, while sharing certain moral deficits, are worlds

92 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility apart in terms of their roles in social systems, including systems of power and domination. Children, for example, can’t commit some of the transgressions that adults can, such as perpetrating a mass murder based on a misogynistic ideology (as Elliot Rodger did). An IF account must be sensitive to these differences in power, privilege, and social position. My second issue is that Strawson doesn’t recognize that the techniques of ‘management, control, and treatment’ internal to the objective stance aren’t equally available to everyone, or equally imposed on everyone. Note that, since these techniques are non-interpersonal, they must be delivered by an intermediary who steps in on behalf of a victim to enforce them on a transgressor, and in our society this intermediary is typically a delegate of the state – the police, the courts, prison guards, and so on. We know for a fact that these state delegates don’t enforce ‘management’ and ‘treatment’ equally on everyone, or on everyone’s behalf, due to gender bias, racial bias, and other forms of prejudice. Yet Strawson never addressed the fact that these behaviour-regulating techniques aren’t to everyone’s advantage. Third, Strawson doesn’t seem to notice that we’re not very good at differentiating between people who deserve the objective stance and people who don’t, and his own language (which was typical for the 1960s) has ableist implications. An IF theory of responsibility must diagnose and combat the biases that skew our perception of people’s interpersonal fitness or ‘civil responsibility,’ i.e., people’s ability to participate in norm-governed relationships. As such, it should leave behind Strawson’s outdated classifications. Fourth, Strawson’s binary system presents some people as rational and others as irrational, without properly acknowledging that ‘rationality’ is patchy as opposed to global (as Vargas convincingly argues). Therefore, it would be naive to think that there are ‘rational people’ and ‘irrational people,’ ‘members of the moral community’ and ‘outsiders.’ Instead, virtually everyone has some rational capacities and some rationality deficits, and the rationality deficits that people have are not random, but structured by their standpoints and social roles. For example, racists have racially structured rationality deficits that prevent them from giving Black people’s reason-giving speech the same uptake as white people’s reason-giving speech, even when the content of the speech is the same in both cases. A psychologically realistic account of responsibility must recognize that no one is fully rational and no one or very few people are fully irrational: instead, everyone has rationality deficits structured by their standpoints. Therefore, no one is ‘responsible’ or ‘irresponsible’ in an unqualified sense. This doesn’t mean that rationally defective people aren’t blameworthy – often, they are. In what follows, I will expand on each of these objections, aiming to delineate a more adequate (intersectional feminist) understanding of

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what it means to ‘take a stand against’ a wrongdoer. In brief, I will argue that the objective stance can be structured by withdrawal-motivating emotions such as contempt, and that these emotion, and corresponding behaviour-regulating techniques, constitute a form of blame, not an alternative to blame. In the next section, I will outline my understanding of the psychology of the objective stance, and then I will defend the role of ‘negative withdrawal emotions’ like contempt and scorn within that stance (section 3). I will show that not everyone has equal access to objective-stance techniques of management, control, and treatment, and that disenfranchised groups are entitled to express rage, contempt, and scorn through various forms of interpersonal withdrawal (e.g., a refusal to forgive and reconcile) (section 4). I will argue that we are not very good at differentiating between people who deserve interpersonal respect and people who don’t because of our acculturated biases, and this problem is only exacerbated by ableist understandings of ‘interpersonal fitness’ (section 5). And, I will argue that rationality is patchy, that patchy rationality deficits are structured by identity prejudice, and (contra Vargas) that people with patchy, prejudice-structured rationality deficits are eligible for blame (section 6). In pursuing these objections to the Strawsonian model, I ultimately aim to clarify what it means to take a stand against a perpetrator in a suitably intersectional feminist sense. At the end of this discussion, I will say that ‘taking a stand’ in the operative sense can involve ‘participatory emotions’ (resentment, indignation) or ‘withdrawal-motivating emotions’ (contempt, scorn, rage), depending on the circumstances. Withdrawal-motivating emotions are appropriate towards perpetrators who enforce hierarchies of power (whether knowingly or unwittingly) in ways that create a hostile or demeaning environment for victims. We are licensed to take steps to manage, control, and avoid such people to protect ourselves from their actions, to shield others, to deplatform the person, and to otherwise regulate the person’s oppression-enforcing transgressions without that person’s consent. When someone is creating a hostile environment, we don’t need his consent to defend ourselves against that person.

3. The Emotional Tones of the Objective Stance: Love, Pity, Fear, Revulsion, Contempt, Scorn Recently, philosophers have begun to question the distinction between the participatory stance and the objective stance. Katrina Hutchison (2018) is a case in point. She argues that we should see both stances as involving respect, but different types of respect. The objective stance, on her proposal, involves recognition respect, or the respect due to all human

94 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility beings, who are entitled to access to basic democratic rights and material goods (e.g., the right to vote, to have shelter and nourishing food, etc.), whereas the participatory stance involves both recognition respect and appraisal respect, or the respect due to morally competent people who can respond to interpersonal demands. This proposal softens the distinction between the participatory stance and the objective stance by identifying a type of respect common to both: recognition respect. Everyone deserves democratic inclusion, shelter, food, etc. I follow Hutchison in taking all human beings to be entitled to recognition respect and thus access to basic goods. While Strawson didn’t explicitly distinguish between these types of respect, it’s reasonable to assume that he (tacitly) shared Hutchison’s belief that everyone, whether morally competent or not, deserves humane treatment; no one should be beaten, politically disenfranchised, deprived of access to food and shelter, or otherwise subjected to dehumanizing treatment. Hutchison helpfully distinguishes this type of respect from the respect that we owe people based on their ability to respond reasonably to moral demands. In this section, I want to contest the participatory-objective divide in another way. I want to suggest that both stances involve negative attitudes, but different types of attitudes. As I see it, when we adopt the objective stance (and suspend the ‘reactive attitudes’), we don’t thereby suspend all moral emotions; rather, we adopt a separate set of emotions which properly target (or take as their object) perpetrators who enforce asymmetries of power in ways that license us to convey certain ‘hard’ emotional responses (e.g., contempt) and use certain strategies (e.g., avoidance, selfdefense) that eschew contact with the target rather than inviting communication. (Henceforth, I will use the term behaviour-regulation techniques for these non-participatory strategies.) The emotions that motivate these techniques, on my view, are withdrawal-motivating emotions such as contempt, scorn, and disdain – emotions that incite us to turn away from their object (Bell 2013). Thus, ‘adopting the objective stance,’ on my construal, involves the adoption of these withdrawal-motivating emotions, and their expression in behaviour-regulating techniques such as control and management. We are entitled to adopt these emotion-technique pairs, on an intersectional feminist understanding, when doing so would advance IF aims. To give a concrete example: if someone posts a sexist comment on my Facebook timeline, I’m not obligated to respond and try to seek common ground with the poster. Perhaps the best thing that I can do in the situation is block the person and delete the person’s comment. When someone opens a conversation with a sexist remark, we’re not obligated to dialogically engage with the person, nor is engagement necessarily the best option. Sometimes disengaging from someone is the most effective way of discrediting them.

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Neil Levy explains why blocking or ‘no-platforming’ someone is sometimes a justified manoeuvre. When we grant someone a platform to voice their opinions, the platform provides higher-order evidence that the person’s speech is credible; if it weren’t, then we presumably wouldn’t have offered the platform. This higher-order evidence is “extremely difficult to rebut” because it’s not a type of argument: it’s an opportunity, and arguments can’t take away or dismiss the opportunity once it’s been granted (Levy 2014). If someone is planning to make prejudiced comments, then allowing the person a platform not only enables him to harm members of the audience but also certifies his speech in a way that is difficult to rebut. We are entitled to no-platform speakers to protect ourselves and others from their speech. In what follows, I will try to defend the value of withdrawal-motivating attitudes by interpreting some of Strawson’s comments through an intersectional feminist lens, thereby expanding the ways in which the objective stance can be “emotionally toned,” as Strawson put it (1963: 10). My intention is to identify a set of emotions that fit with the regulatory techniques associated with the objective stance (e.g., management, control), as well as IF aims. First, we can note that Strawson thought that a fairly diverse range of perpetrators can warrant the objective stance, ranging from ‘children’ to the ‘morally underdeveloped’ to the ‘warped and deranged.’ Quite sensibly, he didn’t think that all of these perpetrators deserve the same emotional response or the same behaviour-regulating interventions (more on which in a moment). From an intersectional feminist standpoint, it’s relevant that not all of these agents can participate in the same hierarchies of power – at least, not to the same extent. A young child, for example, cannot commit a mass murder or popularize a misogynistic ideology in the way that Elliot Rodger did during the 2014 Isla Vista killings (Manne 2017). Similarly, a Black man who commits a mass murder isn’t as capable as a white man (even if he wanted to) of promoting norms of white supremacy, because he isn’t a beneficiary of, or credible spokesperson for, the ideals of white supremacy. Our identities and social roles shape the kinds of transgressions that we are capable of committing (and motivated to commit), and thus the kinds of messages that we’re capable of transmitting through our actions. (Another way of putting it is to say that when two people perform the same action, those actions don’t necessarily have the same social meaning because social meaning is informed by actor identity.) Thus, from an intersectional feminist perspective, social position shapes our eligibility for various moral emotions and behaviourregulating techniques. A misogynistic killer might deserve to be held in contempt and prosecuted in a court of law, whereas a child might never deserve contempt, since children (arguably) can’t commit acts that warrant the full withdrawal of participatory engagement. A child who, say, hits another child might deserve compassionate concern or loving guidance, unlike the misogynistic ideologue who tries to kill as many women

96 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility as possible. This is true even though both transgressors have moral deficits that make them amenable to behaviour-regulating interventions on Strawson’s reckoning; yet since their transgressions play different roles in existing hierarchies of power, they deserve different emotional responses and interventions on an IF analysis. The misogynistic murderer deserves what Macalester Bell calls ‘hard feelings’ (2013), whereas the child deserves a ‘softer’ and more nurturing response. If this is right, then there must be two types of attitude internal to the objective stance: the compassionate recognition appropriate for a child, and the contempt fitting for a misogynistic killer. In general, harder and softer emotions will be fitting towards different transgressors based on their roles in asymmetries of power and their differential powers and privileges. Interestingly, Katrina Hutchison take compassion to be the main driver of the objective stance, regardless of the standpoint or social position of the target – of whether the target is Elliot Rodger or an 8-year-old. She writes, “the objective stance involves a compassionate recognition of the limitations of individuals who cannot successfully participate in normal morally reactive exchanges. The dignity of these individuals is respected insofar as they are spared the sting of resentment” (2018: 208). On scrutiny, this is a radical departure from Strawson (1963), who never described compassion as part of the objective stance, let alone its central component. He unfortunately left that stance largely undescribed, aside from a few telling (but neglected) remarks (to be discussed in a moment). But regardless of what Strawson thought, it’s not feasible to think that compassion is equally appropriate towards every uptake-impaired transgressor, ranging from small children to misogynistic ideologues – from the ‘morally underdeveloped’ to the ‘warped and deranged,’ in Strawson’s words. Is compassion equally appropriate towards a child having a tantrum and a misogynistic serial killer, let alone equally appropriate towards both? Is it equally fitting towards a Black entrepreneur who sells fake deeds to racists during the Jim Crow era, thereby effectuating a more equitable distribution of wealth (as related by Maya Angelou in her 1969 memoir), and towards a rich businessman who sells fake university degrees to poor Americans, thereby exacerbating socioeconomic inequality? Not only is compassion not equally appropriate in each case, in some cases, it’s positively inappropriate. The misogynistic murderer and the exploitative businessman don’t deserve any compassion, because they took advantage of their positions of privilege and power to spread toxic ideologies5 and to harm disadvantaged social groups (women, the poor). This isn’t to say that perpetrators of oppression deserve inhumane treatment. We simply don’t need to feel compassion for someone to recognize that everyone deserves humane treatment. Contempt and principled respect for humanity are compatible propositions. Notably, in our society, compassion is a privilege disproportionally enjoyed by members of

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privileged groups due to the interplay between compassion and identity prejudice in ordinary moral psychology, which results in demographic empathy gaps. As Manne (2017) and Solnit (2017) have shown, we tend to sympathize (or ‘himpathize’) too much with men and their standpoints, and not enough with women and their standpoints. This results in a tendency to downplay men’s transgressions and indulge their demands for compassion, sympathy, and forgiveness. Similarly, we tend to empathize more with white people than racialized minorities, resulting in a tendency to dismiss white people’s transgression and indulge their demands for compassion, sympathy, and forgiveness. These differences can be explained as expressions of the gender empathy gap and the racial empathy gap, which have been observed in healthcare settings and other contexts (e.g., Trawalter et al. 2012; Kiesel 2017). These empathy gaps generate uneven distributions of compassion and respect across privileged and disadvantaged groups. They incite us to absolve privileged people from blame. Rather than trying to give everyone more compassion, then, we should try to balance out our compassion and offer more of it to people who are systemically denied this positive emotion, and the benefits that it confers. If transgressors aren’t necessarily entitled to compassion, then what emotions do they deserve? Strawson offers a few suggestions, though they’re underdeveloped and have been largely neglected (or negated) by contemporary Strawsonians. “The objective attitude,” he says, “may be emotionally toned in many ways, but not in all ways: it may include repulsion or fear, it may include pity or even love, though not all kinds of love” (1963: 329). Strawson says little more than this about the objective-stance emotions, but his suggestions are precisely the sorts of emotions that we would expect to feel towards, respectively, a misogynistic serial killer and a tantrum-throwing child: fear and revulsion on the one hand, and love and pity (or perhaps compassion) on the other. These two emotional ‘tones,’ moreover, are both capable of motivating the regulatory techniques associated with the objective stance, viz., ‘control, management, and treatment,’ though these techniques would naturally take different forms in the two cases: a child might face a time-out, whereas a serial killer would face criminal prosecution. The reason for this difference, on an IF reading, is that the misogynistic killer’s transgression enhances patriarchal oppression, whereas the child’s tantrum only achieves a brief and illusory sense of power, quickly extinguished by an adult. Now, surely fear and revulsion aren’t the only appropriate emotional responses to people who enforce hierarchies of power and domination. But no one, to my knowledge, has offered a more robust sketch of the withdrawal-motiving emotions that can inform blame, so we must look outside of the responsibility literature, to the literature on moral emotions. What other emotions might drive the ‘participatory withdrawal’ characteristic of the objective stance? For clarity, we can turn to

98 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility Macalester Bell’s work on the moral emotions, including the Strawsonian reactive attitudes. She describes these attitudes as one category of ‘hard feelings,’ with a complement in a second, less-appreciated set of negative emotions, which includes contempt, scorn, and disdain. Both categories are equally important for the regulation of interpersonal relationships, she thinks, though only the former category figures prominently in the responsibility literature. One of the key differences between the two types of ‘hard feeling’ is that the ‘participatory emotions’ characteristically motivate interpersonal engagement with the perpetrator, whereas the non-participatory emotions (contempt, scorn, disdain) characteristically motivate “withdrawal and disengagement” from their object (Bell 2013: 13). The “subject of contempt,” says Bell, “characteristically withdraws from, and sees herself as having good reason to withdraw from, the target” (2013: 44). Following this sketch, I will call contempt and its cognates ‘withdrawal emotions’ to capture their distinct role in moral psychology: the triggering of withdrawal or disengagement from their object, and the adoption of withdrawal-compatible techniques such as avoidance and self-defense.6 Withdrawal emotions fit with the objective stance insofar as contempt is the kind of emotion capable of motivating emotional withdrawal, and the strategies of control, management, and avoidance ascribed to that stance. When we withdraw from a hostile person, we often also take steps to prevent that person from harming us or the people we care about. In analyzing the ‘non-participatory hard feelings,’ Bell focuses on contempt, and I will follow this focus, while noting that my arguments also apply to scorn, disdain, etc. Bell notes that one of the main objections to the interpersonal value of contempt is that it is seen as essentially an anti-social emotion. While anger tends to motivate direct confrontation with the offender, which can lead to social change [on the accepted wisdom], contempt tends to motivate psychological disengagement from the target and thus seems to stand as a formidable impediment to social progress. (Bell 2013: 13) I would add that there is a bias against the withdrawal emotions in philosophy, rooted in an idealistic understanding of human beings as rational and cooperative by nature, and, as such, almost never apt for interpersonal withdrawal and avoidance. This is consistent with Mills’ assessment of much of the philosophical landscape as organized by idealizing assumptions about human nature. Once we recognize that human cognition is structured by identity prejudices that make people insensitive to the reason-giving speech of negatively stereotyped speakers, contempt begins to look like a much more reasonable response to ‘ordinary people.’

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Challenging the philosophical bias against contempt, Bell argues that contempt can be just as valuable as resentment when directed to people who deserve it (i.e., contemptible people, who fall below a certain standard and are brought low by that failing). When expressed appropriately, contempt can serve a number of interpersonal functions, such as: (a) acting as a form of protest (contempt’s ‘moral value’), (b) conveying moral information (contempt’s ‘epistemic value’), and (c) motivating witnesses to protest wrongdoing and ‘wrongbeing’ (contempt’s ‘motivational value’). So, in response to a misogynistic ideologue, contempt could serve to protest the person’s misogynistic ideals, inform others about the person’s ideological commitments, motivate others to eschew and denounce the person, and so on. One of contempt’s main functions, on Bell’s understanding, is to answer to the “vices of superiority” and “mitigate their damage” (2013: 14). Contempt is, “in many cases, the best way of responding to those who evince these vices” (2013: 95). On this understanding, contempt signals not only that someone has done wrong or fallen below a standard, but also that the person sees herself “as having a comparatively high status, desire[es] that [her] status be recognized, and . . . attempt[s] to exact esteem and deference on this basis” (2013: 99). Because contempt responds to signs of misplaced superiority or self-entitlement, it may be the best response to people’s status-conferring roles in hierarchies of power: contempt can serve to ‘look down’ on people who demand respect and esteem based on their rank in a malignant hierarchy of power; can rebuke their understanding of their rank as a legitimate source of value; and can deny them the esteem they expect or demand on the basis of their rank. Though it’s useful to see contempt as a response to people’s tendency to pull rank based on their roles in hierarchies of power, Bell’s understanding of contempt is ultimately too narrow. Since contempt is supposed to respond to the vices of superiority, which are robust character traits, contempt is meant to target people’s selves, not their actions: “contempt is focused on what we might call ‘badbeing’ as opposed to ‘wrongdoing.’ That is, contempt is directed towards persons and not simply persons’ actions” (Bell 2013: 16); “contempt is a response to perceived badbeing whereas [participatory] hard feelings like resentment . . . are responses to perceived wrongdoing” (Bell 2013: 39). In this way, Bell takes contempt to differ from resentment in that it tracks people’s character traits, not their actions. But, as we have seen, this understanding departs from the standard Strawsonian interpretation of resentment, on which resentment tracks people’s inner states (e.g., ill will), not just their actions. Strawson himself said that resentment is a response to a person’s ‘quality of will.’ In Chapter 2, I rejected the attributability construal of resentment’s target (i.e., features of the self) on grounds that this ‘characterological’ understanding prevents us from using resentment in maximally ameliorative ways – to track people’s ‘unwillful’ or will-bypassing investments in

100 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility hierarchies of power. The same objection can be levelled at Bell’s characterological understanding of contempt’s targets. If contempt exclusively tracks global character traits, then we can’t hold people in contempt for their actions, even when those actions contribute to hierarchies of power that intersectional feminists have an interest in diagnosing, controlling, avoiding, etc. We can’t, for instance, hold people in contempt (in Bell’s sense) for predatory lending practices if those people aren’t lending to their clients in an arrogant or supercilious manner. But a humble predatory lender may be worse than an arrogant one, insofar as her humility enables her to better exploit people and enforce class-based inequalities more broadly. Besides this, it’s notable that Bell’s globalist understanding of contempt isn’t even consistent with ordinary usage of the word, which in this case corresponds with intersectional feminist usage. A judge, for instance, can hold someone in contempt of court without implying that the target is a contemptible person, prone to causing disruptions across a range of different situations. To be judged in contempt of court, you merely need to disrupt the court’s proceedings in the session at hand. Nothing needs to be true of your conduct in non-court-related situations. In this sense, I can hold someone in contempt for making a sexist remark without knowing whether the person is a deep-seated sexist, prone to spewing sexist rhetoric across a range of different situations, or someone who only makes sexist remarks in a specific type of setting. Maybe the person only makes sexists comments when he feels that his authority is being threatened by a confident woman, which rarely happens because he avoids contact with women, especially confident women. The fact that his sexist comment doesn’t reflect a situation-invariant disposition shouldn’t mean that I can’t hold him in contempt for the sexist remark that he makes in my presence. In holding him in contempt, I’m signalling that his conduct falls below a standard that I’m interested in upholding as an intersectional feminist, and that I won’t tolerate that kind of behaviour. It’s odd, then, that Bell takes contempt to be a globalist emotion. But it’s easy to extend her (otherwise plausible) criteria to cover actions, thereby expanding the scope of warranted contempt. On her view, someone deserves contempt if: (1) they have failed to meet some standard, (2) their failure to meet this standard implicates their character, (3) they are rendered ‘low’ by virtue of that failure, and (4) they are worthy of withdrawal on the same basis (Bell 2013: 66). To eliminate the globalist constraint, we can simply reject criterion (2). Then, we can grant that a predatory lender deserves contempt because he has failed to meet an IF standard, is rendered low by virtue of that failure, and is worthy of withdrawal on the same basis. I am justified in withdrawing from the person, warning others against him, taking legal action against him (to ‘manage’ or ‘control’ his behaviour), on the basis of his contributions to class-based inequalities, regardless of whether they are a reflection of his character.

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Note that, in holding someone in contempt, I’m not adopting the participatory stance (whereby we demand a response from a perpetrator), but I’m not suspending all of my moral emotions, either. I’m expressing a different type of emotion – one that motivates withdrawal from the perpetrator and the adoption of withdrawal-compatible behaviourregulating techniques. The recognition of contemptible (withdrawal-eliciting) actions, in addition to contemptible personalities (or persons), fits with another of Strawson’s underdeveloped observations – an observation that, if properly appreciated, further softens the participatory-objective divide. While most philosophers have focused on the agential deficits that (ostensibly) license withdrawal, Strawson himself grants that we’re sometimes licensed to adopt the objective stance towards uptake-capable (“normal”) people, “for reasons of policy or self-protection” or as “a relief from the strains of involvement” (1963: 82). That is, the recognition of agential deficits isn’t the only justification for adopting the objective stance. Sometimes we can withdraw from ‘ordinary’ uptake-capable people. But Strawson doesn’t explain why. The reason, on an IF framework, will of course be to ameliorate oppression and adversity. Strawson’s expansive understanding of the scope of the objective stance conveniently fits with some of arguments that we’ve already seen. For example, Karen Kelsky recommends blocking people who post sexist comments on social media, even if they’re ‘nice guys,’ the reason being that you ‘don’t have an obligation to educate any man at any time,’ and ‘men are not entitled to your time.’ That is, you’re entitled to withdraw from someone who posts a sexist comment, even if he’s not a sexist person. In fact, you’re entitled to block someone who posts a sexist comment on your Facebook page without knowing anything about the poster, just because it’s your Facebook page. I think that part of Kelsky’s rationale is that women (and other targets of prejudiced slurs) have a right to dialogically disengage from (and no-platform) people who voice, enforce, or promote negative stereotypes that demean or marginalize people on the basis of their identities (e.g., women, POC). Not only do you not have an obligation to respond to such people, you have a right to shield yourself and others from these affronts, no matter how earnest or willing to learn the commentator is. Just because you could enlighten the commentator doesn’t mean that you should. It’s your prerogative to block people who post prejudiced comments on your platform. This fits nicely with Strawson’s underappreciated observation that uptakecapable people may be amenable to interpersonal withdrawal because of the things they do, not necessarily the people they are. We’re licensed to withdraw from perpetrators for reasons of ‘self-protection’ and ‘relief’ from the ‘strains of involvement,’ for reasons of self-defense and self-care. Still, something that Strawson didn’t notice is that these ‘strains of involvement’ are not evenly distributed. As Kelsky notes, women are

102 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility particularly susceptible to exploitation and abuse, since women (on average) are socialized into being caring and understanding, and this acculturated orientation can be exploited. In addition, women are uniquely vulnerable to misogynistic language that impugns their epistemic standing, as well as specific types of dialogical affronts: young women, for example, “experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels,” including “online sexual harassment, stalking, and physical threats” (Duggan 2014). Hence, women are vulnerable to dialogical ‘strains’ to which men are either immune (e.g., misogynistic slurs) or less susceptible (e.g., stalking), and these strains are both emotionally taxing and epistemically marginalizing. Similarly, POC are distinctly vulnerable to epistemically harmful racial slurs and specific types of verbal abuse and harassment based on racial stereotypes. Thus, racialized minorities, too, face distinct dialogical ‘strains’ to which white people are immune or less susceptible, and these strains are particularly emotionally taxing and epistemically marginalizing. Similar considerations apply to victims of heteronormative bias, ableism, and other prejudices – these individuals are vulnerable to distinct emotional and epistemic harms. Because of these vulnerabilities, members of oppressed groups have distinct reasons to withdraw from hostile dialogical encounters, particularly those involving hate speech, targeted harassment, and other forms of identity prejudice. In a hostile encounter, even if we provide the best argument, those arguments will not receive fair uptake due to asymmetries of epistemic power. Although Strawson published his most famous work in the 1960s, his comments about how the ‘strains of involvement’ justify dialogical withdrawal are particularly germane in the digital age, given that we are constantly immersed in conversations with strangers and acquaintances, and we don’t necessarily know what those people are like. When someone posts a prejudiced remark, it may be impossible to discern whether the poster ‘really means it,’ or even if the poster is a human as opposed to a bot programmed by a troll farm. With the advent of social media, discerning a commentator’s motives and moral personality is especially difficult, and frequently not worth the effort. Acknowledging a person’s right to withdraw from (and avoid or manage) expressions of identity prejuduce, without ascertaining anything about the antagonist’s motives beforehand, is therefore particularly important. This was also true in Strawson’s day, though, because people have never been very good at discerning whether someone who acts prejudiced really is prejudiced, or is an opportunist using prejudiced rhetoric to advance their own agenda. People often ask whether certain modern politicians are ‘really racist’ or just spewing racism for political gain. From an IF perspective, we don’t need to know the answer to this question to blame the person, since blame tracks people’s contributions to hierarchies of power, regardless of their motives.

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Returning to the main topic, the reason I’m interested in ‘withdrawal emotions’ like contempt and scorn is that they are precisely the types of emotions that we would expect to find within the psychology of the objective stance – the types of emotions capable of motivating the canonic withdrawal or suspension of the participatory emotions, and the corresponding adoption of the non-participatory techniques of management, control, treatment, and avoidance. We might ‘manage’ a perpetrator by blocking the person on social media, depriving them of a platform, warning others about them, reporting them, filing a lawsuit against them, taking out a protection order, and managing their behaviour in other ways. According to the dominant interpretation of Strawson, we cannot address ‘participatory attitudes’ to uptake-incapable agents because these attitudes, by their very nature, seek a response from an uptake-capable wrongdoer. That’s supposed to be their distinct role in moral psychology. If we grant this understanding of the psychology of the reactive attitudes, then we have to allow that uptake-incapable perpetrators aren’t eligible for those attitudes. And, since most Stawsonians take blame simply to be an expression of those attitudes, it follows that uptake-incapable perpetrators are necessarily exempt from blame. But if we attend to some of the less celebrated aspects of Strawson’s writing, we find a potential alternative to this (‘positional’) understanding of blame. First of all, Strawson recognized that uptake-incapable perpetrators may be eligible for negative emotions like fear and revulsion, and I have proposed that they may also be eligible for contempt and scorn, which canonically motivate withdrawal from interpersonal contact, and recourse to behaviour-regulation techniques. Second, Strawson recognized that uptake-capable perpetrators can be eligible for the objective stance in certain cases, and I take these cases to be ones in which withdrawal serves IF aims (e.g., self-care in the face of prejudice). We can, then, withdraw from people whether they are uptake-capable or not, to shield ourselves and others from identity prejudice and hate speech, to practice self-defense or self-care in the face of identity-based hostility and disrespect, and to realize or promote other IF-relevant goals. These provisions challenge the notion that the objective stance entails a withdrawal of blame. Instead, it involves a withdrawal of the participatory attitudes, and an adoption of another set of emotions (contempt, scorn) that motivate non-participatory responses (avoidance, self-care). These withdrawal-based responses constitute an alternative form of blame. In the next section, I will offer a deeper defense of the value of contempt, which is a fairly besieged emotion in philosophy, as well as mainstream culture. This may be due to the influence of the Christian tradition, which (in theory) favours cooperation, forgiveness, and reconciliation above contempt and scorn. But the notion that these ‘Christian responses’ are always the best option neglects the fact that these responses

104 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility are not always eligible in asymmetrically structured conditions, such as patriarchal, racist, and cisheteronormative cultures. In the next section, I will defend the value of contempt in conditions of systemic oppression.

4. A Defense of the Negative Withdrawal Emotions (Contempt, Scorn, etc.) Unlike Bell, philosophers tend to be skeptical of the value of negative emotions, especially withdrawal emotions like contempt and scorn. They tend to think that we almost always have a reason to participate in cooperative dialogue with others, on the assumption that most people are essentially rational and capable of recognizing our testimonial authority and moral agency. But, as Vargas has argued very convincingly, human rationality is patchy, not global. In support of this, research shows that cognitive skills are largely domain-specific: for example, “mathematical acuity in the classroom” doesn’t transfer reliably to “work-related settings” (Doris 1998). Moral capacities evince a similar level of domainspecificity: people who cheat in one situation don’t necessarily cheat in other situations, and people who cheat don’t necessarily steal or lie when given the opportunity (Hartshorne & May 1928, cited in Kamtekar 2004: 465). This seems to show that our actions are not grounded in robust traits. It’s even more evident, however, that epistemic deficits like racism and sexism are ‘patchy’ in the operative sense. When Vargas says that agency is “patchy,” he means that “one might be a responsible [i.e., reasonsresponsive] agent with respect to some considerations and not others . . . [and] the same person might be responsible with respect to those considerations only in some circumstances and not others” (2013: 13). Prejudice is patchy in precisely this way. That is, someone can be sexist but not racist and vice versa, and the same person can be sexist (or racist) towards some women (or POC) and not others, depending on how closely the target conforms to an activated schema. Since most philosophers think that people with patchy deficits deserve the participatory stance, they think that ordinary bigots deserve that stance, since ordinary bigots are rational agents. Indeed, most philosophers agree that almost everyone deserves the participatory stance, and thus almost no one is eligible for the objective stance. This is Holroyd’s reason for favouring McGeer’s view over Vargas’: it “cohere[s] with the plausible assumption that we can adopt the ‘participant standpoint’ in our daily interactions” with almost everyone, from friends to neo-Nazis, family members to online harassers (2018: 152). If almost no one is eligible for the objective stance, it follows that almost no one is eligible for the emotions that I take to structure that stance – revulsion, contempt, scorn, etc. In this way, the assumption that most people are rational, albeit in an “imperfect” way (Hutchison 2018: 152),

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supports the assumption that almost everyone deserves inclusion rather than withdrawal. This assumption, however, misrepresents human cognition by treating prejudiced people as if they were fundamentally rational ‘underneath their prejudices,’ rather than preferentially sensitive to reasons expressed by speakers who fit their internalized schemas about epistemic authority. Because of intersections between reasons-responsiveness and internalized identity schemas, people are reliably unresponsive to speakers whom they regard as non-credible or non-authoritative through the lens of their own biases. This means that people are differentially responsive to reasons expressed by different speakers with different identities. Thus, just because a white person can exchange reasons with a neo-Nazi doesn’t mean that a Black person can do the same. The neo-Nazi’s reasonsresponsiveness faculties aren’t equally sensitive to speech from Black people and speech from white people. So, if a white person has a reason to dialogically engage with a neo-Nazi, it doesn’t automatically follow that a Black person has the same reason, or any reason at all. Similarly, if a straight person can persuade a neo-Nazi to accept her moral testimony, it doesn’t follow that a gay person can do the same. Our reasons to participate in moral conversations with others don’t depend on some global reasons-responsiveness capacity that almost everyone has, but should be sensitive to the asymmetries of epistemic respect that structure our conversational interactions. Because the dominant Strawsonian view holds that people seldom have good reason to withdraw from conversational encounters, it denies that we often good reason to refuse to participate in moral conversations involving forgiveness and reconciliation (as discussed in the Introduction). In this connection, Indigenous scholar Rachel Flowers defends the legitimacy of Indigenous people’s negative emotions (especially rage) and withdrawal responses (such as refusal to forgive and reconcile) in the face of colonial oppression. In the context of a society that tends to misunderstand (or strategically misrepresent) Indigenous women’s anticolonial resistance as an expression of “unconditional love,” Flowers aims to “reclaim space for Indigenous women’s rage, orienting it around a refusal to forgive, as informing an anticolonial approach to disrupting forms of violence and domination that reify settler colonialism” (2015: 33). Flowers argues that love, forgiveness, and cooperation are not necessarily reasonable or self-respecting responses in conditions of ongoing oppression, which are the conditions in which Indigenous women live. In Canada, as elsewhere in the world,7 colonial violence and dispossession are propagated through the state’s systemic neglect of, and disdain for, missing and murdered Indigenous women: While there is pressure on Indigenous peoples to forgive during this era of [so-called] reconciliation .  .  . Federal Indian policy has not

106 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility changed but merely shifted from genocidal practices of forced exclusion and assimilation to a mode of colonial governmentality that works through politics of recognition and reconciliation. Colonial violence has not ended. (Flowers 2015: 41) Given Canada’s refusal to treat Indigenous women with the respect that they deserve – the same respect afforded to white Canadian women like myself – the colonial state cannot expect, let alone demand, love and forgiveness from Indigenous communities: “When this gift [of love] is rejected or abused, expect our sadness, our resentment, and our rage,” says Flowers (2015: 40). Such negative emotions are not only appropriate under the circumstances, but are arguably required by principles of self-love and self-respect. If Indigenous women are to love and respect themselves, how can they forgive and reconcile with people who do not love or respect them, who do not offer trustworthy apologies or adequate restitution, who do not provide the epistemic groundwork for reconciliation on fair and symmetrical terms? As Louise du Toit pointed out in her analysis of rape (2009), forgiveness is not viable or eligible in conditions of epistemic inequality, in which perpetrators fail to grasp the harms that they have caused, and are therefore not in an epistemic position to offer a proper apology or fair restitution. On similar grounds, Flowers suggests that self-respect may require that Indigenous women reject the ‘apologies’ offered by the colonial state in bad faith and on asymmetrical terms. If Indigenous women are entitled to love themselves and their communities, then they are entitled (if not obligated) to refuse to forgive and reconcile with the colonial state (and its individual representatives) who refuse to recognize their democratic standing. Hence, if we are not Indigenous women ourselves, we are obligated to respect Indigenous women’s right to refuse to forgive the state and to reject Canada’s terms of reconciliation. To deny them this right would be to enforce the colonial state’s attempt to epistemically oppress and politically disenfranchise Indigenous women. Flowers’ essay is not specifically about contempt, scorn, or disdain, but is instead about the validity and transformative potential of rage, anger, and sadness, as expressed in the refusal to forgive and reconcile. Though her main focus is rage, I think that her arguments can be applied to contempt as manifested in the refusal to participate in moral conversation. Like rage, contempt can motivate withdrawal from moral conversations involving (bad) offers of forgiveness and reconciliation, which skew the negotiation in favour of the dominant side. Rage and contempt are both appropriate responses to conversational dynamics that enforce or perpetuate asymmetries of power that place one party at a disadvantage. These ‘hard’ emotions can signal that the conversational context is so skewed that fair and respectful negotiations are impossible. The best response is to walk away.

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After presenting her positive account, Flowers defends it against the classic Nietzschean worry that “ressentiment” is a toxic and ‘pathological’ emotion that turns the resentful person’s attention inward and erodes her wellbeing. The same kinds of objections can be applied to rage and contempt, perhaps to an even greater extent. Flowers points out that there is “a long tradition” in which “resentment is characterized by a legitimate and politicized form of anger in response to perceived moral wrongs” (2015: 45). Far from being corrosive and immobilizing, resentment, as expressed within certain traditions and communities, provides fuel for political activism and resistance. In such contexts, resentment can be “an appropriate response that indicates care for oneself, if one’s value or rights are violated” (2015: 44). The failure to feel resentment, then, could indicate or convey a lack of appropriate care for oneself and one’s community. Hence, there may actually be duties to express rage and contempt through withdrawal. Flowers notes that within her Hul’qumi’num community specifically, there are cleansing practices that enable people to moderate and regulate their negative emotions. In general, Nietzsche’s criticism doesn’t take into account the methods that various cultures have for channelling their negative emotions in constructive and self-affirming ways, which undercuts the force of Nieztche’s critique within these contexts. Though Flowers is speaking in defense of ‘ressentiment,’ the same arguments extend to rage and contempt: different people and cultures have different ways of expressing these emotions, not all of which are corrosive or immobilizing. When expressed constructively, these emotions can provide fuel for political resistance and survival under oppression. Furthermore, a failure to feel and express these emotions could signal a lack of respect for oneself or one’s community, or a willingness to be complicit in epistemic oppression through inaction or compliance. When we deny Indigenous women the right to feel and express negative emotions through the refusal to participate in (asymmetrical) dialogue, we epistemically marginalize these women – we deny their moral testimony the uptake that it deserves. We simultaneously misrepresent them as unreasonable negotiators, ‘overly emotional,’ and ‘self-entitled,’ rather than reasonable, fair, and knowledgeable. In general, to deny the validity of negative withdrawal emotions is to epistemically marginalize those who are most entitled to experience and express those emotions – people living under conditions of ongoing genocide.

5. Unequal Access to Objective-Stance Interventions In Strawson’s view, adopting the objective stance involves the invocation of non-participatory techniques of management, treatment, control, and social policy. Insofar as these interventions don’t involve direct interpersonal contact, they must be delivered and enforced by third-party intermediaries who step in on behalf of the victim. Unfortunately, Strawson

108 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility says almost nothing about how this stance is supposed to operate in practice. I have suggested that ‘adopting the objective stance’ could potentially involve blocking people on social media, no-platforming prejudiced public speakers, reporting a sexual harasser to Human Resources, and other mechanisms of withdrawal, self-defense, and self-care. But surely the most recognizable (as well as the most problematic) forms of nonparticipatory ‘management,’ ‘control,’ and ‘treatment’ are those delivered by the state on behalf of individuals and groups. In democratic societies, we are entitled by law to appeal to delegates of the state to act on our behalf to enforce laws that (in theory) protect our civil rights. These state-sanctioned interventions include investigating, policing, prosecuting, granting and enforcing protection orders, involuntarily hospitalizing, and so on. Henceforth, I will assume that ‘adopting the objective stance’ includes these kinds of state-enforced interventions. Strawson’s essay gives the impression that ‘adopting the objective stance’ is a simple affair, but if these kinds of interventions are involved then this couldn’t be further from the truth. From an ideal standpoint, one might assume that if you are wronged by a ‘warped or deranged’ individual, then you can simply call the police or a psychiatrist and have this person ‘managed’ or ‘treated’ by the right state-sanctioned intermediary. Ideally, this is how the objective stance would work in a liberal democracy. Of course, this is a far cry from the reality of our society, in which laws and policies are organized around norms and assumptions constructed by the privileged for the purpose of maintaining hierarches of power passed down for generations. The U.S. prison system is a glaring example of these norms of discipline and punishment. In the U.S., the state incarcerates five times more African Americans and 1.4 times more Hispanic Americans than white Americans (NAACP 2019; Nellis 2016). The NAACP reports that “if African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%” (2019). Black and Hispanic Americans are also much more likely than white Americans to be stopped by police, and, when stopped, are more likely to experience “threats” and “use of force” (Jones 2018). In this climate of racial harassment, African Americans and Hispanic Americans unsurprisingly report much less confidence in the police than white people (The Opportunity Agenda 2016), and are less likely to call 911 than their white counterparts (Garber & Stern 2019). These are just a few examples of how different social groups have differential access to state-sanctioned regulatory techniques, and how different social groups are differentially susceptible to the use of these techniques, often imposed violently, without due process, and for no good reason. This imbalance creates a climate of fear and intimation that reinforces unequal access. As Zak Cheney-Rice observes, “the peculiar nature of

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law enforcement’s relationship to black communities is what makes it so laden with fear” (2019); although police brutality isn’t terrorism “in a formal sense” (because it’s not against the law), it “serves a similar end in that its targets and their communities live in a state of constant stress, mistrust, and fear, practically from the cradle to the grave” (ibid.). People who are terrorized by the state will not have the same access to security, protection, or democratic freedoms as privileged (white, particularly wealthy) citizens. On scrutiny, the availability of state apparatuses is skewed in several interlocking ways. On the one hand, not everyone has access to these apparatuses. A prime example is Indigenous girls and women, who are murdered at much higher rates than their white counterparts, yet their requests for security and democratic equality under the law have been systematically denied by the colonial state. The Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls found that “persistent and deliberate human and Indigenous rights violations and abuses are the root cause behind Canada’s staggering rates of violence,” and concluded that “Canada has committed a genocide against the Indigenous peoples within its colonial borders, and is continuing to maintain systems and structures that result in Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people experiencing a disproportionate amount of violence” (Skye 2019). If you are a victim of state-sanctioned genocide, you cannot trust the state to defend you against violent crimes, as the state itself it complicit in those crimes. At the same time, Indigenous girls and women have been subjected to over-policing and over-incarceration, and extreme forms of punishment such as imprisonment in maximum-security prisons and solitary confinement (Monkman 2018; Wright 2019). Thus, Indigenous women are double victims: victims of the state’s failure to defend them against violent crimes, and victims of the state’s excessive use of incarceration and violence against them, only due to racial prejudice. Similar claims can be made about other racialized minorities, as well as sexual minorities: for example, in the U.S., African Americans (Lopez 2018), Hispanic Americans, (NAACP 2019), and members of the LGBTQIA+ community (NCTE 2018), all face higher rates of policing, incarceration, and abuse in police custody than white and cisgender Americans, and these law-enforcement practices subject these communities to levels of fear, violence, and trauma from which privileged communities are exempt. These discriminatory policing and incarceration norms deprive these communities of equal access to security and freedom. If people have differential access to the state apparatuses internal to the objective stance, then what recourse do they have in the face of statesanctioned violence and persecution? Flowers has defended the legitimacy of negative emotions and non-cooperative responses to ongoing state-sanctioned violence and asymmetrically structured moral-political conversations. I agree that these stances are appropriate when the state is unresponsive to a person’s or group’s reasonable demand for security,

110 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility respect, and equal treatment under the law. Rage and contempt are legitimate and constructive responses to the systemic violence imposed on racialized and queer communities by the state. We should give these emotions uptake. When one feels legitimate rage or contempt towards an oppressive collective, this emotion is naturally expressed in the refusal to forgive and reconcile, as described by Flowers, which, along with protests and direct action, can be understood as a form of political resistance. Political activism can be a way of holding the state in contempt for unforgivable transgressions. When civil discourse fails due to epistemic injustice in the conversational context, the disenfranchised are entitled to forgo conversation in favour of resistance. Bell makes a good case for the legitimacy of contempt-fuelled activism in response to political disenfranchisement. She presents her argument as a rebuttal to the naïve (liberal) understanding the value of human rationality, on which “the only path to eventual convergence and agreement is through respectful dialogue and conversation; we simply cannot achieve moral consensus in any other way” (2013: 222). This naïve optimism is patently false, as illustrated by the historical record: Consider a historical example: there is now broad agreement that chattel slavery is abominable, but 150 years ago there was difference of opinion and a great deal of debate concerning the morality of slavery. Did the progressive moral consensus we have achieved regarding this issue come about through a process of respectful conversation and civil argumentation? While we would need the assistance of historians and sociologists to provide a complete answer to this question, even a cursory look back at our history reveals that scorn, angry protest, bloodshed, and war played a much larger role than respectful conversation in bringing about our current consensus concerning the indefensibility of slavery. While some abolitionists urged a path of civil argument and respectful debate, others expressed plenty of uncivil scorn and anger for slavery and its defenders. [Frederick] Douglass makes it clear that he thinks achieving a progressive moral consensus in this domain in 1852 requires sarcasm and vitriol rather than civil debate and discussion, and his Fourth of July speech aimed to disrupt the dialogue concerning the moral propriety of slavery rather than help smooth over discord and encourage dispassionate exchange of reasons. Other cases of uncivil responses to slavery’s defenders can be found throughout the abolitionist literature. (Bell 2013: 222–223) When the state is insensitive to someone’s moral testimony due to identity prejudice, then contempt and protest may be the best possible responses,

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and perhaps the only responses capable of conveying that the conversation is so imbalanced as to warrant non-participation. We would be foolish to assume that almost everyone is rational and capable of responding positively to our reasons at some deep level of their psychological profile, when the historical record reveals hundreds of years of bloodshed and protest in response to the intractable irrationality of the privileged. The disenfranchised didn’t gain democratic rights by reasoning with the privileged in a boardroom: they fought for those rights using every means at their disposal. ***** Before proceeding with my criticisms of the dominant Strawsonian understanding, I should address a likely objection to the current analysis. This objection is that my critique treats incarceration as a legitimate response to certain crimes (such as the murder and rape of Indigenous girls and women), instead of an inherently illicit abuse of state power. Along these lines, anti-carceral feminists have argued that we should abolish the prison system, not try to reform it (e.g., Taylor 2018). Seeing that America has by far the largest prison population in the world – way ahead of more populous countries like India and China, as well as more totalitarian countries like Russia and the Philippines (Kann 2019) – together with the fact that the prison system disproportionally imprisons members of disadvantaged communities, the appeal of anti-carceral feminism is undeniable. But there are also good reasons to favour reform, one being that the legal system, if reformed, can serve positive ends. I do not have the time to review the arguments for and against carceral abolition vs. reform in the space remaining, so I will instead simply point out that anticarceral feminists and reformists should be able to agree that, as long as the prison system exists, we need to ameliorate the systemic biases that structure its sentencing and enforcement norms, and we need to protect vulnerable communities from state-sanctioned violence rooted in these biases. Indeed, if we could eliminate the biases within America’s law-enforcement system, I would guess that the prison population would shrink quite quickly, because I suspect that wealthy white people would rather have no prison system at all than a prison system that incarcerates and punishes them on equal terms with disenfranchised citizens. That is, the privileged would rather have no prison system than one that gives them what they deserve. Anti-carceral feminists and reformists, then, should be able to agree that the prison system should at least operate on the basis of unbiased norms that apply equally to everyone for as long as it exists. And they shouldn’t also be able to agree that people who are disproportionally and unfairly policed and incarcerated are entitled to feel and express negative emotions, and to participate in political resistance against the state and its delegates (e.g., police, politicians).

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6. Our Incompetency at Judging Interpersonal Fitness According to Strawson, we’re supposed to adopt the objective stance towards interpersonally incompetent agents, and this determination is supposed to be relatively easy to make – at least, he doesn’t mention any complicating factors. But our ability to differentiate between the interpersonally fit (‘responsible’) and the interpersonally unfit (‘non-responsible’) is actually pretty terrible. Hutchison provides compelling examples of this: the judge in the Aboriginal woman’s case regarded her as incapable of feeding and caring for herself and, more generally, of participating in ‘ordinary’ (civilian) relationships; and the police officer supervising the Aboriginal women described one of them as a ‘junkie’ and a liar, unfit for civilian life. The judge and police officer, that is, illicitly ascribed interpersonal incompetency to these women. When perceptions of interpersonal competency interact with identity prejudice in a person’s moral cognition, they track those biases rather than the objective features of the target’s agency or her history of social participation. Hence, they misrepresent civically responsible people as civically irresponsible. I have tried to emphasize that these misperceptions or ‘miscognitions’ are not surprising departures from the norm, committed only by shockingly irrational people, but mundane and predictable biases, held by ordinary people. Consistent with this, demographic data show that Indigenous people are widely seen as unfit for civilian life, as evinced in the fact that they are policed, harassed, and incarcerated at far higher rates than the general population. (African American and Hispanic people face similar levels of over-policing, over-incarceration, and exclusion from civilian life based on misperceptions of their interpersonal fitness.) Though Strawson treated the judgment of interpersonal fitness as a relatively straightforward calculation, it is, in fact, informed by identity prejudices that structure ordinary people’s moral perceptions and emotions. These interactions produce biased perceptions of interpersonal competency, which give rise to asymmetrically structured relationships and institutional practices. Racialized minorities, then, tend to be judged as less interpersonally competent, and less fit for civilian life, than white people, only due to the prevalence of identity prejudice. This makes them vulnerable to illicit exclusions. A related (and strangely neglected) issue with Strawson’s essay, and contemporary Strawsonian thought in general, is the use of outdated language to describe people with mental disorders. This includes references to “neurotics,” the “insane,” and the “psychologically disordered” (1963: 9, 17, 3), who are classified (alongside children and ‘the deranged’) as unfit for interpersonal participation. Even the term ‘warped and deranged’ is problematic if we understand it in a psychological, as opposed to a moral, sense (which is why I have put it in scare quotes). Drawing associations between psychological disorders and moral deficits is inherently problematic because these associations suggest that people

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with psychological disorders are more likely than others to be morally deficient and interpersonally unfit, and there’s no reason to think that this is the case. Having a psychological disorder does not imply having a moral deficit, or vice versa, and drawing this connection only serves to (further) stigmatize people with psychological disorders by painting them as interpersonally incompetent. Saying that ‘insane people’ deserve the objective stance rather than interpersonal communication promotes ableist and sanist ideologies that paint people with psychological disorders as incapable of functioning in relationships. Philosophers should not be stereotyping people with mental disorders as interpersonally deficient or outsiders to the ‘normal moral community,’ as this simply isn’t true. In contrast, having an identity-based prejudice does imply having a moral deficit, because identity prejudices impair moral cognition, and vice versa. Thus, from the fact that someone has an internalized identity prejudice, we can reliably infer that the person has a moral deficit and therefore cannot function well in certain types of interpersonal relationships – those involving people against whom the person is prejudiced. Instead of promoting stigmatizing associations between mental disorders and moral incompetency, philosophers should be focusing on diagnosing and combating genuine psychological sources of moral deficiency, such as internalized identity prejudice, empathy biases, and inflated egos. These are the kinds of psychological states that reliably explain and predict problematic interpersonal behaviours, particularly behaviours that contribute to hierarchies of power. By reproducing Strawson’s outdated beliefs about associations between mental disorders and interpersonal deficits, philosophers are propagating the ableist misconceptions of the 1960s.

7. Global vs. Patchy Deficits Strawson’s construal of the participatory-objective divide seems to suggest that some people are moral agents, deserving of participatory regard, and others aren’t, and we can easily divide people into these two groups: uptake-capable agents and others. Uptake-capable agents belong to the ‘moral community,’ whereas uptake-impaired people do not. Vargas’ circumstantialist position challenges this neat division by contesting the notion that moral deficits are global, reflect the person’s character, and implicate the whole person. He shows that moral deficits are instead patchy and relatively domain-specific. Identity prejudice, as a type of moral deficit, is ‘patchy’ in precisely this sense. Jack may be capable of recognizing John’s moral credibility but not Jill’s, because Jack’s sexism prevents him from recognizing women as credible moral claimants. Thus, Jack has ‘patchy’ moral sensitivity in that he’s sensitive to men’s moral authority but not (to the same extent) women’s. If Jill knows that Jack is a sexist, she has every reason to treat him as unresponsive to her reasons,

114 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility because sexists are unresponsive to reasons communicated by women. If sexism is a patchy deficit, it’s not plausible to say that Jack is unresponsive to reasons in an unqualified sense, or that he is fully outside of the moral community, because he has one foot in the door, so to speak. He’s responsive to a lot of people’s moral testimony, but not women’s. It would be more accurate to say that Jack is outside of the moral community of women (i.e., insensitive to women’s testimonial authority), than to say that he is outside of the morally community, full stop. If we accept Vargas’ understanding of moral deficits as patchy, combined with my proposal that patchy deficits are (often) structured by identity prejudice, we have to grant that people aren’t simply inside or outside of the moral community – they’re capable of functioning well in some moral communities and not others. In other words, people have patchy deficits that make them differentially sensitive to different people’s moral testimony, and differentially capable of functioning in different epistemic spaces. What Vargas doesn’t discuss is the fact that moral deficits aren’t patchy in a random sense: rather, these gaps in people’s moral knowledge are structured by their internalized norms and schemas, which are a function of their identity and social position. These gaps, like ‘white ignorance,’ are ‘miscognitions’ structured by people’s social location and privileges. Stawsonians tend to treat moral cognition as globalist, not patchy. They take people to be fundamentally rational, with a few ‘defective’ outliers (principally children and psychopaths). Racists aren’t eligible for the objective stance because they can respond to some reasons from some people, just not reasons conveyed in Black people’s speech, or reasons attesting to Black people’s experiences of oppression. Hutchison, as we saw, defends McGeer’s view because it is faithful to “the plausible assumption that we can adopt the ‘participant standpoint’ in our daily interactions” with ordinary people (Holroyd 2018: 152). I deny that this statement holds true for everyone. Flowers illustrates how the assumption of general rationality fails in the context of an ongoing genocide. Can Indigenous women expect rationality from a colonial state? No. Can they expect rationality from the 13% or Canadians who, when surveyed, say that Indigenous people “get special treatment from governments, abuse their privileges, and take handouts rather than contribute to society” (Galloway 2016)? Probably not. The fact of the matter is that members of negatively stereotyped groups can’t expect rationality from a great many people, perhaps even the majority. Maybe they can try to reason with racists, but there’s no guarantee that they will succeed, not is this necessarily something that they would want to do. In sum, the ‘plausible expectation of rationality’ is unevenly distributed across society, because epistemic deficits tend to bias people against the testimonial authority of members of marginalized groups. That said, the fact that uptake isn’t evenly distributed in our society shouldn’t be taken to mean that people with intractable patchy prejudices

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(who aren’t enhanceable) are blameless, as Vargas thinks. Rather, they are blameworthy if, and insofar as, they actively contribute to hierarchies of power. This is true no matter how epistemically deformed the person is. Even the most unenhanceable racist can be blameworthy. Thus, while Vargas is right in maintaining that rationality deficits are patchy, McGeer is right in holding that most wrongdoers are eligible for blame, although not for the reasons that she gives (i.e., because they’re rational). Instead, wrongdoers are blameworthy to the extent that they are actively invested in systems of oppression that we have an interest in diagnosing and dismantling.

8. Concluding Remarks In this chapter, I have contested the dominant Strawsonian view on which blame is a reactive attitude internal to the participatory stance. Instead, I recognize forms of blame that involve taking a stance of contempt, scorn, and derision towards a contributor to a system of power, someone who deserves to be avoided, managed, or controlled in light of that contribution. These responses are warranted insofar as they serve intersectional feminist aims such as shielding oneself and others from discrimination, verbal harassment, and violence. These are valid reasons to want to dialogically withdraw from someone and adopt non-participatory regulatory techniques. These techniques are justified as an application of intersectional feminist principles. The state’s use of violence and intimidation, particularly against disenfranchised groups, is a massive departure from IF principles, and should be actively resisted. We are justified in holding the state in contempt for its role in genocide and oppression.

Notes 1. I use the term ‘rational faculties’ very broadly. I intend for it to encompass reasons-responsiveness or reasons-sensitivity, which are the terms favoured by most contemporary responsibility theorists, though they are rather cumbersome. I do not mean ‘rational’ in the tradition sense, viz., opposed to emotionality and embodiment. 2. ‘Rationality’ is a highly contested word, but I’m simply going to use it to mean reasons-responsive. Reasons-responsive is also fairly elusive but philosophers don’t explain it, so I’m just going to take it at face value, too. 3. For simplicity I’m going to call agents susceptible to the objective stance ‘unanswerable’ even though this term is theoretically loaded, but I’ll take ‘unanswerable,’ for present purposes, to mean nothing more or less than uptake-incapable. An ‘answerable’ person, in the present sense, can’t respond rationally or reasonably to the reactive attitudes. 4. Strawson’s language is outdated and offensive but I’m going to quote it so that I’m not accused of misrepresenting his position. I take ‘morally deranged’ to mean intransigently amoral or egoistical. 5. The businessman’s toxic ideology is a neoliberal mantra that justifies the exploitation of anyone and everyone for personal gain.

116 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility 6. Bell thinks that contempt can sometimes motivate engagement as well, but it generally motivates withdrawal, which is what distinguishes it from the emotions internal to the participatory stance as understood by Strawson. 7. America’s settler colonialism is as bad as, if not worse than, that faced by Indigenous people in Canada.

References Bell, M. (2013). Hard feelings: The moral psychology of contempt. New York: Oxford University Press. Caron, C. (2018, Dec 13). In 19 states, it’s still legal to spank children in public schools. The New York Times. Retrieved from: www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/ us/corporal-punishment-school-tennessee.html Cheney-Rice, Z. (2018, June 18). How police brutality can function as terrorism. New York Magazine. Retrieved from: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/ phoenix-police-threatening-family-was-terrorism.html Doris, J. M. (1998). Persons, situations, and virtue ethics. Nous, 32(4), 504–530. Duggan, M. (2014, Oct 22). Online harassment. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from: www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ Du Toit, L. (2009). A philosophical investigation of rape: The making and unmaking of the feminine self. Routledge. Flowers, R. (2015). Refusal to forgive: Indigenous women’s love and rage. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(2). Galloway, G. (2016, June 8). Public opinion of indigenous people in Canada improving: Survey. Globe & Mail. Retrieved from: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/ politics/public-opinion-of-indigenous-people-in-canada-improving-survey/ article30346252/ Garber, H., & Stern, J. (2018, May 10). White people should call the police gray: Minorities should be able to call them more. Slate. Retrieved from: https://slate. com/news-and-politics/2018/05/in-america-calling-911-is-still-a-privilege-ofbeing-white.html Hartshorne, H. & May, M. A. (1928). Studies in the nature of character, I: studies in deceit. New York: Macmillan. Holroyd, J. (2018). Two ways of socialising responsibility: Circumstantialist and scaffolded-responsiveness. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. Oxford University Press. Hutchison, K. (2018). Moral responsibility, respect, and social identity. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. Oxford University Press. Jones, A. (2018, Oct 12). Police stops are still marred by racial discrimination, new data shows. Prison Policy Initiative. Retrieved from: www.prisonpolicy. org/blog/2018/10/12/policing/ Kamtekar, R. (2004). Situationism and virtue ethics on the content of our character. Ethics, 114(3), 458–491. Kann, D. (2019, Apr 21). 5 facts behind America’s high incarceration rate. CNN. Retrieved from: www.cnn.com/2018/06/28/us/mass-incarceration-five-key-facts/ index.html Kiesel, L. (2017, Oct 9). Women and pain: Disparities in experience and treatment. Harvard Health Publishing: Harvard Medical School. Retrieved from: www.

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health.harvard.edu/blog/women-and-pain-disparities-in-experience-and-treat ment-2017100912562 Levy, N. (2014). Why no-platforming is sometimes a justifiable position. Aeon. Retrieved from: https://aeon.co/ideas/why-no-platforming-is-sometimes-ajustifiable-position Lopez, G. (2018, Nov 14). There are huge racial disparities in how US police use force. Vox Magazine. Retrieved from: www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/ 17938186/police-shootings-killings-racism-racial-disparities Manne, K. (2017). Down girl: The logic of misogyny. Oxford University Press. McGeer, V. (2013). Civilizing blame. In Blame: Its nature and norms, eds. Coates & Tognazzini. Oxford University Press. Monkman, L. (2018, June 29). Indigenous incarceration rates: Why are Canada’s numbers so high and what can be done about it? CBC News. Retrieved from: www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenous-incarceration-justice-systempanel-1.4729192 NAACP. (2019). Criminal justice fact sheet. Retrieved from: www.naacp.org/ criminal-justice-fact-sheet/ National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE). (2018). LGBTQ people behind bars: A guide to understanding the issues facing transgender prisoners and their legal rights. Retrieved from: https://transequality.org/transpeoplebehindbars Nellis, A. (2016). The color of justice: Racial and ethnic disparity in state prisons. Sentencing Project. Retrieved from: https://www.sentencingproject.org/ publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/ The Opportunity Agenda. (2016). Racial divide in attitudes toward the police. Retrieved from: www.opportunityagenda.org/explore/resources-publications/ new-sensibility/part-iv Skye, C. (2019, June 4). Canada finally acknowledged the genocide against Indigenous women: It’s time to act. Washington Post. Retrieved from: https:// beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/04/canada-finally-acknowledgedgenocide-against-indigenous-women-its-time-act/ Smart, J. J. (1961). Free-will, praise and blame. Mind, 70(279), 291–306. Solnit, R. (2017). The mother of all questions. Haymarket Books. Strawson, P. F. (1963). Freedom and resentment. In Freedom and resentment and other essays. Routledge, 2008. Taylor, C. (2018). Anti-carceral feminism and sexual assault: A defense: A critique of the critique of the critique of carceral feminism. Social Philosophy Today, 34, 29–49. Trawalter, S., Hoffman, K. M., & Waytz, A. (2012). Racial bias in perceptions of others’ pain. PloS One, 7(11), e48546. Vargas, M. R. (2018). The social constitution of agency and responsibility: Oppression, politics, and moral ecology. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. Oxford University Press. ———. (2013). Building better beings: A theory of moral responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waller, B. N. (2014). The stubborn system of moral responsibility. MIT Press. Wright, T. (2019, June 5). Changes to Canada’s solitary-confinement bill could help with MMIWG report findings. Retrieved from: https://globalnews.ca/news/ 5353955/changes-to-canadas-solitary-confinement-bill-mmiwg-report-findings/

5

Against Civility Constraints

If you speak in an angry way about what has happened to our people and what is happening to our people, what does he call it? Emotionalism. Pick up on that . . . You’re supposed to watch your diction . . . You’re supposed to be respectable and responsible when you holler against what they are doing to you. – Malcom X

1. Responsibility and Civility In my last chapter, I discussed affinities between Strawsonian and functionalist accounts of the objective-participatory divide. In this chapter, I want to discuss another assumption shared between the two. When Strawson discussed the rationale behind the objective stance, he referred to people who approve of that stance as ‘civilized’: “the personal reactive attitudes in general . . . tend to give place, and it is judged by the civilized should give place, to objective attitudes, just in so far as the agent is seen as excluded from ordinary adult human relationships by deeprooted psychological abnormality (sic)” (1963: 157, emphasis mine). And similarly, “no other civilized attitude is available than that of viewing the deranged person (sic) simply as something to be understood and controlled in the most desirable fashion” (1963: 345, emphasis mine). This notion of “civilized blame” is echoed by Victoria McGeer (2013), who offers her own version of a ‘civilized’ responsibility system. She says that civilized blame should exclude retributive aims and should function not to punish, but to “stabilize . . . cooperative interactions” (McGeer 2013: 172). Thus, ‘civilized blame’ fosters interpersonal cooperation between ‘civilized people.’ Though McKenna doesn’t self-identify as a functionalist, he similarly adopts a Strawsonian conception of blame as part of a cooperative conversation, in which apt blame is a “meaningful, fitting, intelligible conversational response” (2012: 90), which serves to “move a conversation or dialogue further along” (McKenna 2012: 142). Thus, all three philosophers share similar ideas about blame’s relation to civility and cooperation. Blame is a ‘civil’ contribution that serves to move

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cooperative dialogue along, enhancing the scope of civil discourse in general. The notion that blame should be ‘civilized’ implies that it should be civil, inasmuch as a ‘civilized person’ is supposed to be civil (polite, courteous, well-mannered, temperate). And civility is supposed to contribute to a ‘civilized society,’ which seems to be the society that Strawson (and his followers) took to comprise the ‘moral community.’ Furthermore, civility is generally assumed to advance cooperative conversation under ordinary circumstances. Civility helps people get along and pursue shared moral and epistemic ends. The notion that civility facilitates cooperation and consensus around shared aims isn’t unique to responsibility theory by any means: it is a mainstay of classic political philosophy, and is increasingly prevalent in mainstream discourse. Therefore, whether or not responsibility theorists are committed to the notion that blame should be civil and conducive to dialogical cooperation and social consensus, this is the accepted wisdom across a range of ideological spaces. In this connection, Joe Biden recently cited his “good working relationship with two defenders of segregation in his own party” as evidence of the loss of civility in politics, saying, “well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done” (Hartmann & Kilgore 2019). While this representation of history has been contested by Biden’s opponents, it conveys a sentiment with a long precedent in American politics, and an even longer precedent in political philosophy, which predates the creation of America. This precedent is the notion that dialogue should be civil because civility leads to consensus around shared aims, even amongst opponents with very different perspectives. Whether we are debating abolitionists or segregationists, feminists or ‘incels,’ civil rights activists or Nazis, we should always be civil, contain our emotions, and respond to their arguments with charity and understanding. In this chapter, I’m going to dispute the alleged value of civility, and the related values of cooperation and consensus as democratic and moral ideals that reliably foster mutual understanding and respect. To be precise, I plan to argue that civility, cooperation, and consensus are not necessarily valuable within asymmetrically structured conversations, and therefore civility is not a valid constraint on conversation under ordinary (asymmetrical) circumstances. My reason for rejecting the civility constraint is that uncivil and uncooperative moral testimony is often IF-conducive. Moreover, a focus on the (putative) ideal of civility distracts us from the more important aim of promoting intersectional feminist goals, such as dismantling systems of oppression. And the amelioration of oppression is often achieved through stereotypically ‘uncivil’ interventions such as political activism, direct action, and protest. Drawing largely on political philosophy, I will dispute the value of civility and cooperation in our responsibility practices, and in liberal democracies in general. I take ‘civility’ to encompass ideals of moderation,

120 Against Civility Constraints tolerance, temperance, conventional rule-following, and charity – qualities that are typically taken to promote the democratic aims of freedom and equality. These ideals have been championed by preeminent political scholars such as John Locke, John Rawls, and O.W. Holmes. I argue that civility is not the epistemic ideal that these philosophers take it to be because, in ordinary conditions of inequality and oppression, civility norms don’t necessarily promote voluntary consensus around shared aims. More often than not, they serve to marginalize minorities. I argue further that consensus itself is not inherently valuable because it is often achieved through the silencing and smothering of minority voices, allowing the privileged to control the conversation. Scholars who defend the value of civility tend to neglect the fact that pervasive asymmetries of power operate to marginalize members of oppressed groups, preventing them from participating equally in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ and in civilian life in general. In these non-ideal conditions, the politics of civility is often wielded as a tool of epistemic oppression, not used to ensure equal participation and uptake. In part, this is because civility is associated with social conventions, and social conventions favour asymmetrical relations. In our society, political disenfranchisement is conventional, and political resistance is ‘uncivil.’ In section 2, I will survey some of the arguments for and against civility and argue that civility is not a political or personal virtue, contra the conventional widsom. In section 3, I will respond to an anticipated objection to my rebuke of civility. And in section 4, I will summarize the implications of my arguments for moral responsibility. My goal is to show that apt blame isn’t necessarily civil (in the standard sense) or cooperative in nature. It can be uncivil and uncooperative, and it can (and ideally should) shake the very foundations of western civilization as we know it.

2. The Politics of Civility Discourse about the value of civility has become increasingly common since Donald Trump was appointed president. Whereas ‘civil discourse’ used to be an uncontested political and epistemic ideal – an ‘obvious’ source of cultural knowledge and cooperation – critics have begun to challenge the accepted wisdom. When Robert De Niro yelled “fuck Trump” at the Tony Awards, critics condemned his behaviour as “uncivil,” “ugly” and “angry” (Baker & Rogers 2018), but feminist journalist Jessica Valenti (2018) defended him on grounds that morals should trump manners, so to speak, and De Niro’s moral indignation was entirely fitting: expecting those of us who are scared and angry over what our country is becoming to speak with civility is absurd – civility died the day Trump took office. It’s like telling a woman to smile as she’s being

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sexually harassed on the street: we’re not just supposed to put up with injustice, we’re meant to be cheerful through it, as well . . . Meeting extreme injustices with polite banter plays right into the hands of this administration, because it paints their outrageous actions as just being on one side of a well-meaning debate. They’re not. This is not about disagreement, or political discourse. This is about fighting for what’s right over what is clearly and demonstrably evil . . . being spittingly angry will not drive more people to Trump and will not diminish us – the high road is about morals, not a few curse words. (Valenti 2018) Valenti shows how calls for civility can undermine democratic aims, such as fostering equality and justice, by shutting down legitimate political criticism (howsoever ‘uncivil’). Something that her commentary doesn’t illuminate is that the people who are most susceptible to being called ‘uncivil’ are members of oppressed groups who have the most to gain from political activism. Malcolm X emphasized that when Black people protest racial injustice, they are seen as ‘uncivil’ by white moderates (i.e., racial liberals) who would prefer that they operate through established democratic channels, such as the court system and electoral politics. These critics don’t realize (or won’t admit) that such channels are not equally available to racialized minorities, which is precisely why they resorted to political activism in the first place. In protesting, they are demanding, or asserting their right to, equal access to the basic infrastructure of democracy. Valenti’s observations mirror some of the criticisms levelled by contemporary political philosophers and social epistemologists against the traditional understanding of ‘civil discourse’ as an epistemic and political ideal that facilitates democratic consensus around shared knowledge under ordinary circumstances. Skepticism about civility’s value has been voiced by Andrew Calabrese (2015) and Christopher Zurn (2013), who argue that civility norms have been used throughout history to oppress persecuted minorities, as well as Jose Medina (2013), who argues that cooperation and consensus are less epistemically valuable than contestations and dissent within asymmetrically structured epistemic contexts. If civility is valuable purely as a means of advancing consensus, but consensus itself isn’t valuable in conditions of asymmetrical uptake, then civility isn’t valuable in this context, either. In contrast to this skepticism, Cheshire Calhoun (2000) defends the value of civility as a personal virtue. I challenge Calhoun’s optimism by arguing that her position neglects the asymmetries of power that allow the privileged to control public discourse. In my view, civility is valuable insofar as it advances IF aims, but not otherwise. And in conditions of asymmetrical power relations like ours, it won’t advance those aims as often as most people think.

122 Against Civility Constraints In what follows, I will outline the challenges to civility offered by Calabrese, Zurn, and Medina; then respond to Calhoun’s defense of civility; and then reply to potential objections to my position. 2.1. Andrew Calabrese Andrew Calabrese (2015) argues that civility and justice can come into conflict, in which case justice should take precedence. He points out that throughout history, civility norms have been brandished as “a blunt instrument to punish and discipline the [marginalized]” rather than a mechanism for promoting shared knowledge and substantive equality (2015: 541). Before pursuing this argument further, I should offer a definition of ‘civility.’ Calabrese provides a definition drawn from classic political philosophy, which sees civil discourse as speech constrained by moderation, temperance, and tolerance. Within the western tradition, these virtues were originally extolled by Aristotle, who associated “temperance” and “continence” with “self-discipline and the control of impulses to seek bodily pleasures, self-indulgence and passions” (Calabrese 2015: 541). The ‘civil person’ was thought to embody the virtues of temperance and continence, which Aristotle defined as “the essential virtues of the good man” (ibid.). Whereas the civil person is temperate and disciplined (or, in other words, rational), the uncivil person is driven by emotions and bodily urges. On Aristotle’s conception, the civil person is, in fact, the good man, who has virtues conventionally associated with maleness and masculinity. The construct of the ‘temperate man,’ whose emotions and bodily urges are constrained by rationality, persists to this day in cultural associations between men and rationality and women and emotionality (Brescoll 2016), which have an analogue in racial associations between whiteness and temperance on the one hand, and Blackness and anger on the other (Jacobs 2018). These associations intersect in the stereotype of the ‘Angry Black Woman,’ which is an oppressive racial construct. These cultural associations make it more likely that women and African Americans will be charged with ‘incivility’ for the same behaviours that would be labelled as civil in white people and men. Subsequent political philosophers took up the torch of prejudice from Aristotle. John Locke (1924), for instance, proclaimed that “members of civil society unite to form a government, the chief reason being the protection of property interests,” hence depicting civil society as grounded on property rights – a notion reiterated by contemporary legal scholar Stephen Carter in his book, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (1998, in Calabrese 2015: 543). Based on this colonialist understanding of civil society, Locke construed “petty crimes .  .  . disproportionately committed by members of lower socio-economic strata”

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as the greatest threats to ‘civilization’ (ibid.), while completely ignoring, and therefore tacitly justifying, the human rights violations committed by agents of the colonial state – people who often saw themselves as humanitarians devoted to ‘civilizing the savages,’ expanding ‘western civilization’ through the subjugation of Black bodies under capitalism. Because Carter adopts Locke’s colonialist understanding of civil society, he “offers no insight into the incivility and violence that underlies the decades-long neoliberal collusion between national governments and transnational elites to redistribute and concentrate massive amounts of wealth into the hands of the very rich,” that is, white property owners (Calabrese 2015: 534). On the Lockean understanding, civility is a virtue of a ‘civil society,’ which is a society founded on property rights established through genocide and white supremacy. More recently, Norbert Elias published The Civilizing Process (2000), which is “widely considered to be the most detailed historical account of the Western idea of civility” (Calabrese 2015: 542). Therein, Elias describes the modern state as a ‘civilizing force’ insofar as it “makes possible the ‘free competitive struggle’ over the means of production and consumption ‘largely without the threat of physical violence’” (Elias 2000: 303, cited in Calabrese 2015: 542). The state accomplishes this feat by claiming “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Elias 2000: 78, cited in Calabrese 2000: 542). For this monopoly to be justified, according to Elias, the state must “be sparing in its use of force against its own citizens” (Calabrese 2015: 543). But the modern state isn’t, in fact, sparing in its use of violence, but uses violence excessively and disproportionally on Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities, as we have seen. It is a ‘civilizing force,’ then, only if we ignore the violence perpetuated continuously on these racialized communities. If civility is a feature of a civil society and our society is a civil one, then civility is a vehicle of racism and violence, used to maintain colonialist systems of power. Mark Kingwell (1995) argues that civility “is necessary to democratic politics, not because it can or should produce agreement or consensus, but because it increases the likelihood of understanding” (Calabrese 2015: 547). He thinks that civility prevents people from expressing “themselves in ways that might damage the potential for fruitful [epistemic] outcomes,” and this enables people to contribute better to what J. S. Mill famously called ‘the marketplace of ideas’ (Calabrese 2015: 548). What Kingwell doesn’t sufficiently appreciate is the fact that, in conditions of epistemic inequality, not everyone can contribute equally (or at all) to the marketplace of ideas, since some people are marginalized and excluded by forces of epistemic injustice, including false charges of ‘incivility’ based on identity prejudice. These marginalized individuals are victims of what Mill called the ‘tyranny of the majority’ (or perhaps, in our society, the tyranny of the privileged few), which silences minorities to maintain established relations of power and domination.

124 Against Civility Constraints On scrutiny, all of the defenses of ‘civility’ discussed here are either naïve or bigoted. The Aristotelian notion is underpinned by implicit sexism and racism. The Lockean understanding whitewashes slavery by depicting petty theft under a colonial economy as ‘uncivil.’ Elias’ understanding tacitly justifies state-sanctioned violence against racialized communities. And Kingwell’s account overlooks the oppressive civility politics of the privileged. We can clearly see the marginalizing effects of civility politics in our current political situation, in which calls for civility are often addressed to Hispanic and Black Americans, who are criminalized by prevailing racial schemas (Young 2005), making them more susceptible to epistemic suppression. In the 1960s, Malcolm X warned African Americans about white moderates’ tendency to appeal to “civil discourse” as an ideal in order to police protestors’ “emotions” and “diction,” and suppress their legitimate political demands (1990). By labelling Black people’s speech as ‘uncivil’ (because it is ‘angry’ and ‘inarticulate’ according to racial schemas), white moderates can dismiss their claims without citing racism as a reason. (‘White supremacy isn’t the problem – it’s angry Black people!’) But if we look at civility’s roots in colonialist understandings of imperialism and capitalism as ‘civilizing forces’ (rather than mechanisms for genocide and exploitation), it becomes clear that calls for civility function to enforce colonialist relations of power and domination. As Calabrese observes, Malcolm X describes here what has long been recognized as a steep barrier that is often put before dissenters who voice their claims angrily, if not violently, namely, the disproportionate ability of the powerful to define the terms of civil discourse and to question the civility of the [vulnerable], thereby discrediting the validity of the latter’s message. (2015: 547) This corresponds with Mill’s observation that “there is an unfair advantage for the powerful in defining ‘intemperate speech’ . . . The judges have full rein over how bitterly they can assault the challengers without consequence to themselves and their views” (Calabrese 2015: 547, citing Mill 1859: 117). In effect, the powerful can define ‘civility’ so that it applies to certain speakers and certain vernaculars, thereby excluding marginalized groups from public discourse. (‘Civility is rational, and white men are rational; therefore, white men’s speech is civil.’) The privileged tend to use civility politics to marginalize minorities within the marketplace of ideas, positioning themselves to better promulgate their own ideological agenda. Although some philosophers take Mill to be optimistic about the value of civil discourse, Calabrese points out that Mill described the belief that

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truth will prevail as “one of those pleasant falsehoods” and “a piece of idle sentimentality” (Mill 1859: 90, cited in Calabrese 2015: 546). Calabrese takes this pessimism further, describing “belief that civility . . . is the most likely means of ensuring just outcomes” as “liberalism’s greatest pathology” (2015: 540). It is a ‘pathology’ because it is practically “an article of faith” in western society, but there is abundant evidence that the powerful use their epistemic clout to exclude vulnerable groups from the marketplace of ideas and erase their testimony. In ordinary conditions, the marketplace of ideas is not so much a vehicle for shared knowledge and voluntary consensus, as a locus of epistemic oppression and ideological warfare. Within this context, calls for civility from the powerful function “to discipline and silence” the oppressed (Calabrese 2015: 541). Often, these negotiations are part of an epistemic practice that Herbert Marcuse calls “repressive tolerance,” a facsimile of tolerance that only allows for superficial dissent, and suppresses substantive disagreement. The politics of civility tends to silence minorities and repress genuine challenges to the established order – an order mischaracterized as a ‘civil society’ in which democratic ideals are respected and enforced. In sum, political philosophers from antiquity to the present have been far too optimistic about civility’s propensity to produce voluntary consensus around shared knowledge, and far too dismissive of civility’s associations with racist, colonialist, and genocidal practices, ideals, and systems. In conditions of inequality like ours, civility politics is often used to epistemically marginalize minorities, and to misrepresent the colonial state as a bastion of ‘civility.’ When civil discourse does produce consensus, this is often a forced consensus around majoritarian values. That is, it produces consensus by silencing genuine dissent from the margins. 2.2. Christopher Zurn Christopher Zurn is less pessimistic than Calabrese about the value of civility, but he still describes it as “another illusionistic ideal” of the neoliberal state (2013). By this he means that civility is an illusory source of value, as opposed to a substantive tool of political change. Zurn derives his notion of ‘political civility’ from Cheshire Calhoun’s influential theory of civility as a personal virtue (more on which in a moment). Accordingly, Zurn takes political civility to involve the conflicting principles of social conformity and moral respect. More precisely, civility involves “the use of prevalent norms of interaction . . . to communicate basic moral attitudes of respect, tolerance, and considerateness” (Zurn 2013: 344). As such, civility is intrinsically ambivalent, because ‘civil conduct’ can be morally disrespectful, and moral conduct can be uncivil. To illustrate this tension, Calhoun cites the social conventions that oblige men to ‘show respect’ to women by holding doors open for them, thereby (implicitly) infantilizing them (Zurn 2013: 345, citing

126 Against Civility Constraints Calhoun 2000: 262). In this way, civility expresses ‘respect’ according to social conventions, but doesn’t necessarily treat its target with the moral respect due to an “equally dignified subject” (Calhoun 2000: 344). Like Calabrese, Zurn objects to classic theories of civility that present it as a democratic ideal. He specifically rejects the notion shared by John Rawls and O.W. Holmes, that civil discourse tends to produce “reliable knowledge” through “productive political reasoning” and “overlapping consensus” (Zurn 2013: 348). Like Calabrese, Zurn invokes Mill’s doubts about the value of civility in conditions of tyranny, in which “the despotism of custom” tends to undermine fair epistemic negotiations and equal participation in the marketplace of ideas (Mill 1859, cited in Zurn 2013: 355). On a proper Millean analysis, calls for civility in conditions of inequality don’t necessarily promote reliable knowledge or productive political reasoning, but may instead subjugate minorities under forces of epistemic tyranny. The outcome isn’t democratic consensus but epistemic injustice. Zurn offers a specific example of the oppressive use of civility politics. When Fannie Wright gave one of the first feminist talks on record in 1828, she was accused of ‘uncivil conduct’ by the press. The New York Free Enquirer described her as having, “with ruthless violence broken loose from the restraints of decorum, which draws a circle around the life of a woman”; The Louisville Focus stated that she had “leaped over the boundary of female modesty”; and The New York American claimed that she had “waived all claims” to “courtesy,” and had “ceased to be a woman,” transforming into “a female monster” (Cmiel 1991, cited in Zurn 2013: 356). These reports show how civility norms were used to silence women who demanded gender equality in the 19th century. The civility norms of the time barred women from speaking about politics in public, particularly in relation to women’s rights, because doing so violated binary gender conventions and threatened patriarchal hegemony. Because Wright went against these conventions, she was decried as not only uncivil, but also ‘unwomanly’ and a ‘monster.’ This is because the civility norms of the day were used to police violations of conventional gender norms. Women who challenged those norms were seen as both ‘impolite’ and ‘gender deviant’ – not simply manly, but ‘monsters,’ outside of the ‘natural’ binary gender system. They posed a threat to ‘civilized’ (patriarchal) society. Because civility is associated with cultural conventions, acting in defiance of cultural conventions triggers charges of ‘incivility’ from conventionabiding people (conservatives). Going against patriarchal gender norms is ‘uncivil.’ Going against white supremacy is ‘uncivil.’ In support of this contention, researchers have found that ‘civility’ is culturally associated with ideals of purity and hygiene. Thus, when someone violates a cultural convention – such as a convention of femininity – the person is liable to be seen as ‘uncivil,’ as well as ‘impure’ and ‘polluted,’ and, by

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extension, will be seen as a threat to the ‘purity’ of ‘civil society’ and even ‘civilization’ itself. In western society, there are also longstanding cultural associations between ‘civility,’ ‘purity,’ and ‘whiteness,’ which operate to marginalize racialized minorities within public life (Berthold 2010). These associations trigger charges of incivility when Black people protest white supremacy, the foundation of ‘civilization.’ These are similar to the associations between civility, purity, and masculinity, which trigger charges of incivility when women protest patriarchal norms. Because of these associations, African Americans and women are vulnerable to oppressive uses of civility politics. Zurn addresses a second worry, which corresponds with an objection raised by Jose Medina. He points out that the ideals of civility and cooperation have been challenged by “political agonists,” who hold that “the essence of democracy is contestation,” often “between factions within incommensurable and non-negotiable fundamental principles” (2013: 532). These theorists argue that “calls for civility – especially when they are really calls for mild consensus and bland unanimity . . . simply misunderstand democracy as a kind of polite talking session, a well-run graduate seminar responsive to the force of argument and reason” (2013: 353). Though Zurn doesn’t fully endorse the ‘agonist’ position, a version of it has been defended convincingly by Jose Medina in his work on epistemic asymmetries of power in the political sphere. I turn to that objection in the next section. 2.3. Jose Medina Medina’s Epistemology of Resistance (2013) is a form of non-ideal theory that foregrounds asymmetries of power as they exist in our epistemic relationships. It rejects the “consensus model” of democracy advocated by John Rawls, in favour of a resistance model that sees resistance as the mechanism for political change (2013: 11). Medina worries that the consensus model excludes perspectives that can’t be fully integrated into a ‘social consensus’ structured by the privileged. Instead of consensus, he believes that we should seek to foster contestation and dissent, frictions that reveal sources of alienation and exclusion. His view is compatible with claims made by Elizabeth Anderson to the effect that “conditioning decisions on the achievement of consensus often leads to undue pressure on and even coercion of dissenting minorities” (Anderson 2006: 16, cited in Medina 2013: 11). That is, the pursuit of consensus can undermine the production of knowledge by silencing minorities or forcing them to assimilate their testimony into the dominant ideology. Medina’s approach sees resistance, opposition, and contestation as paramount epistemic ideals in an unequal society. He identifies “oppositional discourses” and “counterhegeominc publics” as sources of “epistemic friction,” a wellspring of political knowledge (Medina 2013: 16). Instead of consensus, we should

128 Against Civility Constraints seek sources of epistemic friction in the testimony of the marginalized. The friction model thus challenges the dominant view on which consensus is the source of political knowledge. d. Cheshire Calhoun In contrast, Cheshire Calhoun (2000) is surprisingly optimistic about the value of civility, given her insights about how civility can be used to enforce patriarchal oppression (e.g., by promoting the patriarchal ideal of ‘chivalry’). She defines ‘personal civility’ (or civility as a personal virtue) as the disposition to communicate moral regard through established social norms. Civility and moral regard, as such, can come apart: respectful actions can be uncivil, and civil actions can be disrespectful. A second example of this tension is the U.S. government’s erstwhile “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which required gay military personnel to hide their sexual identity while in uniform. This policy showed civility to gay military personnel in that it mandated an attitude of tolerance (as long as gay personnel agreed to stay in the closet), but it didn’t show them moral respect because it denied them the right to express their sexual identity as openly as their straight counterparts. Thus, military personnel had to “choose between accepting without ire a civil display of tolerance and protesting treatment that would not be acceptable were our society a sexually unprejudiced one” (Calhoun 2000: 263). While Calhoun admits that duties of civility can conflict with duties of moral respect, she still maintains that civility is an instrumental virtue that facilities democratic equality. Specifically, civility serves to “regulate discussion of controversial subjects so that dialogue among those who disagree will continue rather than break down,” which in turn contributes to democratic consensus around shared knowledge (2000: 269). This view toes the line of the political orthodoxy on which civility promotes shared knowledge and voluntary consensus, which is conducive to a well-functioning democracy. Unlike classic political philosophers, however, Calhoun specifies that civility’s value has limits, which are determined by “extensive social consensus,” in contrast to the moral discretion of individuals (2000: 271). That is, we should forego civility only when there is extensive social consensus on the immorality of a given social practice, not when our private conscience condemns the practice. Calhoun adopts a consensus criterion because she sees personal discretion as too subjective to be trusted. The consensus constraint justifies Calhoun’s judgment that moral disrespect towards minorities such as gay military personnel, in the form of abiding by the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, is justified in conditions of ‘epistemic complexity’ (or, put differently, epistemic injustice), in which moral facts are ‘complicated’ or obfuscated by cultural ignorance. Thus, “given extensive social disagreement over the moral status of homosexuality . . . civility may require what, from one’s

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own socially critical moral viewpoint, seems excessive accommodation to prejudice” (Calhoun 2000: 273). We should abide by the principle of civility and not cause a fuss when the moral truth is culturally contested. Hence, deference to the military’s homophobic policy was justified by the duty of civility due to the lack of consensus on gay people’s moral dignity, which licensed capitulation to the cisheteronormative majority’s homophobia. Calhoun admits that her consensus condition requires that we forfeit our moral integrity in epistemically contested situations, but she sees this as an acceptable concession, because, she says, deferring to the consensus reflects a spirit of epistemic humility, whereas following one’s moral conscience would evince “a kind of hubris” (Calhoun 2000: 275). It would be arrogant, in other words, to assume that one’s conscience is a more reliable moral guide than the social consensus. Calhoun’s defense of civility above moral integrity relies on the epistemic value of social consensus, but social consensus, as we saw above, can take the form of the tyranny of the majority. And within an asymmetrically structured society like ours, the social consensus tends to favour oppression. The reason the social consensus in the U.S. favoured preventing openly gay people from serving in the military until 2011 is because the experiential testimony of gay people was excluded from the consensus-generating procedure: it was effectively erased. This gave rise to a cisheteronormative consensus that excluded gay people’s knowledge. Since we know that our society is unequal, we shouldn’t simply trust the social consensus – we should evaluate the mechanisms of consensus to see if they exclude minorities. That is, we should look for asymmetries of power in the marketplace of ideas. Because the social consensus is the result of unfair epistemic negotiations, it’s not true that our conscience is generally less trustworthy than the social consensus, since our conscience might be informed by knowledge that is completely lacking from the consensus-generating procedure. If a gay person believes that he’s entitled to love someone of the same sex based on his extensive experience with loving relationships, and the social consensus denies this because it operates on the basis of cisheteronormative prejudice, then the gay person should trust his (unbiased) conscience above the (biased) social consensus. He should trust his conscience because his direct experiences of same-sex love are more reliable than a forced cisheteronormative consensus based on a lack of relevant knowledge or experience. Another issue with Calhoun’s argument is that it asserts that ‘we’ are obligated to forfeit ‘our’ moral integrity in deference to the social consensus, as if this obligation were equally distributed. In fact, in conditions of inequality, it is always the marginalized who are called on to forfeit their moral integrity for the sake of the hegemony of the dominant ideology. In conditions of compulsory heterosexuality, sexual minorities are the ones required to sacrifice their moral integrity to preserve the integrity of

130 Against Civility Constraints cisheteronormative ideals. Homophobes aren’t asked to make an equivalent sacrifice. The integrity of their moral ideology is protected by a consensus procedure that excludes gay people’s opposing testimony. In conditions of systemic racism, racialized minorities are the ones required to sacrifice their moral integrity to preserve the structural integrity of white ignorance. And so on. Epistemic minorities are always the ones forced to submit to the tyranny of the epistemic majority. In general, subcultural epistemic communities are better sources of moral guidance than the social consensus because these communities are sources of the kinds of epistemic friction that Medina identifies as crucial to the production of true knowledge and equality. These communities contain the oppositional discourses and counterhegemonic narratives needed for objective knowledge and democratic inclusion. And, in deferring to these communities as moral authorities, we are not acting on ‘epistemic hubris,’ but are instead giving uptake to oppressed group insights. It’s not just our conscience that tells us that a certain consensus opinion is wrong, but the corroborating insights of an oppressed epistemic subculture.

3. An Objection The main objection that I anticipate in response to my argument about the disvalue of civility is that people like Donald Trump use uncivil language in problematic ways, and their incivility is harmful to democracy and the production of knowledge. While I agree that Trump’s language (e.g., calling Mexicans ‘drug dealers’ and ‘rapists’) is problematic, I deny that it is problematic because it is uncivil. Rather, it is problematic because it reinforces systems of oppression. This is the type of moral transgression that an IF model is committed to ameliorating. When civility conflicts with IF moral values, we should favour morality every time. So, while I deny that Trump’s language is unacceptable because it is uncivil, I believe that it is unacceptable because it enforces oppression. By drawing attention away from social conventions and towards systems of oppression, we position ourselves to better track and diagnose people’s roles in those systems, consistent with the aims of intersectional feminism. Conventions of civility simply distract us from the aims of an IF account – identifying and combating people’s roles in hierarchies of power. Moreover, civility norms are contaminated by western cultural schemas that depict members of oppressed groups as ‘angry,’ ‘intemperate,’ and ‘impure,’ and therefore incapable of functioning in ‘civil society’ or contributing positively to ‘western civilization.’ As we saw above, women, racialized minorities, and sexual minorities are more susceptible to being labelled as ‘uncivil’ than members of privileged groups, whose identities are not associated with western ‘incivility schemas.’ Thus, adopting a policy of strict civility may incite people to reinforce these

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schemas, or to lose track of more valuable moral ideals (i.e., equality, justice, non-domination). Rather than enforcing norms of civility, we should cultivate skepticism of the politics of civility and sensitivity to its role in asymmetrical power relations. A related objection is that incivility is responsible for the current polarization of political discourse in America, and if we were simply more civil, then we would get along better, just like we did in the ‘good old days.’ This was essentially Biden’s sentiment, and it has been soundly refuted as a spurious piece of historical romanticism. This romantic re-visioning of the past promotes the false belief that America is worse now than it was in the ’50s, when schools were racially segregated by law (not just convention), the ’80s, when men could legally rape their wives, and the ’90s, when gay people couldn’t get legally married. This romanticism goes hand in hand with the mystifying belief that we should ‘make America great again.’ In reality, there was no idyllic America in which everyone got along. In the past, the voices of racialized minorities were excluded from public conversations and political life, which allowed white people to speak respectfully to each other about ‘the race problem’ and ‘race relations’ in America, and to agree on racist policies behind closed doors. If American political life was ‘more civil’ in the past, this is only because it excluded minorities, enabling privileged people to talk amongst themselves about political problems that don’t directly affect them. We can see the same perverse form of in-group civility in the debates on abortion that took place Alabama, where restrictive abortion laws were introduce by an allmale group of politicians (Durkin & Benwell 2019). Those men, no doubt, respected each other more than the women whose rights they voted to revoke. Is it any wonder that people get along when debating political issues in which they have no personal stake? If debates amongst non-diverse groups are civil, cooperative, and consensus-generating, this doesn’t mean that they are knowledge-producing or democratic. In fact, civil debates in which privileged groups decide the fates of epistemic minorities are symptoms of democratic collapse and rising authoritarianism. Now, Biden’s claim doesn’t just suggest that American politics used to be more civil, but that civil segregationists were more virtuous than uncivil segregationists, which is just as problematic as his rosy view of America’s ‘civil past.’ Kamala Harris responded convincingly that this characterization of segregationists’ reputations is insulting to Black people. But aside from this, the claim raises questions about whether a civil racist is better than an uncivil racist. If civility is a virtue, as Calhoun avers, then a civil racist must be more virtuous (or less vicious) than an uncivil one. But the civil racist might use his civility to cooperate better with opponents and advance his racist agenda more effectively. On an IF analysis, the civil racist is actually worse (i.e., more harmful) than the uncivil one if he’s more effective at promoting hierarchies of power. So, civility can be a (consequentialist) vice and a target for blame in some people.

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4. Implications for Responsibility This chapter responded to the popular assumption that civility and consensus are epistemically and politically valuable. I deny that either ideal is valuable except insofar as it promotes IF aims. And I reject the assumption that norms of civility typically promote these aims in an asymmetrically structured society like ours. Because civility is a loaded concept associated with western schemas that privilege certain identities, civility is unlikely to serve intersectional feminist aims unless it is used with those aims in mind. Recent political and epistemic scholarship shows that calls for civility are often used, not to foster cooperation across social groups, but to exclude marginalized groups from the marketplace of ideas and to promote consensus amongst a small group of ideologues. I argue that we should reject the ideal of civility in favour of intersectional feminist aims, and should demand civility only when doing so would advance these aims. At the same time, we should recognize that civility is less politically and epistemically productive than epistemic friction through dissent and difference. In terms of holding people responsible, we should not treat civility as a constraint on apt blame, because civility norms favour the demographic traits and mannerisms of privileged groups. Therefore, we should not demand that people act ‘civilly’ within moral conversations. If someone’s behaviour is ‘uncivil’ by conventional standards, this isn’t a reason to condemn it, since social conventions are biased against oppressed groups. Indeed, ‘uncivil’ contributions to the responsibility system are perhaps the most valuable, as they can signal that a conversational context is so biased that equal cooperation and voluntary consensus are impossible. In such contexts, a refusal to cooperate is often a more constructive response than cooperation and negotiation under conditions of silencing and smothering.

References Anderson, E. (2006). The epistemology of democracy. Episteme, 3(1–2), 8–22. Baker, P., & Rogers, K. (2018, June 20). In Trump’s America, the conversation turns ugly and angry, starting at the top. Retrieved from: http://nymag.com/ intelligencer/2019/06/joe-biden-segregationist-controversy-what-you-need-toknow.html Berthold, D. (2010). Tidy whiteness: A genealogy of race, purity, and hygiene. Ethics & the Environment, 15(1), 1–26. Brescoll, V. L. (2016). Leading with their hearts? How gender stereotypes of emotion lead to biased evaluations of female leaders. The Leadership Quarterly, 27(3), 415–428. Calabrese, A. (2015). Liberalism’s disease: Civility above justice. European Journal of Communication, 30(5), 539–553. Calhoun, C. (2000). The virtue of civility. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 29(3), 251–275.

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Cmiel, K. (1991). Democratic eloquence: The fight over popular speech in nineteenth-century America. New York: University of California Press. Durkin, E., & Benwell, M. (2019, May 14). These 25 republicans-all white menjust voted to ban abortion in Alabama. The Guardian. Retrieved from: www. theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/14/alabama-abortion-ban-white-menrepublicans Elias, N. (2000). The civilizing process (revised edition). Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hartmann, M., & Kilgore, E. (2019). Joe Biden’s segregationist controversy: What you need to know. New York Magazine. Retrieved from: http://nymag. com/intelligencer/2019/06/joe-biden-segregationist-controversy-what-youneed-to-know.html Jacobs, T. (2018, July 6). For Black students, stereotyping starts early. Pacific Standard. Retrieved from: https://psmag.com/education/for-black-studentsstereotyping-starts-early Kingwell, M. (1995). A civil tongue: Justice, dialogue, and the politics of pluralism. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press. Locke, J. (1924). An essay concerning the true original, extent and end of civil government. In: Locke J (ed.) Two Treatises of Civil Government. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, pp. 117–224. Malcolm X. (1990). Malcolm X on Afro-American history. Pathfinder Press. McGeer, V. (2013). Civilizing blame. In Blame: Its nature and norms, eds. Coates & Tognazzini. Oxford University Press. McKenna, M. (2012). Conversation & responsibility. Oxford University Press. Medina, J. (2013). The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and the social imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Mill, J. S. (1859). On Liberty. London: Penguin Books, 1974. Strawson, P. F. (1963). Freedom and resentment. In Freedom and resentment and other essays. Routledge, 2008. Valenti, J. (2018, June 15). Spare me the calls for civility: President Trump deserves our rage. The Guardian. Retrieved from: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2018/jun/15/samantha-bee-robert-de-niro-trump-language?CMP=fb_us Young, H. B. (2005). Inheriting the criminalized black body: Race, gender, and slavery in ‘Eva’s Man’. African American Review, 39(3), 377–393. Zurn, C. F. (2013). Political civility: Another illusionistic ideal. Public Affairs Quarterly, 27(4), 341–368.

6

Third-Party-Addressing Blame

1. Introduction In this chapter, I will respond to Macnamara’s communicative model of blame (2015), on which blame has only one purpose: eliciting a response from a wrongdoer. On this view, perpetrator-bypassing uses of blame do not figure in blame’s telos. Macnamara espouses this perpetratoraddressing view because she takes blame to convey the emotions of resentment and indignation, and she takes these emotions to function to elicit uptake from a perpetrator by their very nature. In evolutionary terms, these emotions evolved to play this role in our interpersonal relationships, which is why they still exist in our motivational economy. In this chapter, I will deny that blame’s only communicative function is to elicit uptake from a perpetrator. I shall argue that perpetratorbypassing uses of blame (i.e., addressed to a third party) are just as essential as perpetrator-addressing blame from an intersectional feminist standpoint. Therefore, an IF model can’t treat communicating with a perpetrator as blame’s only aim. I suggest that Macnamara could accommodate this ‘non-positional’ understanding of blame by recognizing a broader range of emotions internal to blame – emotions that don’t function to elicit guilt from a wrongdoer. Such emotions could serve to motivate withdrawal from the perpetrator and consolidate epistemic peers around shared aims.

2. Objections to the Perpetrator-Addressing Model Colleen Macnamara (2015)1 defines blame as a communicative exchange between a victim and a perpetrator. More precisely, blame is analogous to a message that elicits a response from a wrongdoer. As a messageanalogue, blame has representational content – it represents the wrongdoer as having done something wrong, and it has a distinct function – it elicits uptake for its representational content from the blamee. These features (representational content and the elicitation of uptake from the blamee) are the defining features of blame as a communicative entity on

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Macnamara’s view. She advances this account, in part, to justify the widely held belief that blame is an “incipient form of communication” (Watson 2008: 265, cited in Macnamara 2015: 8), which can be addressed to the deceased and to public figures whom we may never meet. If blame is akin to a message, it can exist prior to, and independently of, being sent, similar to an email, a ‘No Trespassing’ sign, or a syllabus. Even if no one reads a teacher’s syllabus, the syllabus is still a message addressed to the class. Macnamara’s view, like mine, is a communicative-functionalist one. She sees blame, essentially, as an adaptation that continues to exist because it evolved to serve social-regulation functions in our Paleolithic ancestors. In our evolutionary past, blame “led to sincere acknowledgement of fault,” which improved “the health and strength of the moral community,” giving it a selective advantage; and this advantage, “in part, explains the existence of current tokens of resentment and indignation” internal to blame (Macnamara 2015: 222). This is essentially a teleological account on which blame has a specific aim, which it served in our evolutionary past, and continues to serve in present-day society because of its adaptive advantages. Macnamara admits that blame can be used for other (intentional) purposes (such as demanding recognition from the moral community, as per Angela Smith’s construal), but she denies that these other purposes are part of blame’s telos. Our intentional uses of blame don’t necessarily correlate with its evolutionary role and its essential function in interpersonal communication, and therefore don’t constitute part of its core telos. To illustrate how the functionalist view works, she compares blame to the human heart, which functions to pump blood through the body, and continues to exists in human anatomy because it performs this role well, facilitating good health: “Pumping blood is a function of hearts because past token hearts pumped blood, and this, at least in part, explains why current token hearts exist” (Macnamara 2015: 218). Macnamara contrasts this to the tongue, which (arguably) has two essential functions, each of which is independently sufficient to ensure its persistence: it “is both for eating and talking” (2015: 219). Macnamara thinks that blame is like the heart, not the tongue: it evolved to serve only one basic function, eliciting guilt from a wrongdoer, thereby facilitating communication between the two, and ensuring the health and strength of the moral community through guilt-eliciting transactions in general. Thus, blame is “invariably” addressed to a wrongdoer (Macnamara 2015: 223). While we can use blame for ‘ulterior’ purposes, this is akin to using a stapler as a door jamb. The stapler is meant to fasten papers together, not hold doors ajar, though I can intentionally put it to this non-teleological use, generally with substandard results (2015: 225). In contrast, I have described blame as, in a certain sense, more like the tongue than the heart. It can elicit uptake from perpetrators or it can elicit uptake from third parties, depending on the circumstances. In

136 Third-Party-Addressing Blame this way, blame has two distinct ‘functions’ inasmuch as it has two distinct epistemic targets. But on my view, these functions are ultimately rooted in a deeper telos – the realization and promotion of intersectional feminist aims. Since both ‘uses’ of blame can advance IF aims, both are equally valid. Neither is prior or ‘teleologically basic.’ One of my reasons for advancing this ‘epistemically promiscuous’ account of blame is that I agree with Kate Manne’s contention that a feminist methodology should be “opportunistic – or enterprising, depending on how you look at it” (2017: 30). Perpetrator-bypassing blame can serve to combat hierarchies of power and affirm counterhegemonic narratives within and through marginalized epistemic communities, thereby contributing to a ‘healthy’ intersectional feminist responsibility system. While Strawsonians (including Macnamara) tend to focus narrowly on blame’s role in structuring perpetrator-victim relationships so as to promote forgiveness and reconciliation, this ‘positional’ construal of blame’s telos ignores blame’s ameliorative role amongst epistemic peers and within epistemic subcultures – a role that can preserve counterhegemonic knowledge, eventually spurring epistemic transformations within mainstream society (with recent examples including #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo). This ‘subcultural’ communicative-epistemic function of blame (i.e., strengthening knowledge and confidence within marginalized epistemic communities) is just as important as blame’s function within victim-perpetrator relationships (e.g., promoting reconciliation), if not more important, since the consolidation of epistemic resources within marginalized epistemic communities is often a necessary precursor to the elicitation of uptake between differently situated people in an unequal society. To give an example: before the mass media was reporting on racial profiling by police, Black people were giving their children ‘the talk’ and politically mobilizing within their own communities, generating shared knowledge and vernacular conventions around racist law-enforcement norms with their epistemic peers. These subcultural moral conversations enabled these communities to disseminate their knowledge more broadly over time, and to elicit uptake for their moral testimony (to some extent) across multiple epistemic spaces. I’m not the first philosopher to argue that blame can function to seek uptake from a third party. Macnamara replies to similar lines of objection from Matthew Talbert and Angela Smith, who see blame’s ‘message’ or illocutionary force as potentially addressed to a third party. Talbert (2008, 2012) argues, in substance, that the perpetrator-addressing (positional) constraint silences victims of persecution, and doesn’t fit with their own construal of their aims as blamers. He advances the example of the prisoners of Nazi executioners who “surely blamed and condemned their murderers,” even though they didn’t expect to trigger guilt in “hardened” Nazis, or to effectuate a “last-moment conversion” in their executioners (2008: 532). Talbert offers a similar interpretation of the aims of enslaved African Americans, who surely blamed their enslavers as a way

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of “demonstrating and affirming [their own] self-worth” to each other, against their enslavers’ dehumanizing logic (2012: 106). Talbert associates these uses of blame with W. E. Dubois’ emancipatory philosophy, and cites Dubois’ exhortation to African Americans to respond to racial oppression with “unabated protest” in support of his view. Dubois didn’t just exhort African Americans to use blame to seek mercy and recognition from white supremacists, but also to protest the logic of white supremacy itself (Talbert 2012: 106). He calls this the ‘Duboisian protest model’ of blame, in contrast to the ‘Watsonian demand model.’ Angela Smith similarly argues that blame doesn’t always seek uptake from a wrongdoer, but can instead be addressed to a whole community to elicit uptake for certain values or norms. She argues that when we blame deceased Americans who participated in slavery, we should say that the desire [embodied in blame] in this case is for a continued acknowledgement, on the part of the moral community, of the horrible wrongs that were committed against particular members of our community in the past. (2007: 45) That is, in blaming the (now-deceased) enslavers, we are seeking acknowledgement from our contemporaries that these people’s participation in slavery was evil, and we should not repeat it. I believe that these Duboisian uses of blame are an essential part of blame’s communicative telos, because they contribute to the strength and health of a non-oppressive moral ecology. Without ‘Duboisian blame,’ the slave trade2 would have continued indefinitely, as oppressed communities would not have had the internal epistemic resources (shared vernaculars, experiential knowledge, epistemic courage) needed to mobilize against that system of oppression, and eventually dismantle it through collective acts of resistance and activism. And even if the slave trade had continued, a society in which oppressed communities blame their oppressors is morally healthier than one in which they submit to oppression. Duboisian blame, in other words, is a sign of health in a fundamentally epistemically deranged. Although Macnamara rejects the Duboisian defense of perpetratorbypassing blame, she actually agrees with Talbert and Smith that Nazi guards, enslavers, and other people with moral-epistemic deficits structured by identity prejudice, are eligible for blame, though she provides a Watsonian reason. On her view, ‘hardened Nazis’ and the like are eligible for blame because they’re the type of being capable of feeling guilt, even if they’re epistemically incapable of feeling guilty about executing Jewish people, or other minorities who don’t fit their schema of ‘a person.’ They’re eligible for blame because they can feel guilty about certain transgressions in certain circumstances – that is, because they’re neurotypical (‘normal’) human beings with guilt-realizing neural mechanisms. (That

138 Third-Party-Addressing Blame is, they’re capable of feeling guilt.) It doesn’t matter that these neural mechanisms are structured by identity prejudice; the fact that they have these mechanisms at all makes them eligible for blame (from anyone). In contrast, ‘psychopaths’ aren’t eligible for blame, according to Macnamara, because they’re incapable of feeling guilty under any circumstance. They don’t even have semi-functional guilt-realizing mechanisms (2015: 230). Thus, there is a “categorical difference” between Nazi executioners and psychopaths, as the former can feel guilt under some circumstances, while the latter are globally guilt-impaired (Macnamara 2015: 230). Following Austin’s theory of conversational felicity, Macnamara says that addressing blame to a psychopath would be like making a promise to a donkey: “Donkeys are not appropriate promisees. Blaming someone incapable of giving uptake to blame is like making a promise to a donkey, a misinvocation” (2015: 231). She admits that the difference between the Nazi and the psychopath is “conceptual not practical” (2015: 230, citing Watson 2008: 315), which means that it may be impossible to draw in practice, and it may also be irrelevant from the perspective of the blamer. Yet she still takes this to be the difference that matters, morally. If the Nazi can feel guilty about forgetting his mom’s birthday, then he is eligible for blame from the Jewish prisoner, even if he can’t recognize the Jewish prisoner as a human being. All that matters is the perpetrator’s possession of blame-realizing neural networks. Aside from being a version of ideal theory (which relies on purely conceptual distinctions), Macnamara’s account doesn’t adequately answer Talbert’s concern, which is that the Watsonian view ignores the standpoints and epistemic aims of oppressed people. It’s implausible to think that Jewish prisoners take a Nazi executioner’s neurological capacities to inform their own standing to blame. The only person who might care about this consideration, or is even in a position to evaluate it, is a clinical psychologist with training in psychopathy diagnostics. Does it matter to a Jewish prisoner that a Nazi executioner is ‘conceptually distinct’ from a psychopath because he’s capable of feeling guilt about things like forgetting his mom’s birthday? From the prisoner’s standpoint, what is most salient is that the Nazi is just as incapable as a psychopath of recognizing his humanity and right to life. The source of that incapacity – whether innate neurological deficits or identity prejudice – hardly matters to the person being executed. In any case, it’s worth noting that epistemic deficits like Nazi ideals are more harmful than neurological deficits, as prejudice can be transmitted through ideological channels while neurological deficits cannot: you don’t learn to have brain damage. But the fact that the Nazi is more harmful than the psychopath doesn’t make a difference on the Watsonian view (as described by Macnamara). Yet it makes good sense to think that a person’s impact on society should affect his eligibility for blame.

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Besides the fact that neurotypical ideologues are more effective at disseminating oppressive ideologies than people with brain damage, the distinction between the two may be impossible to draw in practice, especially if you’re a prisoner in a concentration camp. Is the Nazi executioner also a psychopath? Who knows? Even a clinical psychologist would have trouble drawing the relevant distinction. In any case, what matters from the prisoner’s standpoint is, surely, the Nazi’s propensity to see him as a lesser being, not his clinical status according to a psychological evaluation. If the Nazi turned out to be a psychopath as well as a racist, that wouldn’t erase the prisoner’s practical interest in protesting the Nazi’s role in racial hierarchies and genocidal transactions, which would give him a reason to blame him. In essence, Macnamara’s understanding of blame’s telos doesn’t capture the plurality of communicative roles that blame can play in asymmetrically structured societies, which extend beyond the roles that it can play in victim-perpetrator relationships. To bring these perpetratorindependent roles into relief, consider an example presented by Catriona Mackenzie (2018): in 1973, a woman brought her husband and three men to trial after the husband arranged a gang rape with his friends. The wife managed to prosecute the friends but not the husband, because the law didn’t recognize marital rape as a crime. Men were legally allowed to rape their wives. The wife clearly knew that her husband was in the wrong, which explains why she tried to prosecute him in spite of knowing that the law was on his side. But under the circumstances, she wasn’t able to elicit uptake from the court, or her husband. To use a variant of Fricker’s terminology, the dominant epistemic community lacked the shared hermeneutical resources needed to recognize marital rape as wrong, and to validate married women’s experiential testimony. Still, the wife knew that it was wrong, as did many of her contemporaries, who continued to pursue prosecution against their rapist husbands by whatever means they could, until they finally won the right to prosecute for marital rape in 1991 (UK News 2018). The point is that, prior to the criminalization of marital rape, wives did blame their rapist husbands, and even took them to court knowing that they didn’t have a legal case because of sexist legal conventions. The fact that the legal system didn’t recognize the validity of their moral testimony didn’t deter them from voicing it. But why did they publicly testify against their husbands when the dominant epistemic community was insensitive to their testimony? Surely part of the reason was to affirm their moral standing as women, for their own sake and for the sake of other women – their mothers, daughters, friends. To them, testifying against men in conditions of epistemic injustice wasn’t pointless, even if they couldn’t elicit uptake from the epistemic majority – those who controlled the public discourse around rape and gender relations. There were people who could relate to their situation, who supported them, and

140 Third-Party-Addressing Blame who depended on them. This was enough to incentive women to fight for equal standing under the law (as they still do). In general, when we blame people, it’s often for personal and ingroup reasons – to affirm our dignity and the dignity of our epistemic peers in conditions of oppression, to challenge pernicious stereotypes about our identities, to build epistemic confidence and shared vernaculars within our epistemic peer groups, and so on. Our reasons for blaming wrongdoers aren’t necessarily to extract guilt and forgiveness from them, nor to reconcile with them. If it were, then members of marginalized groups would not persist in testifying against transgressors in conditions of epistemic injustice that give the wrongdoer testimonial authority. But they always have and always will. People have always used blame to challenge systems of oppression and gain uptake for their moral testimony from epistemic peers, and because they have done this and succeeded, these ingroup blaming practices persist. They contribute to the strength and health of the moral ecology. In fact, these counterhegemonic blaming tokens are faint signs of vitality in an otherwise deranged moral ecosystem.

3. A Possible Reconciliation Even though I disagree with Macnamara’s understanding of blame’s telos, I share many assumptions in common with her, and it wouldn’t be difficult to reconcile our views. One way of doing this would be to expand the psychology of blame as understood by Macnamara, to include a different set of moral emotions. Macnamara’s understanding of blame is essentially Strawsonian in that it sees blame as a reactive attitude that conveys (primarily) resentment or indignation to an answerable wrongdoer. An ‘answerable wrongdoer,’ on Macnamara’s conception, is one capable of feeling guilt (conceptually, if not practically) in response to these emotions. This is the unique functional role of the reactive attitudes: they seek to trigger guilt in a wrongdoer. Partly because of this canonic Strawsonian understanding of the moral emotions, Macnamara rejects Talbert’s description of blame as serving two distinct functions: demanding recognition from a wrongdoer, which Talbert calls the “Watsonain demand model,” and protesting injustice, which Talbert calls the “Duboisian protest model” (in Macnamara 2015: 223). Blame can only function to elicit uptake from a wrongdoer on the standard Strawsonian understanding, because the reactive attitudes play this distinct role in moral psychology; thus, the Duboisian model is psychologically untenable. Using blame as a form of protest is like using a stapler as a door jamb – you can do it, but this usage isn’t consistent with the telos of this tool. But what if blame can include more than these ‘demanding’ emotions? In Chapter 4, I argued that blame can involve a broader range of emotions than Strawsonians tend to think, and these other emotions play a distinct (and uniquely valuable) role in moral psychology. If we grant the

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standard Strawsonian assumption on which resentment and indignation invariably function to elicit a response from an answerable wrongdoer, we can still acknowledge other emotional components of blame, which may play different roles in moral psychology and in ‘emotionally toned’ interpersonal relationships. In particular, these other emotions may play the roles ascribed to blame by Talbert and Smith: protesting injustice and seeking uptake from third parties (or the entire community). What emotions are capable of playing these roles? Drawing from Macalester Bell’s moral psychology, I have proposed that contempt, scorn, and other ‘withdrawal emotions,’ which characteristically motivate disengagement from a perpetrator, can serve to protest or condemn perpetrators’ roles in systems of power and domination. Holding a Nazi executioner in contempt is a case in point. Contempt can serve to rebuke the Nazi’s dehumanizing view of Jewish people (and other minorities), and to elicit uptake from epistemic peers, capable of endorsing the content of that rebuke. Thus, the withdrawal emotions can serve the Duboisian aims of self-affirmation and protest. And these uses of blame serve intersectional feminist aims. Macnamara doesn’t explicitly deny that blame can include negative withdrawal emotions – she simply doesn’t mention these emotions. But if we re-conceive of blame as capable of communicating the withdrawal emotions in response to people’s roles in hierarchies of power, then we can grant that blame can play more than one role in interpersonal communication. It can motivate communicative engagement with a perpetrator, or it can motivate communicative withdrawal from the perpetrator, and incite non-participatory responses of avoidance and management. If we are committed to the aim of ameliorating injustice and oppression, then we ought to see both roles – communicating with perpetrators and withdrawing from perpetrators – as equally important, given that withdrawal and protest may be the only, or the best, way of ameliorating oppression in asymmetrical epistemic contexts. If a Nazi executioner is insensitive to the moral claims of a Jewish prisoner, then protest-blame is the only option available to the person, and as the only option, it’s the best option – certainly better than silence and resignation. A society in which people use blame to protest oppression is better than one that lacks protest-blame, even if protest-blame doesn’t succeed in dismantling oppressive structures. This is because the protest-involving society at least contains emancipatory knowledge – knowledge that presents an alternative to oppressive hegemonies. Without this knowledge, the society is hopeless. In this connection, note that Francesca Manne, a ballet dancer imprisoned at Auschwitz in the 1940s, managed to kill her Nazi guards on the way to the gas chamber by seducing them and then shooting them with their own guns. Although she was ultimately killed, she is still celebrated for her “brave act of resistance” (Cunning 2018). For Manne, protest

142 Third-Party-Addressing Blame was the only option, and therefore the best option – better than going quietly to the gas chamber. Even though she didn’t manage to effectuate a ‘last-minute conversion’ in her executioners, her act of resistance had interpersonal value, and continues to have interpersonal value to this day – it inspires contemporary activists. Acts of resistance like this are epistemically valuable because they give rise to counterhegemonic narratives that inspire others to resist their own oppression. They inspire hope in the face of the bleakest oppression. Even if a particular act of resistance doesn’t convert anyone or overthrow any oppressive regimes, it contributes positively to society’s social imaginary. In this way, ameliorative uses of blame are epistemically valuable even if they don’t end oppression, because they give rise to emancipatory narratives, they inspire hope, and they enable survival.

Notes 1. This argument is distinct from Macnamara’s (2013) argument, which I recruited earlier to support an objection to the positional view. Here, I focus exclusively on her 2015 argument. 2. I recognize that slavery still exists today, but I am speaking here of the European slave trade as it functioned at its peak.

References Cunning, D. (2018, Jan 4). The Polish ballerina who shot Nazis on her way to the gas chamber. Vice: Identity. Retrieved from: www.vice.com/en_us/article/ a3n7ja/the-polish-ballerina-who-shot-nazis-on-her-way-to-the-gas-chamber Mackenzie, C. (2018). Moral responsibility and the social dynamics of power and oppression. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Macnamara, C. (2015). Blame, communication, and morally responsible agency. In The nature of moral responsibility, eds. Clarke et al. Oxford University Press. ———. (2013). Taking demands out of blame. In Blame: Its nature and norms, eds. Coates & Tognazzini. Oxford University Press. Manne, K. (2017). Down girl: The logic of misogyny. Oxford University Press. Smith, A. M. (2007). On being responsible and holding responsible. The Journal of Ethics, 11(4), 465–484. Talbert, M. (2012). Moral competence, moral blame, and protest. The Journal of Ethics, 16(1), 89–109. ———. (2008). Blame and responsiveness to moral reasons: Are psychopaths blameworthy? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 89(4), 516–535. UK News. (2018, Dec 6). When did marital rape become a crime? UK News: The Week. Retrieved from: www.theweek.co.uk/98330/when-did-marital-rapebecome-a-crime Watson, G. (2008). Responsibility and the limits of evil: Variations on a Strawsonian theme. In Free will and reactive attitudes (pp. 127–154). Routledge.

7

Blaming Cognition

1. Introduction Malle et al. (2014), like Macnamara, describe blame as an interpersonal practice that evolved in early ancestral conditions to regulate behaviour. They say that blame “regulates individual behaviours so that they come in line with community interests and sustain social relations” (Malle et al. 2014: 148). More specifically, blame motivates people to act “in accordance with social expectations for sharing (e.g., food), reciprocity, self-control (e.g., politeness, modesty), and recognition of others’ rights and vulnerabilities” (ibid.). Malle et al. don’t just offer an evolutionary (functionalist) account of blame as an interpersonal practice, though: they offer a functionalist account of blaming cognition. They say that blame as an interpersonal practice is supported by “social cognition – the suite of concepts and processes that allow people to make sense of human judgment” (2014: 148). Blaming cognition involves a judgment about a person’s moral qualities, based on considerations about a set of specific blame-relevant concepts. These concepts are: (a) event detection, (b) agent causality, (c) intentionality, (d) reasons, (e) obligation, and (f) capacity. Malle et al. call this the ‘Path model’ because it represents blaming judgments as the result of the brain processing information about relevant concepts through a paradigmatic sequence of paths. Specifically, on the Path model, blame involves the processing of concepts in the following sequence: (a) the blamer detects that an event or outcome violated a norm; (b) the blamer evaluates whether an agent caused the event; if yes, the blamer (c) judges whether the agent brought about the event intentionally; if yes, the blamer (d) considers the agent’s reasons for acting; if no, the blamer (e) considers whether the agent violated an obligation to prevent the event from occurring; if yes, the blamer (f) considers whether the agent had the capacity to prevent the event from occurring. This information-processing sequence is shown in the following graph:

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Figure 7.1 Path Model.

The Path model thus provides a cognitive model of blame. It involves the cognitive processing of information over relevant concepts, and therefore doesn’t chart any emotional inputs. That said, the authors clarify that “the focus on information processing in no way denies the role of affect and emotion in blame or the possibility of motivated reasoning” (2014: 151). On the contrary, the path model “provides ‘locations’ for potential interactions between emotions and pertinent information processes” (2014: 166). Emotions can, perhaps, be charted into the sequence by someone else in the future. To maintain the integrity of the Path model, however, these emotional and other non-cognitive states must enter the Path system as inputs that drive information-processing down Path’s conceptual nodes. Non-cognitive inputs (emotions, implicit motivations) that generate deviant pathways, or biased judgments, undermine the predictive value of Path, which is designed to accurately predict the results of sequential processing over objectively blame-relevant concepts, and to model ordinary moral reasoning as evidence-based computing. If deviant paths or non-sequential judgments emerge, then Path’s construct validity is called into question. It might not actually be tracking ordinary moral reasoning. In what follows, I will raise some objections to Path’s core assumptions and predictive validity. Specifically, I will use research on affect and implicit bias to reinforce and expand on existing criticisms of Path (viz., Goodwin 2014; Niemi & Young 2014). I will argue that blame

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should not be understood as paradigmatically cognitive (section 2.1); that implicit biases produce deviant causal pathways and ‘blame-early’ judgments that, by the authors’ own lights, pose a threat to Path’s validity – yet these pathways and judgments are paradigmatic blaming sequences (section 2.2); and that Path represents an idealization of blame because it is informed by the results of experiments in which cool-headed subjects respond to impersonal scenarios, which don’t resemble the ordinary blaming situations that we encounter in real life (in an unequal society) (section 2.3). On the basis of these arguments, I show that the Path model isn’t a valid construct because it involves idealizations that don’t square with our lived experiences in conditions of inequality and oppression.

2. Objections 2.1. Affect While Malle et al. admit that affect plays a characteristic role in blaming cognition, they say that there is insufficient evidence to chart the role of affect in the Path system. They nonetheless provide a few speculative examples of affect-laden blame: being upset at the sight of an accident may lead to sharpened information acquisition for possible agent causality, admiring an agent’s prosocial character may preset the value of reasons to be justified, and a happy mood may lower one’s threshold of evidence for all components. (2014: 166) Though they agree with Victoria McGeer that blame canonically involves emotions, they stipulate that paradigmatic blaming responses are more cognitive than emotional (Malle et al. 2014: 171). Specifically, paradigmatic blame is “affective enough to signal the severity of the offense (McGeer 2013), but favor[s] thought over emotional intensity” (Malle et al. 2014: 171, emphasis mine). To distinguish paradigmatic blame judgments form non-blame moral judgments (e.g., that someone is disgusting), the authors use the results of surveys in which subjects judged blame according to various concepts, and found blame to be paradigmatically “rational, calm, [and] constructive,” as opposed to emotional or biased (ibid). Cognitive blame is modelled on this intuitive conception of blame, which is assumed to be more effective at regulating social behaviour “in accordance with social expectations for sharing . . . reciprocity, selfcontrol . . . and recognition of others’ rights and vulnerabilities” (Malle et al. 2014: 148). ‘Rational blame’ functions to reliably enhance social cooperation and equality, as per the role that blame played in our evolutionary past.

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In previous chapters, we explored why the Aristotelian, ‘rational’ model of civility is inadequate. One reason is that, in conditions of epistemic injustice, this model serves to epistemically marginalize and exclude identities that are stereotyped as ‘highly emotional’ (e.g., women and African Americans). While Path may admit emotional blame as a ‘nonparadigmatic’ case, this designation suggests that emotional blame is a secondary and defective case, which falls short of the ideal of ‘rational, calm, constructive’ criticism. Hence, the Aristotelian ideal of rationality, when enforced in oppressive conditions, is likely to marginalize women and POC, who are stereotyped as ‘emotional,’ ‘angry,’ and ‘intemperate.’ Their blame will be taken as a defective or, at best, secondary case of moral testimony. A second problem is that emotional blame isn’t necessarily less ‘constructive’ than unemotional blame in conditions of inequality. Whether it is constructive or not depends on the circumstances. High emotionality is an appropriate and informative response to cultural persecution, such as genocide or gender-based violence. To witness these offenses unemotionally in full understanding of their import would be almost inhuman – not at all what we would expect from interpersonal animals attached to their peers, communities, and cultural traditions. Highly emotional blaming responses in the face of persecution are justified by the circumstances, and are constructive insofar as they disseminate information about the actual magnitude of the offense. To deny the validity of highly emotional blame in conditions of systemic oppression is to deny uptake to oppressed people’s moral testimony, thereby further marginalizing them within the responsibility system. It makes it harder for them to command uptake for their moral testimony in the face of persecution, which is construed as emotional-not-rational. Of course, emotional blame can be unjust. For instance, someone might ‘blame’ his intimate partner for coming home late by yelling misogynistic slurs at her at the top of his lungs, thereby frightening her into submission. But this is a defective case of blame not because it is ‘too emotional,’ but because it uses emotional manipulation to enforce relations of patriarchal oppression. The emotional content of the sexist’s blaming judgment is inapt because it tracks and enforces relations of patriarchal domination, not because it is emotional per se. Rather than defining blame as paradigmatically low in emotionality, it is more consistent with intersectional feminism to see blame as appropriate to the extent that its emotional contents fit with the target’s blame-relevant features, specifically the target’s investments in systems of oppression. This ‘emotion fittingness’ criterion allows us to acknowledge that high emotionality is appropriate (if not obligatory) in response to systemic norm violations such as the state-sanctioned genocide of Indigenous women, but inappropriate in response to petty (non-systemic) norm violations such as someone forgetting about a friend’s birthday party. In the latter case, rage and contempt would be too strong, whereas in the

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former case, rage (as Rachel Flowers has argued) and contempt (consistent with Bell’s account) are eminently appropriate, as well as eminently deserving of uptake. The emotion-fittingness criterion refuses to see emotionality as intrinsically ‘irrational,’ but instead takes its reasonableness to be a function of the context. In this way, the model is context-specific and concrete as opposed to abstract and conceptual. In cases of cultural persecution, unemotional blame would be quite unreasonable, as would the demand that people respond to cultural oppression unemotionally. This constraint would amount to treating cultural genocide as morally equivalent to being stood up by a friend. These kinds of false equivalencies only reinforce existing asymmetries of power in the responsibility system. As we saw in the introduction, not all misperceptions of the situation are equally problematic. An innocent mistake – for example, blaming an innocent person in bad lighting conditions – isn’t nearly as problematic as blaming an innocent person because of identity prejudice. This is because identity prejudice plays a generally corrosive role in the moral ecology. Notably, Malle et al. admit that biases can enter the Path system, and they explicitly discuss the role of “motivational biases,” such as outcome bias and character bias, in the Path system (2014: 160). However, they say that these biases don’t play a systematic role in blaming cognition. As relatively rational animals, we make these mistakes infrequently, not on a regular basis. Unfortunately, the authors’ treatment of bias in general downplays the systematicity of bias in blaming cognition – an oversight that I shall address in the next section. 2.2. Motivational Bias Malle et al. concede that blaming cognition is “fallible” and doesn’t always produce a sound blaming judgment (2014: 152). That said, blame is “systematic” in that it “emerges from processing of predictable classes of information that stand in conceptual relations to one another” (ibid.). On the basis of informational inputs, one can reliably predict a certain blame judgment. The authors discuss two (ostensible) types of ‘motivational bias’ that challenge the predictive value and ecological validity of the Path model. The first is outcome bias, in which worse outcomes bias blamers in favour of harsher blame, and the second is character bias, in which unlikable character traits bias blamers in favour of harsher blame. These biases are demonstrated in a set of experiments discussed and ultimately disputed by the authors. a. Outcome Bias Outcome bias is (allegedly) demonstrated in an experiment in which participants are given a scenario in which a homeowner hears an intruder

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going through his daughter’s drawer, enters the daughter’s room, and fatally shoots the intruder (Alicke & Davis 1989; Mazzocco et al. 2004). The intruder’s identity is varied across two trials. In the first trial, participants are told that the intruder is a burglar with a criminal record; in the second trial, participants are told that the intruder is the daughter’s boyfriend. The participants in the second trial blame the intruder more than the participants in the first trial, which seems to show that worse outcomes (in this case, the killing of the boyfriend) bias people in favour of harsher blaming judgments. If the discrepancy between the judgments is truly a matter of outcome bias, then, seemingly, bias is a systemic feature of blaming cognition, which is a threat to Path’s validity. Malle et al. counter that these judgments weren’t generated by outcome bias, but were instead prompted by evidence of negligence in the homeowner (the homeowner should have locked the door, purchased an alarm system, etc.), which prompted a judgment that the homeowner had the capacity to prevent the bad outcome, and therefore deserves blame on that basis. Thus, the blaming judgment is, in fact, sequential and predicted by Path’s sequences. b. Character Bias Character bias is (allegedly) demonstrated in an experiment in which participants are given a scenario in which a driver gets into an accident while speeding. In this experiment, the driver’s characteristics are varied across two trials. In the first trial, the participants are told that the driver was speeding ‘in order to hide his cocaine;’ in the second trial, the participants are told that the driver was speeding ‘in order to hide a gift for his parents’ (Alicke 1992). The first group of participants blame the driver more than the second group, which seems to show that information about character (good versus bad) biases people’s judgments of blame severity. Malle et al. counter that the driver’s “goals . . . may provide preventability [and therefore capacity] information: for example, that the drughiding agent was driving faster, was more attentive, and more careless than the gift-hiding agent” (2014: 163). Thus, Malle et al. reinterpret the participants’ severity judgments as unbiased responses to information about capacity. c. Implicit Bias Malle et al. are intent on re-describing the participants’ judgments as responses to concepts in the Path model (e.g., capacity) because Path can’t explain the role of outcome bias and character bias in blaming cognition, since these biases are not concepts represented in the Path sequence, and

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they cause the blamer’s judgment to deviate from the sequential paths. Thus, if these biases are systemic factors in judgments of blameworthiness, Path can’t explain or predict them. Such biases, if charted in Path, would produce ‘deviant pathways’ that depart from the paradigmatic sequence, and Path wouldn’t be able to predict their outcomes. Malle et al. offer alternative explanations for outcome and character bias, but it is debatable whether these explanations are tenable. And even if they are, there are other biases that Path can’t so easily predict. For example, it’s hard to reinterpret racist blame as the result of sequential processing in Path, since racial bias can’t be represented in the Path sequence, and it would cause the blamer’s judgment to depart from the charted sequential paths. To see this, consider an experiment on racially biased blame. Participants were presented with a scenario in which a man had shot and killed an unarmed victim, but they were given three different racial characterizations of the shooter: white, stereotypically Black, and counterstereotypically Black (Dukes & Gaither 2017). The racial characteristics were manipulated by giving shooters different names (e.g., Darnell Jackson as a stereotypically Black name, Neil Schwartz as a stereotypically White name) as well as different racial group memberships (Black, white). Overall, the participants judged white shooters to be less blameworthy than counterstereotypical Black shooters, and they judged counterstereotypical Black shooters to be less blameworthy than stereotypical Black shooters. Capacity and preventability – the alternative explanations given for outcome bias and character bias – are not plausible alternative explanations for the discrepancy in blame severity across shooters with different racial characteristics, because the racial characteristics of the shooter don’t provide any information about the shooter’s ability to avoid committing the shooting, or the victim’s capacity to avoid being shot. The most plausible interpretation of the data is that the judgments of blame severity are (potentially implicit) responses to the shooter’s racial characteristics, not a tacit judgment of shooter capacity or outcome preventability. It is also difficult to square sexist blaming judgments with the Path model. As Laura Niemi and Liane Young observe, “assigning some degree of blame to rape victims is not uncommon” (2014: 230, e.g., Bieneck & Krahe 2011; Catellani et al. 2004; Krahe et al. 2007). These victim-blaming judgments are influenced by (often implicit) gender bias. In studies on attitudes towards rape victims, participants rate sexual crime victims as more contaminated and less injured than nonsexual crime victims, and these attitudes correlate with high levels of “ambivalent sexism, moral valuation of purity norms, and male gender” in the blamer (Niemi & Young 2014: 232). Niemi and Young infer that the tendency to blame sexual crime victims could potentially be explained by a victim-focus model, in which blamers detect a norm violation in the victim, and then follow a Path sequence for that person. However, they also provide an

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alternative explanation on which victim-blamers are ideologically motivated to blame the victim. More precisely, blamers have a “desire to blame the victim in service of sexism or the maintenance of purity and authority norms” (2014: 232), prior to outputting the blame judgment. If this is the correct explanation, it is a genuine case of motivated cognition, which cannot be explained by the Path model. Malle et al. specify that Path does not accommodate “extraevidential” considerations such as blamer bias, which is one of their reasons for rejecting the standard interpretation of outcome-bias experiments (2014: 161–162). These ‘extraevidential considerations’ (e.g., motivational bias) trigger deviant pathways that the Path model can’t explain or predict. Malle et al. reinterpret outcome bias by substituting ‘evidential considerations’ (negligence, capacity) for ‘nonevidential’ ones (outcome, character), thereby restoring Path’s predictive validity, but it is much harder to do this for victim-blaming judgments (or racially biased judgments). This is because the research on victim-blaming shows that people high in gender bias tend to judge rape victims as more blameworthy than victims of other violent crimes. To explain away the role of gender bias in judgments about rape victims would amount to distorting the reality of these judgments and misrepresent them as ‘rational’ responses to relevant evidence. The much more reasonable explanation is that victim-blamers are prejudiced against women. Even if cultural biases don’t affect every single blame judgment we make, there’s good reason to think that they play a systematic role in blame judgments, since biased moral judgments are normal, not aberrant. The experiments on racially biased blame and gender-biased blame don’t, in fact, show that these judgments are rare and aberrant, but that they’re ordinary and pervasive. They are more likely to occur in people higher in racial bias and gender bias, to be sure, but people with these biases are not abnormal moral delinquents: they’re normal members of an unequal society. If Path can’t model the biased judgments of ordinary people, then its predictive validity is more limited than Malle et al. would like to admit. Path is modelling the blaming judgments of ‘rational’ people, not ordinary members of society. ***** Notably, there are two ways in which bias can influence blame. It can give rise to a false judgment of blame, or it can increase the severity of a valid judgment of blame. The second example is illustrated in the racial bias experiment, in which participants judged the stereotypical Black shooter to be especially blameworthy for a legitimate norm violation (murder). That said, in our society, racial bias also produces completely false judgments of blame, such as the famous false indictment of the Central Park Five, later overturned in court. Path doesn’t capture the role of implicit bias in either false blaming judgments or disproportionate blaming judgment.

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On the second score, Geoffrey P. Goodwin argues that Path may, in fact, be capable of explaining excessive blame severity in various non-deviant ways, such as by taking into account the number of norms violated, the magnitude of each norm violation, and the intentions of the norm violator (2014: 216). But this explanation doesn’t help us with the racial bias experiment, because none of these considerations were relevant. There’s no indication that the white shooter and the Black shooter committed different violations, committed different magnitudes of violation, or acted on different intentions. The only discernable differences between the two shooters were their names and explicit racial group memberships. The blaming of sexual crime victims is an example of purely false blame, not simply disproportionate blame. This example is also difficult to reconcile with the Path model, though Niemi and Young suggest it could be explained by an alternate ‘victim-focus Path sequence.’ However, the balance of evidence supports a ‘motivated bias’ explanation. Research shows that people who blame sexual crime victims have a preexisting disposition to ascribe causality to victims, and a preexisting disposition to associate sexual crime victims with contamination (Niemi & Young 2014: 231). These preexisting dispositions naturally preempt motivated judgments of victim-blame. Thus, victim-blaming judgments correspond to what Malle et al. call a “blame early model,” in which blame “occurs rapidly and automatically, in a way that might bias later assessments of causation or intention” (Goodwin 2014: 217). In contrast, Path is presented as a ‘blame-late model,’ on which blame judgments are the result of sequential processing over evidential information, unaffected by prior (extra-evidential) inputs. The sequence of processing in Path can be fast and automatic or slow and deliberate, but it invariably involves the sequential processing of “criteria information about causality, intentionality, and mental states” (Malle et al. 2014: 166). As an example of a blame-late alternative, Malle et al. cite Jonathan Haidt’s social intuition model, on which blame is generated non-sequentially on the basis of ‘extra-evidential’ heuristics. An example of an intuitive moral judgment is the commonly held judgment that incest is wrong, seemingly made on the basis of implicit heuristics (Haidt 2001). When blame is intuitive, the blamer can’t explain why the transgression is wrong, resulting in ‘moral dumbfounding.’ If this is how blame usually works, then the Path model won’t accurately predict most blaming judgments, as they will be based on non-sequential, extra-evidential inputs (e.g., heuristics). To preempt this worry, Malle et al. reinterpret ‘intuitive blame’ as nonblame moral judgments, because they (allegedly) involve a judgment about the wrongness of an event, not a judgment about a person’s blameworthiness. So, the intuitive judgments studied by Haidt are about incest, a type of event, not people who commit incest. This reinterpretation isn’t very plausible, because judgments about the wrongness of incest entail or imply judgments about the blameworthiness of people who commit

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incest, and seem to rely on similar heuristics (about the wrongness of incest and the badness of incestuous people). Similarly, judgments about the wrongness of murder involve judgments about the badness of people who commit murder. In cases of biased blame, these judgments appear to involve preexisting biases against certain identities (racialized minorities). They are not simply the result of unbiased processing over sequential information, nor are they simply judgments about events. Goodwin identifies other cases of ostensible blame-late judgments, which similarly call into question Path’s validity. In one experiment, participants were asked to read about a man named Norton1 who stores flammable oxygen tanks in his garden shed, resulting in a fatal explosion when someone lights a cigarette outside. Norton’s reasons are varied across three trials, from a laudatory reason to a neutral reason to a culpable reason. Malle et al. say that Path predicts that participants will attribute more blame to a protagonist with culpable motives rather than innocent motives. But what they “pass over,” says Goodwin, is the fact that the effect of a culpable motive was also observed on judgments of Norton’s causal contribution to the outcome, his intentionality in producing that outcome, and his responsibility for it. These results fit blame early models much better than they do the Path Model. (2014: 218) More precisely, blamers’ preexisting values appear to influence every stage of their deliberation about Norton’s blameworthiness. Besides this, it’s “not at all obvious” that storing oxygen tanks in one’s shed is actually culpable, which calls into question the blame-late interpretation on which the participants’ blaming judgments were responses to Norton’s culpability, as opposed to effects of outcome bias (Goodwin 2014: 218). Similar considerations extend to racist and sexist blame: these judgments appear to be influenced by preexisting biases that produce blame-first judgments – judgments that can’t be predicted by the Path model. They can’t be adequately explained by appeal to concepts within the Path model. Malle et al. might object that these cases of motivated blame and preempted blame aren’t paradigmatic cases. But what is the measure of ‘paradigmaticality’? If most participants judged the (counterstereotypical and stereotypical) Black shooters to be more blameworthy than the white shooter, then why aren’t these biased blaming judgments the ‘paradigm case’? If paradigmaticality is a measure of typicality, then biased blame is paradigmatic. The above objections to Path highlight that Path is an ideal model of blaming cognition, which abstracts away from real-world cognitive processing involving motivated biases and heuristics. Ordinary humans living in conditions of social injustice have motivated biases, and their blaming cognition is influenced by those biases, systematically. These

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inputs should appear in a predictively and ecologically valid model of blaming cognition. In the next section, I will discuss some problems with Malle et al.’s derivation of Path from experimental data. The construction of Path based on experimental results is one of the reasons why it doesn’t map blaming judgments as they occur in a natural ecology. 2.3. Idealizations The Path sequence is informed by participants’ responses to norm-violating events. In one paradigm, participants were shown a norm-violating event and had an opportunity to gather information by asking questions. In another paradigm, participants were offered different types of information and indicated whether they wanted the information offered. In both paradigms, participants tended to gather information in the order represented in the Path sequence. These information-sequence preferences informed the construction of Path (Malle et al. 2014: 156). Because of how they are conducted, these tests measure people’s explicit preferences for specific types of information when choosing under nonstressful conditions. Therefore, they don’t necessarily map blaming cognition as it actually occurs in the real world. More precisely, the tests don’t measure subjects’ implicit attitudes and don’t include factors that could potentially trigger blame-first judgments such as ambivalent sexism and racial bias. As a result, Path should be seen as a model of explicit sequential reasoning in response to abstract problems, not the kind of reasoning that takes place under ordinary circumstances. There is also little reason to think that unemotional sequential processing represents real-world blaming practices. On the contrary, it’s reasonable to assume that emotions, as well as implicit biases, intuitions, heuristics, and other ‘extra-evidential’ inputs, play a systematic role in real-world blame, and that they tend to give rise to biased blaming judgments (e.g., victim-blaming, harsher blame towards Black protagonists). Participants in experimental conditions, moreover, had time to gather information in a calm and collected manner. Yet Malle et al. acknowledge that the use of heuristics and other ‘shortcuts’ are common in taxing and stressful situations, and these ‘shortcuts’ tend to produce blame-first judgments (2014: 157). Because real-world blame is often produced under taxing and time-constrained situations, it probably differs substantially from blaming judgments produced in a lab. Another idealization attributable to Malle. et al. (also shared by McGeer and Macnamara) is the assumption that blame serves roughly the same functions in modern western society as it did in hunter-gather societies (facilitating cooperation, reciprocity, etc.), even though these two human ecologies could hardly be more dissimilar (according to the standard view in responsibility theory). Malle et al. provide an evolutionary

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story on which blame originated in hunter-gatherer societies, which were “highly egalitarian” and interdependent, and in which “everyone knew each other, and maintaining relationships was critical to survival of the individual and the group” (2014: 172). In these conditions of relative equality, blame functioned to promote “sharing,” “reciprocity,” “selfcontrol,” and reciprocal recognition of “people’s rights and vulnerabilities” (2014: 148), thereby strengthening the community. (This seems to be the accepted view amongst responsibility theorists.) Of course, contemporary society is nothing like the hunter-gatherer societies that Malle et al.’s describe, so we shouldn’t expect blame to play the same relationship-structuring roles that it did in those societies. America is one of the most socioeconomically unequal cultures in the post-industrial world; the richest three citizens own more wealth than the bottom 50% (Kirsch 2017). And these inequalities are not equally distributed across social groups: historically disenfranchised groups are particularly disadvantaged due to economic inequalities like the racial wealth gap and the gender pay gap. Because of these inequalities, historically disenfranchised groups are particularly susceptible to false and disproportionate blaming judgments, generated on the basis of culturally normative biases and heuristics. These blame-first judgments are not rare and aberrational, but the order of the day. In America, blame doesn’t function to promote sharing, reciprocity, and self-control, but instead reinforces entrenched asymmetries of power, as well as the identity prejudices and cultural myths that support them. So, blame in our society serves quite different functions than blame in the hunter-gatherer societies in which it evolved – indeed, exactly the opposite functions, viz., the reproduction of identity prejudice and extreme social inequality. An ecologically valid theory of blame (which describes blame as it operates in our actual ecological conditions) should incorporate the implicit and explicit biases that produce the inegalitarian blaming patterns that structure our society. To model blaming cognition in our society on the basis of blame’s role in relatively egalitarian and interdependent huntergatherer societies is to erase the substantive differences between these two ecologies, particularly the fact that one society distributes resources fairly equally, while the other allows three men to control more wealth than half the country. If three people had hoarded the majority of the community’s resource in a pre-agrarian society, this would have destroyed the community. The differences between social dynamics in pre-agrarian societies and social dynamics in the neoliberal state (built on a foundation of genocide and slavery) translate into differences in how blame generally functions in these two moral ecologies. Having said this, Malle et al. have developed an interesting and informative model of blaming cognition – one that accurately maps explicit reasoning in non-stressful conditions, in which demographic attributes are not salient. This is how blame should work, and perhaps would work

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in a more egalitarian society – one in which prejudice is minimized and reasons for outrage are reduced. This is surely the kind of blame that we want to scaffold through social change.

3. Concluding Remarks I have argued that blaming cognition is influenced by emotion and identity prejudice in systematic ways. The Path model, which represents blame as the result of evidence-based information-processing over sequences of concepts, neglects the systematic role of emotion and bias in ordinary blaming cognition. Thus, Path offers an account of ideal blame, not blame as it is actually produced in ordinary people’s brains. By taking note of the distorting factors in ordinary blaming cognition, we position ourselves to better understand and ameliorate those biases. We can use bias-reducing strategies such as intergroup contact and implementation intentions to reduce the role of biases in our own cognition, and we can use political strategies such as protest to reduce the role of prejudice in social systems and institutions.

Note 1. I’m not sure why all of the non-rape-related experiments involve male protagonists, but it’s dismaying to say the least.

References Alicke, M. D. (1992). Culpable causation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 368–378. Alicke, M. D., & Davis, T. L. (1989). The role of a posteriori victim information in judgments of blame and sanction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 362–377. Bieneck, S., & Krahe, B. (2011). Blaming the victim and exonerating the perpetrator in cases of rape and robbery: Is there a double standard? Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 26, 1785–1797. Catellani, P., Alberici, A. I., & Milesi, P. (2004). Counterfactual thinking and stereotypes: The nonconformity effect. European Journal of Social Psychology, 34, 421–436. Dukes, K. N., & Gaither, S. E. (2017). Black racial stereotypes and victim blaming: Implications for media coverage and criminal proceedings in cases of police violence against racial and ethnic minorities. Journal of Social Issues, 73(4), 789–807. Goodwin, G. P. (2014). How complete is the path model of blame? Psychological Inquiry, 25(2), 215–221. Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814. Kirsch, N. (2017, Nov 9). The richest 3 Americans hold more wealth than bottom 50% of the country, study finds. Forbes. Retrieved from: www.forbes.

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com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-richest-americans-hold-more-wealththan-bottom-50-of-country-study-finds/#16bd44c03cf8 Krahe, B., Temkin, J., & Bieneck, S. (2007). Schema-driven information processing in judgments about rape. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 21, 601–619. Malle, B. F., Guglielmo, S., & Monroe, A. E. (2014). A theory of blame. Psychological Inquiry, 25(2), 147–186. Mazzocco, P. J., Alicke, M. D., & Davis, T. L. (2004). On the robustness of outcome bias: No constraint by prior culpability. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 26, 131–146. McGeer, V. (2013). Civilizing blame. In Blame: Its nature and norms, eds. Coates & Tognazzini. Oxford University Press. Niemi, L., & Young, L. (2014). Blaming the victim in the case of rape. Psychological Inquiry, 25(2), 230–233.

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Responsibility and Conversation

1. Introduction: Responsibility as a Non-Ideal Conversational Practice Like Macnamara and McKenna, I subscribe to a communicative view of blame on which blame is part of a system of communicative interactions. What I think communication theorists have not adequately addressed is the role that asymmetries of power play in our moral conversations. Notably, many moral conversations take place in institutional settings, in which historically disenfranchised groups are generally underrepresented and marginalized. These ‘institutional conversations’ are structured by the same inequalities and exclusions as the institutions within which they take place. Often, members of underrepresented groups are treated as worthy of resentment or disapprobation only because of identity prejudice, in which case they suffer penalties that they don’t deserve (e.g., silencing, dismissal); in other cases, members of historically disenfranchised groups are treated as ‘insufficiently responsible’ to participate in a given institution in the first place. In the latter case, the (prejudiced) exclusion of the person conveys, even if it does not explicitly articulate, an attitude of contempt, disdain, or disrespect. Through these biased displays of resentment, disapprobation, contempt, scorn, and disrespect, blame is tilted against members of oppressed groups within institutional conversations. The focus of the current chapter will be ‘vocal discrimination,’ or discrimination against certain ‘vocal identities.’ Members of marginalized groups are associated with certain vernacular, lexical, and tonal patterns, which together amount to a kind of vocal fingerprint or ‘vocal identity.’ Historically marginalized groups are affiliated with vocal identities that are relatively culturally disvalued due to identity prejudice. As a result, speakers with disvalued voices will be marginalized in moral conversations. I call this ‘vocal bias.’ In this chapter, I will look at institutional conversations that marginalize African Americans and women, resulting not only in lower credibility ratings, but also in institutional exclusions. Then, I will look at specific vocal patterns associated with specific identities that are culturally

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disvalued. More precisely, I’ll examine (A) feminine-coded voices, (B) African American Vernacular English, (C) gender non-conforming voices, (D) disabled voices, and (E) feminine-coded body language, to illustrate how each of these vocal patterns, in spite of being no better or worse than the vocal patterns associated with privileged identities, are subject to resentment, indignation, disapprobation, contempt, and scorn, both within institutional conversation and within ordinary intimate conversations. Simply being culturally associated with one of these disvalued vocal identities can incur epistemic and social costs. Because disvalued vocal features are (objectively) no better or worse than privileged vocal features, people who use them shouldn’t be expected to ‘code switch’ or assimilate into the dominant vocal paradigm. Indeed, even if they did assimilate, they wouldn’t gain the same advantages as people whose privileged vocal attributes fit with their privileged bodily attributes. Being a woman with a masculine-coded voice, for example, isn’t going to confer the same advantages as being a man with a masculinecoded voice, since dissonance between one’s physical gender and one’s vocal gender violates the culture’s dominant binary gender logic, resulting in socioeconomic penalties. This is why, while women with a lower vocal pitch are rated as more ‘dominant’ than women with a higher vocal pitch, they are also rated as ‘less likable.’ Feminist researchers describe this as “another example of the ‘double-bind’ that women face in the workplace, in which the very same qualities that are praised in men may still be judged negatively in their female colleagues” (Robson 2018). For this reason, code-switching is not a viable solution to vocal bias. Rather than expecting people with disvalued voices to assimilate, we should give uptake to people’s speech based on its content (and its content’s role in systems of power and oppression), not its superficial vocal features. On an IF model, the speech that deserves blame is speech that contributes to hierarchies of power.

2. Institutional Conversations and Responsibility: Race and Gender In this section, I will proceed to examine asymmetrical distributions of blame and praise in institutional conversations. Institutions involve inequalities that affect the conversations that take place within them, often in ways that disadvantage members of marginalized groups. The prison system and the education system are two prominent examples. In U.S. prisons, “youth of color are more likely [than white youth] to be arrested, charged, detained, sentenced severely, and tried as adults” (Epstein et al. 2017: 15). This is partly because Black boys “are more likely than their white peers to be misperceived as older [and guiltier]” (Epstein et al. 2017: 1). Similarly, in public schools in the U.S., Black girls are five times more likely than white girls (and twice as likely as Black

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boys) to be suspended, 0.8 times less likely to have their cases diverted, and 2.7 times more likely to be referred to juvenile detention (ibid.). This is partly because Black girls, like Black boys, are seen as “less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers” (Epstein et al. 2017). These are just a couple of examples of racial and gender bias in institutional contexts. Within the relevant contexts, the acts of charging, detaining, sentencing, suspending, and referring to juvenile detention all involve conversations in which a defendant is asked to provide a moral (and sometimes legal) account. To give one example, when a student is suspended, the student has a right to an informal, pre-suspension conference with school district staff, except in the case of an emergency. In this meeting, students are allowed to tell their “side of the story and present evidence in the conference before [they] are suspended” (ACLU 2019). The data on racial disparities in school discipline reveal that Black youths’ testimony is being discredited and rebuffed at higher rates than white youths’ testimony in, and prior to, such hearings, in part because Black youths are perceived as older and guiltier than their white counterparts. That is, their defenses, excuses, and appeals are being denied at higher rates due to racial bias. These racial inequalities are examples of epistemic exclusions, which in turn trigger downstream “secondary harms” (Fricker 2007: 162) such as lower educational outcomes and decreased earning potential. The lower credibility ratings being given to the testimony of Black youths convey, even if they do not explicitly articulate, negative reactive attitudes (e.g., resentment for ‘willfully breaking the rules’), or negative withdrawal attitudes (e.g., contempt for Black youths’ ‘inability to follow the rules’), towards their target. In both cases (biased resentment and biased exclusion), Black youths are not being given equal uptake in institutional conversations involving praise and blame. When Black students are expelled, for example, they aren’t given the opportunity to receive future praise from their teachers, as they have been barred from attending further classes. One might object that these are not moral conversations. However, the correlation between metrics like grades, income, and employment on the one hand, and moral worth on the other hand, is too strong to be dismissed in our social context. To say that a youth is a ‘bad student,’ undeserving of further education, amounts to a moral judgment in our society. Notably, the racial biases that result in these inequalities can interact with empathy to produce biased empathic responses, which in turn produce biased blaming attitudes. For example, the racial bias study discussed in the last chapter found that empathy mediates judgments of blame severity, with empathy for white victims generating more severe judgments of blame towards stereotypical and counterstereotypical Black shooters (Dukes & Gaither 2017), whereas no empathic effects were observed in judgments of white shooters. That is, participants blamed Black shooters more than white shooters partly due to racial empathy

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bias. This is consistent with research showing that white people show less physiological arousal in response to Black people’s pain (Forgiarini et al. 2011), which partly explains why white patients are prescribed more painkillers than Black patients (Trawalter et al. 2012; Silverstein 2013). This ‘prescription bias’ conveys (tacitly if not explicitly) that Black patients are less ‘responsible’ than white patients, and therefore don’t deserve the same pain-management care. This bias is tantamount to taking the ‘objective attitude’ towards Black patients and excluding them from the prescription practices that are available to white patients who report the same amount of pain. Women are another group harmed by epistemic injustice within institutional conversations, one salient example being the workplace. In the U.S., women do more caretaking than men, even when they earn more than their male partner in a heterosexual relationship, which makes it harder for them to enter the workforce (Lyonette & Crompton 2015; Grigoryeva 2014). But when women do hold paying jobs, they earn less than men and face sexist discrimination (Graf et al. 2018), no matter what type of work they do (Canevale & Smith 2014). When women migrate into male-dominant fields in large numbers, the average pay drops, preventing them from achieving parity with men (Miller 2016). If moral attitudes track or mirror economic patterns, then we should expect women to receive less praise and more blame than men for the same performance in the same job. And there is evidence that this is the case in many contexts. Teaching evaluations, for instance, show that women are rated worse than men “simply because they are women” (Flaherty 2018). One study found that instructors assigned to identical online courses were rated more favourably when they were identified as men rather than women (MacNell et al. 2015). Another study found that students rated male professors as nicer and funnier than female professors, and rated female professors as ruder and less approachable than men (Mitchell & Martin 2018). Similarly, on workplace performance reviews women receive more negative feedback than men, whereas men receive more ‘constructive feedback’ designed to help them improve and advance in their career (Cecchi-Dimeglio 2017). And when women are seen as “high-achieving,” they are also perceived as more “abrasive” (Snyder 2014). Overall, these biases in teacher and workplace evaluations indicate that women are less likely than men to receive praise (e.g., being called funny), and more likely to receive blame (e.g., being called rude), even when their performance is equivalent to men’s. Women are also less likely to be included in workplace conversations at all, given that they still do the majority of the (time-consuming) unpaid caregiving work, and are more susceptible to hiring discrimination and unconstructive criticism on the job. These labour market exclusions tacitly express contempt

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for women’s perceived ‘inability to perform to the same standard as men,’ even when their performance is objectively equal or superior to that of their male-identifying colleagues. And if they are seen as high-achievers, they will be rated as less likable and more ‘abrasive.’ These are just a few token examples chosen to illustrate how identity prejudice operates to marginalize disvalued identities within institutional conversations. In the next section, I will examine specific vocal habits associated with specific identities, and I will show that these habits are culturally disvalued in ways that give rise to prejudiced blame and dialogical exclusions. These ‘vocal biases’ generate asymmetrical responsibility practices in institutional as well as intimate conversations. They affect us in public spaces and the privacy of our own homes. Therefore, this analysis extends beyond the institutional context.

3. Vocal Qualities and Identity Communication involves speakers with distinct voices and vocal patterns. Speakers from marginalized groups tend to use, or be associated with,1 culturally disvalued lexical habits, vernaculars, and tones, which together produce a certain kind of vocal fingerprint or ‘vocal identity.’ People with marginalized vocal identities are susceptible to various types of discrimination. This is illustrated in the films In a World and Sorry to Bother You, which highlight, respectively, how people with femininecoded voices and Black-coded voices are seen as less credible, less intelligent, less educated, and less employable compared to their male and white counterparts. Though these films are fictional narratives, they tap into real prejudices against vocal patterns coded as feminine and/or Black in the social imagination. In this section, I will examine five dimensions of vocal bias: (A) bias against feminine-coded voices, (B) bias against non-standard vernaculars, (C) bias against gender non-conforming voices, (D) bias against vocal disabilities, and (E) bias against feminine-coded nonverbal communication. Unfortunately, there is insufficient space here to consider other types of vocal discrimination, which are numerous; but I only have time to analyze a few aspects of the problem. A similar analysis can be applied to other stigmatized vocal identities.

3.1. Feminine-Coded Speech Women tend to use certain lexical patterns that are culturally associated with femininity (or are ‘feminine-coded’). In her influential book, Language and Woman’s Place (1973), Robin Lakoff argued that women have distinct (average) lexical habits, and these habits are relatively socially

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disvalued. Examples include “weaker expletives (oh dear versus damn); trivializing adjectives (divine versus great); tag questions used to express speakers’ opinions (The way prices are rising is horrendous, isn’t it?); rising intonation in declaratives (as seen in the second part of the sequence, What’s for dinner? Roast beef?); and mitigated requests (Would you please close the door? versus Close the door)” (Lakoff 1973, cited in Tannen et al. 2015: 549). Recent studies have confirmed a number of Lakoff’s observations, including that women’s communicative habits enhance cooperation whereas men’s promote social dominance (Leaper 1991; Mulac et al. 2001); that, “on average, women use more expressive, tentative, and polite language than men . . . especially in situations of conflict” (Basow & Rubenfeld 2003, cited in Merchant 2012); and that men interrupt women more than vice versa (Hancock & Rubin 2015; Jacobi & Schweers 2017). Though feminine-coded lexical habits are conducive to dialogical cooperation, they are culturally disvalued compared to malecoded lexical habits. This is evidenced in the fact that women are interrupted (or ‘manterrupted’) more than men, and are rated as less credible and competent than men for the same speech content (as I will show in a moment). These biases against feminine-coded lexical habits result in dialogical marginalizations that favour men with masculine-coded voices. Second, women are associated with vocal registers that are socially disvalued. These registers include creaky voice (‘vocal fry’), breathy voice, whisper, and certain stylized intonations (Sicoli 2015). Creaky voice is seen as “annoying, irritating, or a fashion fad” by many people (Sicoli 2015: 114, cf. Wolk et al. 2012). Women with ‘vocal fry’ are seen as “less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hirable,” which can “harm their job prospects” (Anderson et al. 2014). People tend to find speakers with lower-pitched voices (i.e., masculinecoded voices) more attractive, competent, and trustworthy than speakers with higher-pitched voices (Garber 2012). Therefore, when women adopt a lower pitch, they’re seen as more authoritative than women with a higher-pitched voice, but they’re also seen as less likable than men with the same low pitch (Robson 2018). Partly as a result of these vocal biases, job applicants with masculine-coded vocal registers are rated as more competent than applicants with feminine-coded vocal registers, even when their resumes are identical (Ko et al. 2009). But when women use lower registers, they don’t gain the same credibility or favourability as men with the same register. In other words, bias against feminine-coded vocal registers confers disadvantages that women can’t escape by adopting a masculine-coded pitch, as women with a masculine-coded pitch are less liked. Women are also more susceptible than men to ‘tone policing’ for certain forms of expression, particularly emotional expression. When women speak in an angry tone, for example, they are seen as less competent and less convincing than when they speak ‘unemotionally,’ whereas men are

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seen as more competent and more convincing when they are seen as being angry (Brescoll & Uhlmann 2008; Tiedens 2001; Salerno et al. 2016). This results in lack of uptake for women who use, or are seen as using, an angry tone. Since feminists are stereotyped as ‘angry man-haters’ they are susceptible to tone policing all the time. Because feminine-coded lexical and tonal patterns are culturally disvalued, women are susceptible to epistemic injustice, along with ‘secondary harms’ such as employment discrimination and low pay. Notably, even when a woman doesn’t have a feminine-coded voice, she is liable to be misperceived as having one because of cultural associations between particular voices and particular bodily attributes (Rubin 1992). That is, women may be misperceived as having feminine-coded voices (like vocal fry) even when they don’t. And when women adopt a lower pitch, they’re seen as less likable than men with the same pitch. Thus, adopting a more ‘masculine’ voice won’t necessarily eliminate the epistemic gender gap. 3.2. African American Vernacular English and Nonstandard Vernaculars African Americans also use, and/or are associated with, culturally disvalued vocal patterns. In particular, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) tends to be judged negatively. Jeff Siegel notes that AAVE and other nonstandard vernaculars are “stigmatized as corrupted forms of the standard and kept out of the classroom,” whereas Standard English (SE) is “valued by the general public as being more logical, more precise, and even more beautiful than other varieties” (Siegel 1999: 701; cf. Siegel 2012). Research shows that speakers of AAVE are perceived as less nice, less helpful, less kind, and less intelligent than speakers of SE, even by young children (Lewis 2015). Though there is no reason to think that SE is superior to AAVE, the latter vernacular is barely tolerated, let alone encouraged, in American classrooms. In my experience, professors tend to give students grading rubrics with a ‘grammar’ section that penalizes them for using non-standard vernaculars, and some institutions actually require an SE metric. Researchers have argued that institutionalized prejudice against AAVE partially explains the racial achievement gap – the difference in average standardized test scores between Black and white students (Roye-Gill 2013) – the reason being that AAVE-speakers (who are predominantly African American) are expected to read and write in a non-native vernacular, whereas SE speakers (who are predominantly white) can use their native vernacular at school and in other institutional contexts without penalty. Housing and hiring discrimination are two other facets of vernacular bias. In phone interviews, housing applicants who spoke AAVE or had feminine-coded voices received fewer callbacks from landlords than applicants who spoke SE or had masculine-coded voices; “across all measures,

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female speakers of Black English Vernacular consistently fared the worst” (Massey & Lundy 2001). Similarly, job applicants who spoke AAVE, or SE with elements of AAVE, received fewer call-backs from employers, and were rated as less intelligent, less ambitious, and less qualified for the job compared to applicants who spoke only SE (Henderson 2001). In court, defendants who speak nonstandard vernaculars are misunderstood or mis-transcribed at higher rates than SE speakers, which may be a factor in the racial incarceration gap (Rigoglioso 2014; Rickford & King 2016). These dimensions of vernacular discrimination once again convey, even if they do not explicitly voice, negative attitudes towards speakers of nonstandard vernaculars such as AAVE, and they sometimes also function to exclude those speakers from institutions and institutional conversations. Notably, when African Americans speak SE, they are often misperceived as speaking a nonstandard vernacular because of “accent hallucination” (Rubin 1992). When participants listened to a speech delivered by an SE speaker and were shown one of two accompanying photographs, those shown a picture of a Chinese woman rated her speech as less clear and less intelligible than those shown a picture of a white woman (even though the voice and script were the same in both cases). This means that our perception of a person’s speech is influenced by our perception of the speaker’s body, resulting in misattributions of non-standard vernaculars to non-white speakers. As a result, racialized minorities who speak SE may be epistemically marginalized only because of cultural associations between racialized bodies and racialized vernaculars. Hence, codeswitching won’t eliminate race-based vocal bias. Because AAVE is culturally disvalued, speakers of AAVE (and other nonstandard vernaculars), as well as people misperceived as using those vernaculars, are vulnerable to epistemic injustice and its secondary harms. These individuals face negative attitudes and exclusions that convey that they are either blameworthy or insufficiently responsible to participate equally in institutional and other conversations. That is, they are subject both to prejudiced blaming/praising attitudes and prejudiced deployments of the objective attitude. 3.3. Gender Non-Conforming Voices Trans and non-binary people are also marginalized because of vocal bias. Trans women, trans men, and non-binary people all face some dimension of vocal bias. Trans women face the same sorts of double-binds as cisgender women, with the added vulnerability of having a voice that doesn’t necessarily match their birth-assigned sex. Trans men similarly face discrimination for having a voice that may not match their birthassigned sex. And non-binary people are vulnerable to discrimination for having a gender identity that doesn’t fit with the culture’s binary gender logic, irrespective of their vocal qualities. If they have a non-binary voice

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that matches their non-binary gender identity, this is hardly accepted in a culture rooted in a binary gender logic that demands gender-conformity and favours cisgender men. Thus, all three groups are vulnerable to vocal discrimination on some basis. These axes of vocal discrimination may be implicated in the systemic harms that trans people face – harms such as employment and housing discrimination and higher susceptibility to violence and abuse (Whittle et al. 2007). These are the typical secondary harms that result from epistemic injustice. When people are epistemically harmed by identity prejudice, these harms usually translate into add-on material and political disadvantages as well. 3.4. Disabled Voices and Vernaculars People with disabilities are also susceptible to vocal discrimination. People who stutter, for example, are perceived less favourably than those who don’t. Researchers have found that “adults who stutter [are] perceived to have lower cognitive ability, to be less likeable and to be more anxious than typical adult speakers,” even when they’re asked to read the same script as someone without a stutter and nothing is known about their personality (Amick et al. 2017). In one study, 85% of employers agreed that “stuttering decreases a person’s employability” (Hurst & Cooper 1983, cited in Gilman 2011: 1180). Another study found that people associate stuttering with “certain negative personality traits such as being shy, quiet, nervous, tense, afraid, self-conscious, etc.” (Boyle et al. 2009, cited in Gilman 2011: 1184). In a similar vein, deaf people – many of whom speak American Sign Language (ASL) – face higher unemployment and underemployment rates, and earn less than the average nondeaf person (Winn 2007). They also face discriminatory attitudes from hearing people, many of whom assume that that deaf people want to be ‘fixed’ so that they can use spoken English, implying that ASL is a ‘lesser vernacular’ (Ringo 2013). The National Association of the Deaf states that “the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, pronounced us ‘deaf and dumb,’ because he felt that deaf people were incapable of being taught, of learning, and of reasoned thinking” (2019). This association wants to debunk negative stereotypes about deaf people, which can be traced back to the origins of western philosophy, and it wants people to recognize ASL as a valid mode of communication, not a substandard vernacular. In sum, prejudices against stutterers and deaf people express negative attitudes towards these groups and result in biased institutional exclusions. These attitudes and exclusions convey that stutterers and deaf people are worthy of resentment (e.g., for being ‘less intelligent,’ ‘too anxious,’ etc.), or are ‘insufficiently responsible’ to participate fully in society.

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3.5. Nonverbal Communication and Gender Conversation can take place via phone or email, but it often occurs in person, in which case body language and physical attributes play a role in the dynamics of the conversation. Specifically, perceptions of people’s bodies influence our judgements of their responsibility status. Feminist philosophers have analyzed how women’s bodily comportment – or how we take up space – is policed by patriarchal norms that dictate that women should be smaller and more restrained than men in size and bodily comportment (e.g., Beauvoir 1964). This is reflected in women’s fashions – created by predominantly-male fashion designers (Milano 2016) – which are more constrictive and less functional than men’s fashions, as exemplified in the prevalence of dresses (as opposed to pants), fitted clothing, long hair, and high-heel shoes in fashion shows, as well as the absence of (usable) pockets on women’s pants (Basu 2014). Marion Young has argued that women’s physical movements are more confined, tentative, and uncertain than men’s due to gender socialization under patriarchy (1980: 145–147). More recently, feminists have noted that women tend not to ‘manspread,’ or extend their extremities in space, as freely as men. Roxane Gay argues that fat women are perceived as “unruly” and “problematic” because they don’t fit the patriarchal ideal of ‘disciplined femininity,’ which (as per Young’s analysis) is small, restrained, and self-conscious (Gay 2017). These patriarchal norms of female embodiment penalize women who don’t conform to them. To give some specific examples: obese people earn less for the same job, are less likely to be hired to high-level positions, and are more likely to be denied a promotion compared to non-obese people (Puhl & Brownell 2001), and an analysis found that the financial penalties associated with obesity are specific to women (ibid.). Anecdotally speaking, women have testified that men who manspread are subject to less negative attention than women who assume the same posture, and men may even be admired for showing less bodily restraint and consideration for other people’s personal space (Petter 2017). These examples indicate that women are judged more harshly than men for taking up space in the same ways. Seemingly, women who violate patriarchal norms of embodiment are vulnerable to negative attitudes such as resentment and indignation, as well as exclusions from social institutions and economic opportunities. These negative attitudes and exclusions subject women to blame and objectification based on their body language and perceptions of their bodies.

4. The ‘Ideal Speaker’ In this chapter, I argued that certain identities are marginalized within institutional conversations that involve blame and praise, and I also showed that certain ‘vocal identities’ are marginalized across a range of institutional contexts due to vocal bias. In doing so, I demonstrated that epistemic

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injustice doesn’t just target people’s bodies; it also targets people’s voices. These vocal biases are forms of epistemic injustice, which result in asymmetries of credit, respect, and inclusion, and these asymmetries trigger typical secondary harms such as financial disadvantage, hiring discrimination, and housing inequality. Most communication theorists don’t address the asymmetries of power that structure our conversational practices. Therefore, they neglect the vocal biases that negatively affect certain speakers within those practices. The data on vocal prejudice indicate that certain people are perceived as ‘ideal speakers’ because their vocal characteristics are culturally favoured, especially when those characteristics match their (equally culturally favoured) physical attributes. White people, cisgender men, and abled people, for instance, tend to use, or be associated with, vernacular, lexical, and tonal patterns that are perceived favourably and that confer certain advantages in our culture. That is, these groups tend to be perceived as ‘ideal speakers’ deserving of high credibility ratings and institutional privileges on the same basis. In contrast, people associated with disvalued vocal characteristics (e.g., feminine-coded voices, AAVE speakers) tend to be perceived as ‘non-ideal speakers,’ which confers epistemic and material disadvantages, even if this association is illusory. These dimensions of vocal bias tilt the responsibility system against disadvantaged speakers, who are more likely to receive blame rather than praise compared to privileged speakers, and who are more likely to be excluded from or marginalized within institutional conversations. Both factors – unfair blame and unfair exclusion – create inequalities within moral conversations Intersectional feminism aims to diagnose and ameliorate these prejudiced attitudes and exclusions by examining how and where they occur, and taking a stand against them. One vehicle for identity prejudice, according to the present analysis, is vocal identity bias. An intersectional feminist analysis should home in on and resist this form of epistemic injustice.

Note 1. I say ‘be associated with’ because simply being associated with a disvalued vocal identity can incur costs, even if the speaker doesn’t use the associated vocal pattern, because of the role of ‘accent hallucination,’ binary assumptions, and other schemas in the social imaginary.

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Robson, D. (2018, June 12). We’re not talking Barry White here but some fascinating research reveals how women’s voices are becoming deeper in some countries. BBC News. Retrieved from: www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180612the-reasons-why-womens-voices-are-deeper-today Roye-Gill, C. (2013). Inclusion of African American Vernacular English in the classroom. Scholarly Commons. Retrieved from: https://rdw.rowan.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0% 2C26&q=racial+achievement+gap+aave+vernacular+gill&btnG=&httpsredir= 1&article=1521&context=etd Rubin, D. L. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33(4), 511–531. Salerno, J., Peter-Hagene, L., & Sanchez, J. (2016). Expressing anger increases male jurors’ influence, but decreases female juror’s influence, during mock jury deliberations. The Jury Expert, 28(1), 1–9. Sicoli, M. A. (2015). Voice registers. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2, 105–126. Siegel, J. (2012). Keeping creoles and dialects out of the classroom: Is it justified? In Dialects, Englishes, creoles, and education. Routledge. ———. (1999). Stigmatized and standardized varieties in the classroom: Interference or separation? Tesol Quarterly, 33(4), 701–728. Silverstein, J. (2013, June 27). I don’t feel your pain: A failure of empathy perpetuates racial disparities. Slate. Retrieved from: https://slate.com/technology/ 2013/06/racial-empathy-gap-people-dont-perceive-pain-in-other-races.html Snyder, K. (2014, Aug 26). The abrasiveness trap: High-achieving men and women are described differently in reviews. Fortune Magazine. Retrieved from: https:// fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias/ Tannen, D., Hamilton, H. E., & Schiffrin, D. (2015). The handbook of discourse analysis. John Wiley & Sons. Tiedens, L. Z. (2001). Anger and advancement versus sadness and subjugation: The effect of negative emotion expressions on social status conferral. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(1), 86. Trawalter, S., Hoffman, K. M., & Waytz, A. (2012). Racial bias in perceptions of others’ pain. PloS One, 7(11), e48546. Whittle, S., Turner, L., Al-Alami, M., Rundall, E., & Thom, B. (2007). Engendered penalties: Transgender and transsexual people’s experiences of inequality and discrimination. Wetherby: Communities and Local Government Publications. Retrieved from: http://www.pfc.org.uk/pdf/engenderedpenalties.pdf Winn, S. (2007). Employment outcomes for people in Australia who are congenitally deaf: Has anything changed? American Annals of the Deaf, 152(4), 382–390. Wolk, L., Abdelli-Beruh, N. B., & Slavin, D. (2012). Habitual use of vocal fry in young adult female speakers. Journal of Voice, 26(3), e111–e116. Young, I. M. (1980). Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality. Human Studies, 3(1), 137–156.

9

The Mysterious Case of the Missing Perpetrators How the Privileged Easily Escape Blame and Accountability

1. Introduction This book argues that blame and praise are unfairly distributed in our moral ecology because of identity prejudices and related cultural myths and narratives. These cultural myths and narratives erase the existence of perpetrators who participate in systemic oppression, which enables them to escape blame and accountability for their transgressions. In this chapter, I will examine ‘disappearance narratives’ that erase or obfuscate privileged people’s status-conferring roles in systems of power and domination, making it difficult to blame those people in light of those roles. These disappearance narratives write privileged perpetrators out of existence, or else misrepresent them as rare and aberrant outliers rather than ordinary people. Because these narratives make it difficult to identify privileged perpetrators and their roles in systems of power and domination, they make it difficult to blame them on that basis. In what follows, I shall use four ‘disappearance accounts,’ or accounts of how privileged perpetrators are written out of existence by hegemonic cultural narratives, to explain why our society is so bad at identifying privileged people as perpetrators of oppression. The first part of the title of this chapter is a paraphrase of Rebecca Solnit’s article, “The case of the missing perpetrator,” which argues that certain privileged demographics easily escape blame because of cultural narratives constructed to protect and absolve them (2016). The second part of the title refers to the implications of these ‘disappearance narratives’ on our collective blaming practices: they function to erase and exonerate privileged perpetrators. In section 2, I will use Rebecca Solnit’s article to explain why a certain privileged demographic – namely, men who commit gender-based violence and abuse – so easily escape blame. In section 3, I will use Kate Manne’s account of misogyny to explain why misogynists in general so easily escape blame. In section 4, I will use Charles Mills’ account of racial liberalism to make the same case for racists, who are erased and exonerated by racial liberal narratives. In section 5, I will use critiques

172 The Mysterious Missing Perpetrators of economic-political theory to show how the wealthy evade blame and receive praise for no reason other than class bias. In section 6, I will defend an intersectional feminist solution to the problem of disappearance narratives and their impact on the responsibility system. In my conclusion, I will use Judge Ellis’ pronouncement that Paul Manafort ‘lived an otherwise blameless life’ to confirm my analysis, and to show that only an ameliorative method can adequately explain this pronouncement as the predictable outcome of an asymmetrically structured legal-moral order.

2. The Mysterious Case of the Missing Perpetrator: The Erasure of Rapists and Abusive Men Rebecca Solnit’s article points to scientific narratives as sources of sexist blaming practices. She uses the guidelines published by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) as an example. These guidelines list the “risks” of drinking for women and warn women to avoid them. These risks include “miscarriage,” “stillbirth,” “premature birth,” “injuries/violence,” “STDs,” and “unintended pregnancy.” The guidelines further explain that “[healthcare] providers can help women avoid drinking too much, including avoiding alcohol during pregnancy.” Solnit’s main criticism of the CDC guidelines is that they nowhere address the question of how (cisgender) women encounter “risks” such as “unintended pregnancy,” “injuries/violence,” and “STDs.”1 How is it, exactly, that women “experience” and “encounter” pregnancy, violence, and STDs? Of course, men are an integral part of the equation. Women aren’t inseminated by alcohol, and the “violence/injury” cited in the CDC guidelines isn’t referring to the risk of stumbling while drunk, which is also a risk for men; it is referring to rape. And, as Solnit notes, “men are the main source of violence against women (and for that matter the main source of violence against men)” (2016). Yet men aren’t cited anywhere in the guidelines. The guidelines are informing women about their ‘responsibilities’ as consumers of alcohol, which evidently include the responsibility of avoiding drinking in the vicinity of a rapist and getting raped. Since it’s impossible to identify rapists at first glance, we’d better not drink at all! Women also don’t get pregnant by exposure to alcohol: fertile females are impregnated by fertile males. As Solnit clarifies, “pregnancy results when particular subsets of men and women get together in particular ways. No man, no pregnancy” (2016). The CDC guidelines treat (cisgender, fertile) women as if they were solely responsible for the effects of drinking in proximity with a man, including pregnancy as a result of sex and/or rape. Because men aren’t mentioned as part of the explanation for these ‘risks,’ they’re effectively exonerated. You can’t hold a man responsible for rape, unplanned pregnancy, or STD transmission if women are the

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Figure 9.1 CDC Poster.

only actors on the scene. This man-less explanation of women’s ‘health problems’ is a patriarchal myth presented in the guise of scientific fact. If interpreted literally, the CDC guidelines are saying that women who drink alcohol might immaculately conceive an unwanted child or suffer mysterious injuries with no male agency involved. The CDC didn’t make a second poster informing men that ‘exposure to alcohol’ increases the

174 The Mysterious Missing Perpetrators ‘risk’ that they will commit rape, conceive an unwanted child, or transmit an STD to someone. By not naming men, the guidelines let them off the hook for the gender-based violence for which they are arguably collectively responsible. And worse, it holds women responsible for being victims of gender-based violence. At the same time, it absolves men of responsibility for conceiving children and then refusing to raise them. As Solnit puts it, seriously, we know why men are absented from these narratives: it absolves them from responsibility for pregnancies, including the unfortunate and accidental variety, and then it absolves them from producing that thing for which so many poor women have been excoriated for so long: fatherless children. (2016) Solnit’s analysis perfectly captures the ways in which scientific discourse illicitly blames women for men’s actions (rape, not providing for their own children, etc.). This scientific narrative makes it very difficult for women to blame rapists, abusive intimate partners, and absent fathers, since their testimony (about the distribution of responsibility across genders) doesn’t fit the scientific narrative about women’s ‘risky’ and ‘reckless’ choices. The erasure of male agency in accounts of gender-based violence, unwanted pregnancy, and STD transmission therefore functions to smother and silence women who try to hold men accountable for transgressions that they commit and that harm women as a group.

3. The Mysterious Case of the Missing Misogynists Kate Manne (2017) draws attention to a second mystery: the case of the missing misogynists. (She focuses on misogyny as a structural problem, but I believe that her view has implications for the attribution of misogyny on the individual level, as I shall argue). She argues that western society subscribes to a naïve conception of misogyny that writes misogyny (and therefore misogynists) out of existence, particularly in the most patriarchal settings, where we would most expect to find it. In short, the naïve conception works to ‘disappear,’ and thereby exonerate, misogynistic collectives, individuals, and actions, by misrepresenting misogyny as a rare and aberrant personality complex, possessed by men who hate all women by virtue of their gender. To be more specific, the naïve conception says: misogyny is primarily a property of individual agents (typically, although not necessarily, men) who are prone to feel hatred, hostility, or other similar emotions toward any and every woman, or at least women generally, simply because they are women. That is, a misogynist’s attitudes are held to be caused or triggered merely by

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his representing people as women (either individually or collectively), and on no further basis specific to his target. (Manne 2017: 32) Misogynists, then, genuinely and deeply hate all women in virtue of their gender. (Let’s call this “naïve-conception misogyny” or “NC misogyny” for short.) An NC misogynist is defined by his psychological profile – specifically, his deep-seated hatred of all women as women. This hatred, Manne clarifies, is embedded in his deep self, or the “deep” and “ultimate” substratum of his psychological profile (2017: 18). (Misogynists, note, can be men, women, or non-binary people). NC misogynists consciously and passionately hate all women. Obviously, almost no one will fit this definition of misogyny, since even ‘incels’ favour women who (bafflingly) give them some kind of positive attention, and more mundane misogynists might love their mother, especially if their mother lavishes them with praise. Still, it’s worth looking at the various objections that can be levelled against the naïve view. Manne specifically identifies three loci of concern: (s) an epistemic problem, (b) a legal-political problem, and (c) a conceptual-normative problem. (At least, her objections can be parsed this way: Manne articulates them a bit differently.) Let’s examine these objections in turn. 3.1. The Epistemic Problem The epistemic problem is that the naïve conception makes misogyny epistemically intractable in general, and “epistemically inaccessible to women in particular” (Manne 2017: 44). That is, on the naïve conception, women are positioned as having less insight into who is a misogynist and who isn’t, since they have mere ‘second-hand’ or ‘inferential’ evidence of ‘misogyny’ understood as a structural feature of a person’s deep self. Misogynists, in contrast, have first-personal, non-inferential access to their own deep selves, which, on the privileged access view, is superior evidence. (The privileged access view is most likely wrong, but espoused by most people, and since most people espouse it, most people will assume that misogynists have superior evidence about their deep selves [Carruthers 2011].) So, if we grant that misogyny is a matter of a person’s deep self, and that people have privileged access to their deep selves, then we have effectively positioned misogynists as arbiters of who is a ‘real misogynist.’ And they will, of course, deny being misogynists because misogyny is a form of prejudice, and even ‘incels’ deny being prejudiced (as opposed to holding rational and scientific beliefs about ‘women’s natural inferiority’). Thus, the naïve view of misogyny, combined with the naïve view of mental access (both of which are flawed but deeply intuitive), leads to the belief that almost no one is a misogynist. This in turn allows misogynists to dismiss and silence women who accuse

176 The Mysterious Missing Perpetrators them of misogyny, positioning misogyinists to capitalize on the mantra popularized by reality television: ‘you don’t know me!’ In other words, the naïve view operates to silence women’s experiential testimony: it prevents them from eliciting uptake for their claims about gender-based hostility. This is my own interpretation of the problem, but Manne articulates it more concisely as follows: [Because the basis of an individual’s attitudes,] as a matter of deep or ultimate psychological explanation, is frequently inscrutable . . . the naïve conception would threaten to make misogyny very difficult to diagnose, short of being the agent’s therapist (and sometimes not even that would be sufficient). This would make misogyny epistemically inaccesible to women, in particular . . . So in effect, this notion of misogyny would be silencing for its victims. (Manne 2017: 44) If women can’t credibly accuse men of misogyny, then their testimony is silenced. And if women’s testimony about misogyny is silenced, misogyny is erased from the cultural record. 3.2. The Legal-Political Problem The above argument points to a related set of moral and legal problems. Because the naïve view of misogyny makes misogynists themselves the authorities on who is a misogynist, it makes misogyny difficult to identify, and therefore “difficult to prosecute” (Manne 2017: 45). If the court system operates on the basis of the naïve conception of misogyny, it will lack the conceptual resources needed to prosecute people for (objective) acts of misogyny, such as gender-based violence, as it will judge misogyny to be a rare trait of moral delinquints. The naïve view doesn’t just bias prosecution norms in favour of misogynists, of course; it biases moral judgment in their favour as well, making it difficult for women to blame misogynists for (objective) acts of misogyny, whether criminal or not. By granting misogynists testimonial authority, the naïve view silences women’s experiential testimony about gender-based hostility, treating their experiences as inferior to misogynists’ self-aggrandizing self-reports. 3.3. The Conceptual-Normative Problem Finally, Manne points to a related set of conceptual and normative problems. The conceptual problem is the following: intuitively, we would expect to find the greatest proportion of misogynists in a patriarchal milieu. The more patriarchal the milieu, the more misogynists we should find, intuitively speaking. Most people agree on this, whether they are feminists or not. Yet, if the naïve conception is correct (and misogynists

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are people who deeply hate all women as women), then patriarchal cultures – those in which women are socialized into serving men in a spirit of enthusiastic deference and complacent subordination – will contain vanishingly few misogynists, since men will have no good reason to hate women, i.e., the people who have been socialized into complacent subordination under them. As Manne attests, “the naïve conception of misogyny would effectively define misogyny out of prevalence within a patriarchal order, which I take to be the setting in which it should be (most) naturally occurring” (2017: 45). She defines a ‘patriarchal order’ as a social milieu in which institutions and practices position women as subordinate to men by virtue of their gender, and enforce this gender-based subordination with systems of rewards and punishments that shape women into docile vassals. In such a milieu, men would have very little reason, if any, to hate any woman, let alone all women as women. In a highly patriarchal milieu, women are socialized into performing the “emotional, social, domestic, sexual, and reproductive labour” for men, not grudgingly, but “in a loving and caring manner or enthusiastic spirit” (Manne 2017: 46). Any woman not inclined to serve a man in the ‘correct’ spirit of enthusiasm would be punished by the social structures established to maintain patriarchal dominance. In the most patriarchal milieus, then, men should have the least reason to hate women, who are shaped into their enthusiastic servants. Thus, the setting in which we would intuitively expect to find the most misogyny is a highly patriarchal milieu, but this is ironically the setting in which NC misogyny would be the least prevalent. The naïve conception thus fails conceptually because it fails to locate misogyny in the milieus in which one would naturally expect to find it: highly patriarchal milieus. Instead, it (inadvertently) locates ‘misogyny’ in the most feminist milieus, those in which patriarchy is being actively resisted and dismantled, to the chagrin of hostile patriarchs. In such cultures, misogyny is likely to manifest itself in angrier forms – the forms identified as ‘misogynistic’ by the naïve conception (felt hostility towards women as women). But in these feminist milieus, misogyny wouldn’t be the most prevalent – it would be collapsing and giving way to a more gender-equal society. So, misogynists would be angrier but rarer. That’s the conceptual problem in a nutshell. But the conceptual problem leads to a normative problem. The normative problem is that, by defining misogyny out of prevalence in a highly patriarchal milieu, the naïve conception makes it very difficult to criticize, censure, or blame misogynistic agents, institutions, and actions in such a milieu. The same problem occurs in weakly patriarchal societies to a lesser extent as well: misogyny isn’t necessarily erased, but is made harder to identify by the naïve conception. In our society, for instance, most people can recognize ‘incels’ as misogynists, but aren’t good at recognizing ‘benevolent misogynists’ who don’t hate women as women, but still enforce patriarchal relations in various ways. Thus, the conceptual problem gives rise to a

178 The Mysterious Missing Perpetrators normative problem because it makes misogyny, in any context, hard to criticize, protest, resist, and prosecute. While Manne focuses on misogyny as a cultural phenomenon, she also diagnoses particular acts of misogyny, attributable to particular individuals (some of whom she names). These individual acts and actors are ‘disappeared’ by the naïve conception of misogyny and related myths. One salient example is the act of strangulation. Manne points out that strangulation is “a prevalent form of intimate partner violence,” with “the large majority of strangulation . . . victims [being] female intimate partners” (followed by children and infants) (2017: 2). She also notes that there are affinities between literal strangulation and “testimonial smothering” (Dotson 2011, cited in Manne 2017: 3), which is a type of self-silencing under conditions of epistemic injustice. Strangulation often leads to genderbased testimonial smothering, with women choosing euphemisms like ‘choke’ and ‘grab’ over strangulation, which is a more serious crime, and which causes more severe (often life-threatening) physiological and psychological effects. Women also tend to revoke their testimony about strangulation in response to social pressure, threats, and stigma (Manne 2017). In this way, the very existence of intimate partner strangulation is ‘disappeared’ within a patriarchal order that erases and suppresses evidence of gender-based violence. Manne emphasizes that strangulation is literal torture: “researchers draw a comparison between strangulation and waterboarding, both in how it feels—painful, terrifying—and its subsequent social meaning. It is characterized as a demonstration of authority and domination” (Sorenson et al. 2014, cited in Manne 2017: 3). Yet the social and psychological significance of strangulation – indeed, its very existence – is rendered invisible under patriarchal myths designed to protect misogynists, and the institution of misogyny itself, from scrutiny, criticism, and resistance. If the act of strangulation is ‘disappeared’ in our society, then the men who strangle women are, in the same stroke, ‘disappeared.’ Invisible stranglers can’t be prosecuted, blamed, or rehabilitated, because they’re nowhere to be found. The disappearance of misogyny, as well as acts of misogyny such as strangulation, protects misogynists from blame and accountability. It makes it exceedingly difficult for women to credibly accuse men of misogyny, since their testimony is at odds with the dominant cultural narrative, which depicts misogynists as rare and hateful outliers, not ordinary men from all walks of life.

4. The Mysterious Cases of the Missing Racists Charles Mills presents a third mystery: the case of the missing racists. He argues that white intellectuals (including philosophers) have constructed a set of ideologies that justify the existing white-supremacist order by erasing the reality of racial oppression. These ideologies present the liberal state as a relatively egalitarian milieu. Thus, they define racism out

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of existence, making it difficult to identify racist institutions, individuals, and actions in our society. In Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017), Mills defines racial liberalism as follows: [a society] in which conceptions of personhood and resulting schedules of rights, duties, and government responsibilities have all been racialized. And the contract, correspondingly, has really been a racial one, an agreement among white contractors to subordinate and exploit nonwhite non-contractors for white benefit. (2017: 29) Modern ‘ideal’ liberal ideologies, then, hide the fact that the social contract is in fact a white-supremacist contract constructed by white contractors. They therefore misrepresent the existing social order as a relatively egalitarian society created by non-racist contractors. Liberalism says little to nothing about the racial inequalities that structure the real liberal state. In the rest of this section, I will examine some of the more specific ways in which racial liberalism is perpetuated in the U.S., as explained by Mills. Two of the primary culprits are white historians and white philosophers, who propagate mystifying narratives that erase the history of racial oppression, and justify the history of racial oppression, respectively. First, Mills points out that most American history textbooks whitewash the nation’s history of cultural genocide and white supremacy. He quotes Loewen James as saying, “the Indian-white wars that dominated our history from 1622 to 1815 and were of considerable importance until 1890 have disappeared from our national memory,” replaced by a “feel-good history for whites” (1996: 133, cited in Mills 2017: 65). Similarly, white historians have rationalized slavery by presenting it as a ‘civilizing’ enterprise that benefited African Americans: for instance, “the ‘magnolia myth’ of paternalistic white aristocrats and happy, singing darkies . . . dominated American textbooks as late as the 1950s” (Mills 2017: 65). The erection of confederacy statues in the mid-20th century similarly propagated a false narrative about the ‘lost cause of the Confederacy,’ on which the Civil War was about economics, not the perpetuation of white supremacy through institutionalized racism and violence. Whereas history textbooks erase white supremacy by writing it out of existence, philosophy textbooks justify white supremacy by providing a set of spurious rationalizations for the established order. Some of the primary protagonists of racial liberalism, on Mills’ account, are Rawls, Kant, and Locke, who figure prominently in introductory philosophy textbooks. Far more philosophers have read Locke then Dubois, even though Locke obscured white supremacy by defending the colonialist economy, whereas Dubois correctly identified racism as a structural feature of society. Meanwhile, Kant was the primary protagonist, if not “the

180 The Mysterious Missing Perpetrators founder,” of “modern ‘scientific’ racism,” according to Mills (2017: xviii). Kant took white men to be the ideal form of a person and identified everyone else as a second-rate imitation. Finally, Rawls designed a decision procedure that abstracts away from race and racial injustice, making it impossible to identify the structural features of the racial liberal state. These are just a few examples of how philosophers have contributed to white ignorance – a structural ignorance cultivated by the ideological constructions of white intellectuals. If Mills is right that we live in a racial liberal society, in which racial oppression is both very real, and very hidden from white consciousness by white-supremacist ideologies, then we should expect racism (in its many forms) to be largely invisible to white consciousness. That is, we should expect white people to be largely ignorant of racist structures and racist individuals. And this is precisely the case: white people are bad at identifying and diagnosing racism. Many white people can’t even recognize Robert E. Lee, the leader of the Confederacy, as a racist. If they can’t recognize a Confederate General as a racist, how are they supposed to recognize more mundane racists – the white moderates against whom Malcolm X cautioned, for example? White people are susceptible to white ignorance as a function of their socialization into racist ideologies and a share position of privilege. This is not to say that white people are innocent victims: white people (consciously or unconsciously) constructed the very false narratives that structure their cognition so as to protect themselves from knowledge of white supremacy, positioning themselves to deny their role in systems of racial oppression. White people are not victims; they are beneficiaries of white ignorance. White people continue to participate in practices that protect them from guilt and accountability, and that sustain their privileges. The existence of white supremacy is an inconvenient but accessible moral truth. Mills’ analysis explains why it is so hard for white people to identify racism in liberal societies: liberalism is, in fact, a racial liberalism, which systemically erases the existence of racism. If there is no racism in America, then there are no racists. White people can sleep well at night.

5. The Mysterious Case of the Missing Rich Perpetrators In a recent essay entitled “Let us now stop praising famous men (and women),” David Johnson illustrates how blame and praise function in economically unequal societies such as ours to reinforce systems of economic power and domination. A recent example is the praise heaped on the French luxury-goods magnate Francois-Henri Pinault after he pledged to donate 100-million Euros to the reconstruction of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. As Johnson points out, this sum is 0.3 percent of his total fortune, which would amount to about 840 Euros from the average French household: “Not an insignificant sum for an average French [person], but who

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would refuse to give that sum if it garnered the praise and notoriety that followed Pinault’s donation?” (Johnson 2019). In effect, when the superrich do things that any reasonable person would do, they’re celebrated. At the same time, rich people escape blame for transgressions that no ordinary person could perpetrate, even if they wanted to – transgressions such as buying a private island rather than using that money to reduce socioeconomic inequality (or some other source of adversity), as the (white) American business magnate Larry Ellison did (Smith 2017). Johnson attributes this asymmetry of praise and blame to the myth of meritocracy, which holds that people get what they deserve; therefore, rich people deserve their wealth, and can’t be blamed for spending it as they wish. This myth erases the reality of economic oppression and rich people’s roles in it. As such, it fails to identity the rich as contributors to the systems of economic oppression that line their pockets. In a similar vein, Jeet Heer argues that the late David Koch was a terrible person in spite of his charitable contributions, which don’t absolve him of a lifetime of corrupt investments and moral depravity. Koch funded organizations that promote climate change denialism, support environmental deregulation (Heer 2019), and oppose LGBT+ rights and legal abortion (Jones 2019). Yes, he donated to cancer research after being diagnosed with cancer, but he also subjected his employees to working conditions that exposed them to deadly carcinogens, giving them cancer. Yes, he spoke openly in favour of LGBT+ rights, but he secretly funded organizations dedicated to oppressing the LGBT+ community. Heer identifies these investment as examples of “plutocratic philanthropy,” a “wretched social model” that allows the rich to control politics (Heer 2019). Plutocrats regularly receive praise for spending trivial amounts of their blood money on charitable causes – often causes that they simultaneously undermine with quiet investments in conservative charities and lobbyists. In the same spirit, an anonymous author who goes by the pseudonym A.Q. Smith avers that “it’s basically just immoral to be rich” (2017). Smith’s “simple statement of principle” is that if you possess billions of dollars, in a world where many people struggle because they do not have much money, you are an immoral person. The same is true if you possess hundreds of millions of dollars, or even millions of dollars. Being extremely wealthy is impossible to justify in a world containing deprivation. (2017) ‘Smith’ argues that our reluctance to accept this principle is partly due to popular philosophical ideologies that erase the agency and culpability of the rich in their analysis of economic oppression. One example is Karl Marx’s2 theory of historical materialism, on which the rich are simply

182 The Mysterious Missing Perpetrators byproducts of historical and material interactions rather than active drivers of economic inequality (and related axes of oppression, e.g., the racial wealth gap, the gender pay gap). Another example is John Rawls’ theory of justice, on which identity-less contractors decide on the principles of justice in the original position – a heuristic that abstracts away from the personalities and choices of the wealthy, which shape society around principles of economic inequality and structural prejudice in the real world. A third example is Robert Nozick’s libertarian theory, which depicts the rich as entitled to their earnings as opposed to beneficiaries of a legacy of patriarchy, genocide, and slavery that works in their favour. In general, political philosophers prioritize questions about the acquisition and distribution of wealth over questions about the agency and culpability of the wealthy, thereby erasing rich people’s contributions to the systems of economic power and domination that make them rich, and the systems of racial, patriarchal, cisheteronormative, and ableist oppression sustained by capitalism. The dominant philosophies thus exonerate the wealthy for their participation in these hierarchies of power. Due to the class bias in favour of the wealthy, a rich person can expect praise for a charitable contribution of a measly 0.3% of his wealth, which was accrued through past and present forms of imperialism and wage slavery, while a poor person can expect castigation for being a victim of the rich person’s business dealings. In this way, non-agentic political and economic theories ‘disappear’ wealthy people’s roles in systems of power and domination and thereby absolve them from blame for genuine transgressions, while praising them for minuscule donations of their ill-gotten fortunes to charity.

6. Implications for Blame and Praise The current analysis shows that blame and praise are distributed unfairly in our society due to systemic inequality, sustained largely by cultural myths and narratives that privilege dominant groups. The previous four sections explored some of the forms that these narratives take. Solnit shows that the scientific community – which purports to be objective and impartial – is complicit in the dissemination of patriarchal myths about women’s responsibility (and men’s non-responsibility) for gender-based violence, abuse, and unwanted pregnancy. Manne shows that the naïve conception of misogyny hides misogynists in plain sight, making it nearly impossible to identify and blame them. Mills shows that racial liberalism, as propagated by historians, philosophers, and other intellectuals, hides the reality of white supremacy, making it nearly impossible to identify and blame individual racists. Smith’s critique of political philosophy reveals that the wealthy are ‘disappeared’ and exonerated by non-agentic theories of economic relations. These four analyses explain why perpetrators of sexism, misogyny, racism, and economic exploitation

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receive so little blame in our (patriarchal, racial liberal, oligarchic) society, while women, racialized minorities, and the poor are scapegoated for social ills actually created and sustained by privileged social actors. If we want to promote a less biased distribution of responsibility, then we need to resist and reject these disappearance narratives. On an intersectional feminist model, we can do this by using blame and praise in ameliorative ways. Blame and praise, as I understand them, are communicative practices that articulate normative perspectives on perpetrators and victims. By blaming the privileged for culturally normative infractions (like rape within a patriarchal order, or racism within a racial liberal order), while refusing to praise the privileged for unexceptional and plutocratic ‘benefactions,’ we are generating counterhegemonic narratives that challenge disappearance narratives through blame and praise. There’s one way in which my view may seem to be in tension with the philosophies cited in support of it. Whereas I believe that we should blame individuals and collectives for their status-conferring roles in systems of power and oppression, many of the above authors focus on systems of oppression without saying much about individual actors or individual responsibility. And one might naturally assume that there is a tension between these two focal points. In what follows, I will show that there is no incompatibility between the theories that I cite in support of my proposal and the notion of individual blameworthiness. 6.1. Solnit Solnit isn’t averse to the notion of individual responsibility. She says that misogynistic scientific narratives “absolve [men] from responsibility,” and this shift of responsibility – from men onto women, from perpetrators onto victims, from the privileged onto the oppressed – is a bias that we should reject. On the other hand, she cites women’s lack of reproductive rights and limited access to social resources as a main source of women’s susceptibility to gender-based violence, unplanned pregnancies, and other adversities borne predominantly by women. Still, her primary focus is the lack of culpability assigned to men, not (simply) systemic causes of gender inequality. I, too, recognize that revisions to our understanding of responsibility alone will not resolve the problem of systemic inequality, and I agree with Solnit that individual and collective interventions are equally important: women are entitled to blame individual rapists and violent intimate partners, and women are also entitled to social resources such as women’s safe houses, employment assistance, and legal representation. Indeed, these two solutions are interdependent, inasmuch as identifying men as perpetrators of gender-based violence is a precursor to identifying gender-based violence as a problem that governments and nongovernmental organizations should address and resolve. This twoply analysis, which combines individual and systemic anaysis, allows us

184 The Mysterious Missing Perpetrators to identify the perpetrators of gender-based violence and to find systemic solutions at the same time. 6.2. Mills Mills says little on the topic of individual responsibility, but his critique of liberalism mainly takes the form of systems analysis, honing in on the ideologies and institutional practices that white-wash racial oppression. This may seem to suggest that Mills is opposed to individualist analysis, but this isn’t so. As a self-professed liberal who hopes to redeem liberalism by identifying systems of oppression that make the realization of (nonracial) liberal principles unachievable, Mills affirms the moral and political significance of the individual, albeit as partly constituted by social forces. He writes, “one can without inconsistency affirm both the value of the individual and the importance of recognizing how the individual is socially molded, especially when the environing social structures are oppressive ones” (2017: 18). In other words, he takes individualist analysis and systems analysis to be mutually compatible. His own structural account of racial injustice allows for the allocation of blame and praise to individual oppressors and individual resistors, respectively. Indeed, Mills himself seems to blame specific philosophers for contributing to the legacy of racial liberalism and racist scientific schemas. Understanding Mills as a protagonist of the notion of personal responsibility is necessary to understanding Mills as a (radical) liberal, committed to the central liberal principles of individual freedom and responsibility, though he understands ‘the individual’ in a relational sense. Mills’ brand of liberalism, as he puts it, “is capable of recognizing both the extent of our socialization by the existing oppressive social order and the ways in which, nonetheless, many people resist and struggle against this oppressive social order,” while others support it (2017: 20). This understanding makes room for blame and praise directed at socially situated individuals who either contribute to racial liberalism or resist it. 6.3. Manne Manne doesn’t reject the value of blame, but she cautions that “blame has its limits” (2017: xxi). She recognizes that the negative reactive attitudes were misconceived by P.F. Strawson (1963), who ignored the role that misogyny (and other prejudices) play in the perception of moral transgressions and excusing conditions (as I have similarly argued in this book). Yet Manne doesn’t say much about how, or if, we can repair the damage done to our cultural responsibility practices by the naïve conception of misogyny using moral attitudes and emotions. She does say that, while “there is nothing morally neutral about [‘Down Girl’],” its analysis “leave[s] it largely open how (much) to apportion blame, to whom, and

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how we might go about improving the situation” (2018: 29). She continues, “and sometimes it is not in the least clear what to do, and we will have to strategize, experiment, feel our way, and so on” (ibid.). In spite of this uncertainly, she elsewhere defends a very clear methodology, which would presumably apply as much to the construction of a theory of responsibility as to the construction of a theory of misogyny. Her proposed method is “ameliorative” and “intersectional,” and committed to identifying misogyny as a feature of asymmetrical gender relations (2017: 63). This method enjoins us to see the responsibility system as asymmetrically structured, and to do what we can to ameliorate structural inequality. Thus, if we take Manne’s methodological commitments at face value, we should infer that blame and praise should be deployed in ameliorative and intersectional ways, with careful attention to real-world inequalities. This approach positions us to resolve some of the conceptual, legal, and normative problems associated with the naïve conception of misogyny, as it allows us to blame perpetrators of patriarchal oppressions even if they don’t consciously hate all women as women. This in turn gives women more testimonial authority in debates with misogynists. Hence, while it is true that we may sometimes need to ‘feel our way’ towards an appropriate judgment of blame, Manne’s methodological commitments suggest that we should blame people in ways sensitive to their roles in hierarchies of power and domination. 6.4. Johnson, Heer, Smith Johnson, Heer, and Smith explicitly reject systems-based analyses that omit or exclude references to rich people’s agency and culpability. Their central argument is that sociological, historical, and political explanations that omit or exclude the culpability of individuals exonerate those individuals and present them as more admirable than they really are. This critique of the wealthy is in line with my own critique of privileged perpetrators and my belief in individual culpability for people’s statusconferring roles in hierarchies of power. ***** Having clarified this, I think that I am more optimistic about the value of ameliorative blame than some of the authors cited here (particularly Manne), but this is because these other authors are probably working with an intuitive (and philosophically prevalent) notion of blame that jars with their theoretical commitments. For instance, they may be assuming that blame is a response to a wrongdoer’s agency or deep-seated character traits. These definitions of blame aren’t compatible with any of the above critiques of social injustice, because they’re not supposed to transform social relations; they’re supposed to describe wrongdoers. An

186 The Mysterious Missing Perpetrators intersectional feminist theory of blame is far more compatible with the emancipatory aims of the theories described above, because it subscribes to the same emancipatory aims. Thus, if the cited authors are less optimistic about blame’s redemptive value than myself, this may be because they are thinking of blame in the standard philosophical sense, not an ameliorative and emancipatory sense. The notion of blame that I have proposed is compatible with their methodological commitments and transformative goals.

7. Conclusion This chapter used ‘disappearance accounts’ of rape, misogyny, racism, and plutocratic expropriation to explain why blame is so distorted in our moral ecology. A large part of the reason is that dominant cultural narratives disguise and exonerate perpetrators of oppression. Academics have conspired to reinforce and justify these disappearance narratives, allowing the colonialist responsibility practices of the past to persist and thrive. An ameliorative approach helps us to debunk disappearance narratives by diagnosing people’s roles in systems of power and domination and taking a stand against contributors. In this capacity, ameliorative blame also cultivates and disseminates counterhegemonic narratives that challenge dominant ideologies about responsibility. The ameliorative approach thus solves the ‘mystery of the missing perpetrator’ by identifying perpetrators of oppression, and blaming them. Before closing, I briefly want to mention an example of how social institutions contribute to disappearance narratives that exonerate agents of oppression. After Paul Manafort was indicted on multiple charges ranging from tax evasion to bank fraud to hiding foreign bank accounts, Judge T.S. Ellis gave him a mere 47-month sentence, and justified his decision with the pronouncement that Manafort had “lived an otherwise blameless life” (Foer 2019). While many people were appalled by this pronouncement, it’s neither surprising nor aberrant. Rather, it’s a result of the justice system operating as intended – to exonerate the privileged. These kinds of sentencing norms and moral judgments reinforce disappearance narratives by erasing the (full) culpability of privileged wrongdoers. This erasure can’t be predicted or adequately explained by theories of responsibility that neglect the asymmetrical distribution of responsibility in our society. Because these theories neglect asymmetries of power, they’re committed to treating Ellis’ pronouncement as a surprising deviation from ordinary morality, rather than a predictable result of long-established social conventions. These conventions erase privileged people’s full culpability, and also silence their victims, who, in Manafort’s case, include the victims of dictators whom he supported and sponsored: dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, “a kleptocratic dictator from the Philippines”; former Nigerian President, Sani Abacha,

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who carried out “extrajudicial killings, torture, assassinations, imprisonment and general harassment of critics and opponents” during his tenure; former Indonesian President Suharto, “who has been described as one of the most brutal and corrupt leaders of the 20th century” (Maza 2018), and so on. From the standpoint of the victims of these authoritarians, Manafort lived anything but a blameless life. His life was dedicated to the expansion of oppressive regimes and the persecution of the innocent.

Notes 1. Trans women don’t get pregnant, unintentionally or otherwise, though they face even higher ‘risks’ of violence and STDs than cis women due to prejudice, housing insecurity, and other forms of discrimination (National Center for Transgender Equality 2016). The CDC doesn’t mention trans women at all, thereby writing them out of existence in their guidelines for ‘women.’ 2. I think that Marx provides a valuable analysis of class warfare, but I agree with Smith that his historical materialism exonerates the wealthy.

References Carruthers, P. (2011). The opacity of mind: An integrative theory of self-knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foer, F. (2019). The “otherwise blameless” life of Paul Manafort. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/paul-manafortsotherwise-blamess-life-crime/584419/ Heer, J. (2019, Aug 26). Even David Koch’s philanthropy was toxic. The Nation. Retrieved from: www.thenation.com/article/even-david-kochs-philanthropywas-toxic/ James, L. (1996). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York: The New Press. Johnson, D. (2019, Aug 23). Let us now stop praising famous men (and women). Aeon. Retrieved from: https://aeon.co/ideas/let-us-now-stop-praising-famousmen-and-women Jones, S. (2019, Aug 23). David Koch’s monstrous legacy. New York Magazine. Retrieved from: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/david-kochs-monstrouslegacy.html Manne, K. (2017). Down girl: The logic of misogyny. Oxford University Press. Maza, C. (2018, Aug 7). Here’s where Paul Manafort did business for corrupt dictators. Newsweek. Retrieved from: www.newsweek.com/heres-where-paulmanafort-did-business-corrupt-dictators-1061470 Mills, C. W. (2017). Black rights/white wrongs: The critique of racial liberalism. Oxford University Press. National Center for Transgender Equality. (2016). U.S. Transgender Survey. Retrieved from: https://transequality.org/issues/us-trans-survey Smith, Q. (2017, June 14). It’s basically just immoral to be rich. Current Affairs. Retrieved from: www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/its-basically-just-immoral-tobe-rich

188 The Mysterious Missing Perpetrators Solnit, R. (2016). The case of the missing perpetrator. Literary Hub. Retrieved from: https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-case-of-the-missing-perpetrator/ Sorenson, S. B., Joshi, M., & Sivitz, E. (2014). A systematic review of the epidemiology of nonfatal strangulation, a human rights and health concern. American Journal of Public Health, 104(11), e54–e61. Strawson, P. F. (1963). Freedom and resentment and other essays. Routledge, 2008.

10 Women’s Blame in Conditions of Epistemic Injustice

1. Introduction This chapter argues that women’s blame is epistemically marginalized in conditions of epistemic injustice, resulting in epistemic asymmetries of power in the responsibility system. Before proceeding, I should clarify that by ‘women’s blame,’ I mean blame expressed, or capable of being expressed, by women. Sometimes women’s blame is expressed but discounted because of forces of epistemic silencing, and sometimes women’s blame isn’t capable of being expressed in the first place because of forces of epistemic smothering, which undermine women’s epistemic confidence or full insight into their experiences. In either case (silencing or smothering), women are victims of (some type of) epistemic injustice. And in both cases, women’s blaming narratives are lost or erased from the cultural record. Epistemic injustice is a concept largely popularized by Miranda Fricker in her landmark book by the same name (2007). She describes epistemic injustice as a type of injustice that harms someone in their “capacity as a knower” (2007: 1). Epistemic injustice, more specifically, undermines a person’s claim to know things about the world and their place in it, and to be believed and taken seriously by their community. Epistemic injustice is the result of identity prejudice, or prejudice against a person’s identity as a member of an oppressed group. Women are vulnerable to epistemic injustice on the basis of their gender identity. That is, they are susceptible to gender-based epistemic injustice, or what I shall call ‘epistemic gender bias.’ One question that Fricker doesn’t address is how identity prejudice is socially constructed. This question is mined by Rebecca Solnit in her book on the sociology of silencing, The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions (2017). This book analyzes, in essence, the mechanics of epistemic injustice in male-dominant spaces, ranging from popular culture to politics to literary fiction. I shall use Solnit’s work as the basis for my analysis of the effects of epistemic injustice on women’s blame as a type of moral testimony. This analysis will have three focal points: (1) mainstream pornography, (2) literary fiction, and

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(3) western humour. I shall argue that all three domains are governed by patriarchal norms that function to epistemically marginalize women. As a result, the dominant norms in domains (1)–(3) collectively reinforce the hegemony of what Laura Mulvey calls “the male gaze” (1997), which depicts the world from a cisgender male (i.e., masculine) standpoint – one that places women at the margins of experience. ‘The male gaze’ is meant to be a masculine standpoint – that is, the standpoint into which most (though not all) birth-assigned males are acculturated through standard processes of sex-role socialization in the context of a gender-binary society that privileges the cisgender male subject. The ‘male gaze,’ as such, is associated with gender, not sex. Therefore, I will use the term ‘the masculine gaze’ to avoid essentialist associations with birth-assigned sex.1 (People medically labelled as ‘male’ are not necessarily boys, or successfully socialized into masculinity.) The masculine gaze sees women as a second sex. It is prevalent in male-dominant spaces, where it functions to suppress women’s testimony. But, since these spaces are so influential, these epistemic norms creep into other spaces as well. By analyzing how the masculine gaze epistemically marginalizes women’s blame, we gain a better understanding of how responsibility works in the real world, as opposed to some ideal, gender-equal society in which everyone’s blame receives equal uptake. When women’s blame is smothered or suppressed by the masculine gaze, this creates an imbalance in the responsibility system that favours men’s blaming speech and men’s normative understandings. Given that blame contains and conveys normative information (about perpetrators and victims), the privileging of men’s blame entails a privileging of men’s experiential understandings of their rights and responsibilities relative to other identities and groups.

2. Sexual Objectification One of the factors that Solnit identifies as contributing to epistemic silencing and smothering is misogynistic pornography, constructed for the cisgender male subject. She examines the cultivation of pornography throughout the 20th century, as a product designed by and for the masculine subject. While pornography has gotten more diverse in recent years, Solnit believes that it has also gotten more violent, having twisted into “a compensatory parallel universe where male privilege has been augmented and revenge on female power is incessantly exacted” (Solnit 2017b). One former pornographer attests that, “while my overt task at hand was to make sure that the girls got naked, my true responsibility as director was to make sure the girls got punished” (Sam Benjamin, cited in Solnit 2017b). While Solnit admits that pornography is changing, she maintains that “the mainstream product .  .  . seems more about the eroticization of power than the power of eros” (ibid.). In what follows, I will focus only on mainstream pornography (MSP, for short), which was cultivated

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largely through the porno magazines of Hugh Hefner, Larry Flint, and Bob Guccione, and was later adapted into videos.2 This genre of pornography encapsulates and reproduces the logic of the masculine gaze. Playboy Magazine was one of the first mass-marketed porno magazines, and it shaped the sexual preferences and expectations of generations of cisgender men. It depicted women as Hugh Hefner (its producer) envisioned them: infantile, docile, and subordinate to men. Under Hefner’s management, Playboy cast at least nine minors as pornographic models, including a 10-year-old Brooke Shields, pictured naked in a bathtub (Smith 2017). When child pornography laws were tightened, Hefner continued to mass-market sexual attraction to underage girls by presenting women in the guise of much younger girls, dressing them up as “cheerleaders, students, babysitters and sorority girls,” thereby ensuring the persistence of “immaturity symbolism,” and corresponding associations between girlhood and sex (ibid.). Hefner’s success at sexualizing young girls may be a factor in the continued marketability of “barely legal” and “teen pornography,” which are still some of the most searchedfor categories today (Griffith 2017; Schwyzer 2012). When Hefner died, many people celebrated him as a “champion of freedom of speech” (LA Press Club 2017), but he didn’t peddle free speech so much as men’s freedom to use and abuse women and girls to their heart’s content. His public image wasn’t that different from his private life, in which he was known to harass and demean his female employees, as Nathan Robinson describes: He would selectively belittle girls (“You look old, hard, and cheap“), talked down to them and “frequently made them cry.” He pushed Quaaludes on the girls, referring to the drugs as “thigh-openers.” According to Holly Madison, who spent years living with Hefner, he was manipulative, cold, and totalitarian. He refused to use condoms or be tested for STDs, and would require depressing group sex at regularly scheduled times. Each week the girls would have a scheduled time to go to Hefner to receive their “allowance,” and he would threaten to withhold their payment if they had dissatisfied him or broken a rule. (2017) Thus, while Hefner portrayed himself as a carefree hedonist who loved sex and pleasure, his “dark secret” was that “he didn’t even care about pleasure: he cared about the taming and conquest of women” (Robinson 2017). This attitude was conveyed in Playboy from its very first issue, which featured a photograph of Marilyn Monroe on the cover, without her consent, and in spite of the fact that she didn’t want the image made public (Hills 2017). She made $50 for the original prints and nothing for the Playboy reprints. Hefner’s sense of entitlement over Monroe’s image

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was anything but surprising: why would he ask for Monroe’s consent when his porno empire was built on the objectification and silencing of women? Playboy’s relation to the masculine gaze in the 20th century speaks to Foucault’s argument that sexual discourse doesn’t simply break taboos; it also creates an “authorized vocabulary” (1978: 17) that codifies and regulates how people can conceptualize and perform sex. This belies the notion that Hefner was a champion of sexual liberation. His porno empire didn’t liberate us from the conservative sexual mores of the past – it codified a new set of sexual mores and expectations that were patriarchal in nature. And it inscribed those patriarchal sexual mores in the developing psyches of young men. These norms were superficially about sexual freedom, but they were essentially about controlling women and girls through sexual exploitation. Today, porno magazines have been supplanted by online pornography, but that pornography has been shaped by Hefner’s misogynistic legacy. Solnit argues that modern pornography normalizes violence against women, as evidenced in a study showing that college students who report recent porn use have been repeatedly found to be more likely than others to believe ‘rape myths’ . . . [for example], that only strangers commit sexual assault or that the victim ‘asked for it’ by drinking too much or wearing ‘slutty’ clothing or by going to a club alone. (Peggy Orenstein 2016, cited in Solnit 2017b) These rape myths silence women by suppressing their testimony about how and when they want to have sex and how they can express their sexual agency. They may also be a factor in women’s susceptibility to online harassment, especially when they speak out against misogyny. In 2016, The Guardian reported that “eight of its most attacked columnists were women, two were men of color, and the most attacked of all was feminist Jessica Valenti” (Solnit 2017b). The harassment piled on women may be rooted in the pornographic logic on which women are sexual objects and deserve punishment when they demand authority over men. Pornography also has troubling racial dimensions, which I plan to address in the next chapter. Here, I will offer a brief preview, focusing on the fetishization of Asian women. Asian women are rated as the “most desirable” by all men except Asian men in surveys (NPR 2013; Brown 2018), and if this preference is informed by MSP, then it shouldn’t be seen as a compliment. MSP represents Asian women as “infantile,” “sexually subservient” (Sun 2015), “exotic and submissive” (Chang 2006) – that is, ‘hyperfeminine,’ if femininity is understood in Hefner’s sense, as subordinate to men. Feminists trace these associations to WWII, followed by the Korean and Vietnam wars, during which American servicemen frequented “military brothels” (Wang 2014). These brothels housed underage girls

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and sex slaves who were routinely raped by American soldiers. While American men may have enjoyed themselves, Asian women have testified to “repeated rapes that increased before battles, agonizing physical pain, pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and bleak conditions” (Blakemore 2019). Outside of brothels, rape was used as a military weapon to demoralize victims (Turse 2013). After WWII, U.S. Congress passed the War Bride Act, allowing U.S. servicemen to bring Asian brides back to the U.S., after which America was quickly “saturated with impressions of Japanese women as excellent homemakers with ‘wifely virtues and male pleasing attributes’” – not so different from the stereotypical geisha, “the image of an ‘Oriental Woman who exists to please men’” (Uchida, 1998: 166, cited in Chang 2006: 14). These historical events inform the current pornographic trope of the Asian Woman as childlike, passive, submissive, exotic, and a site for colonization. These sexual and racial schemas silence and smother women’s testimony. If women are seen as docile sexual objects deserving of rape, colonization, and subordination, they can’t also be seen as autonomous subjects entitled to respect, recognition, and uptake. MSP makes it harder for women to command uptake from people socialized into a pornographic mindset. This may partially explain why women’s epistemic products (including their literary fiction and humour) receive less uptake than men’s (as I shall discuss in a moment). ***** Before exploring other dimensions of epistemic injustice, I should clarify a few issues. First, I agree with Solnit that not all men contribute equally to misogynistic depictions of women. Indeed, Solnit identifies three types of men: (i) the “raging misogynists and haters,” who actively perpetrate epistemic gender bias; (ii) allies, who support gender equality; and (iii) well-meaning but ignorant men who silence women by accident (2014). The third category includes ‘mansplainers’ (coined by Solnit), who ‘explain’ complex concepts to women as if speaking to a child as opposed to an intellectual equal. This infantilizing attitude may not be intentional, but it still epistemically marginalizes women by treating them as knowledge recipients rather than knowledge producers (or epistemic patients rather than epistemic agents). In this way, it reinforces the presumption of men’s testimonial authority. Men who belong to categories (i) and (iii) both actively contribute to epistemic gender bias, whereas men who belong to category (ii) merely benefit from this imbalance of power, but are committed to dismantling it. I should also clarify that women are not discredited across every domain; women are perceived as more credible in traditionally female domains, and less credible in traditionally male domains. For example, male experts are rated as more credible in murder trials, whereas female experts are rated as more credible in custody hearings (Larson & Brodsky

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2010; Swenson et al. 1984; Walters 1994; Neal 2014; Miller 2019). This shows that gender bias is context-sensitive. That said, the domains in which women’s speech is seen as more credible (generally, domestic) are themselves less respected than the domains in which men’s speech is seen as more credible (e.g., politics), resulting in an overall epistemic deficit for women. In effect, women are seen as experts on ‘trivial’ subjects and non-experts on ‘serious’ subjects, which creates a double-bind: should we acquire expertise in a ‘frivolous’ domain, or deal with epistemic injustice in a ‘serious’ domain? Men don’t face the same lose-lose choice. Finally, I should note that pornography is becoming more diverse, which is a good thing. “Porn for women” surged in popularity by 1400% between 2015 and 2016 (Pearson 2018). Still, this trend doesn’t erase the decades of misogynistic pornography that structured the sexual preferences of young men who grew up under Hefner’s pornographic reign. And Hefner’s influence, though waning, has left an indelible mark on the porn industry. In 2016, ‘teen’ was (still) the second-most popular category on pornhub.com (Pornhub Insights 2017). The most popular category was ‘lesbian,’ which might seem to indicate that the industry is catering more to women and feminists, But Ogi Ogas offers a more sinister explanation: To the extent that lesbian erotica is popular, it can be explained by the fact that men are most aroused by visual cues that emphasize youth and downplay drama and emotional complexity. Lesbian porn, therefore, works for straight men by ‘doubling up’ those visual stimuli. . . . The only thing better than one nubile, personality-free woman is two of them. (cited in Khazan 2016; cf. Ogas & Gaddam 2011) Ogas adds, “very few men visit websites containing erotica featuring actual lesbians that is targeted at actual lesbians” (Khazan 2016). In other words, men are watching ‘lesbian erotica’ designed by, and for, cisgender men. We are still a long way from a society in which feminist pornography is the norm. The masculine gaze remains the dominant influence.

3. Women’s Literature In this section, I examine the epistemic marginalization of women within the realm of literary fiction. Solnit (2015b) notes that Esquire‘s 2015 list of “80 Books Every Man Should Read” included only one book by a woman (Flannery O’Connor). This isn’t a rare case of literary sexism, but a symptom of a deeper problem. The majority of canonized authors are white and male. As recently as 2016, students at Yale protested a two-semester course requirement on ‘canonic English literature’ in which 100% of assigned authors were

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men (Flood 2016). In a press statement, the university argued that it had a duty “to provide all students with a generous introduction to the abiding formal and thematic concerns of the English literary tradition,” notwithstanding how white and male those concerns happen to be (ibid.). The problem with Yale’s syllabus isn’t just that it marginalizes women and minorities, but also that it doesn’t expose students to the range of perspectives needed for a healthy emotional profile. In fact, there are striking similarities between classic literature and mainstream pornography, mainly because Hefner’s misogynistic depictions of women derive from the literary canon – the original source of mystifying, othering, infantilizing representations of women. Indeed, the mix of pornography and literary fiction in Playboy‘s pages, which may seem paradoxical at first glance, is actually complementary insofar as classic literature and MSP promote the same patriarchal norms. Just as classic literature was written by men for a cisgender male audience (e.g., favoured masculine pronouns, featured male protagonists), MSP is produced by men for the same audience. To be fair, Playboy did publish some feminist articles, such as a story by Margaret Atwood (Weiss 2015), but most articles were by men, and many were sexist (Pitzulo 2017). Hefner himself called feminists his “natural enemy” (Altman 2008). The interweaving of sexist literature and sexist images in Playboy’s pages solidified the cultural schema of women as sexual objects. Sandra Bartky has written that pornography “powerfully reinforces male dominance and female subordination because, by linking these phenomena to our deepest sexual desires – desires defined by an ideologically tainted psychology as instinctual – it makes them appear natural” (1990: 48). What better way to naturalize misogyny than by pairing misogynistic literature with misogynistic pornography, thereby intertwining the two symbolic representations in the male psyche? The broader literary canon is equally problematic. Solnit cites an array of famous authors who write misogynistic narratives, which are widely celebrated as timeless cultural artefacts. These authors range from Ernest Hemingway to Normal Mailer to William Burroughs to Jack Kerouac to Charles Bukowski (2015b). When we identify with their male heroes, we marginalize their victims. This is what happens when we take the perspective of Kerouac’s protagonist from On the Road, a supposed ‘free-spirited maverick,’ and ignore the perspective of the Latina farmworker whom he impregnates and leaves to raise their child on her own, without even offering to pay child support; or if we inhabit the perspective of Bukowski’s protagonist ‘Chakowski’ (a portmanteau of the author’s name), as he rapes a house-bound women on his mail route and then laughs about it, showing no sympathy for the victim; or if we identify with Nabakov’s protagonist, HH, who takes custody of his 12-year-old step-daughter after her mother dies, proceeds to rape her for years, and runs from the law, seemingly aware of his status as a child rapist. We have been ‘instructed’

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that these protagonists are heroes, not icons of toxic masculinity. But if we reject the hegemonic appeal of the masculine gaze, we find that they are in fact misogynists, child abusers, rapists, and absent fathers. Disturbingly, Lolita has been advertised by publishers as a novel about a “teenage seductress” as opposed to its true subject matter: the sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl by her de facto step-father (Talmon 2018). The cover of my own issue from high school (Figure 10.1) featured a blurb from Vanity Fair describing Nabakov’s narrative (based on the true story of a child rapist) as “the only convincing love story of our century” (Trombetta 2018). The author of the blurb, Gregor von Rezzori, parsed Lolita as hovering between “a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography” and “a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century” (Shapiro 2009, emphasis mine). While Rezzori admitted that his interpretation didn’t necessarily coincide with Nabokov’s authorial intent, he defended it as “one of the novel’s many dimensions” (ibid.). In contrast, Nabokov’s wife Vera lamented that nobody seemed to “notice the tender description of the child, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along” Solnit 2015b). The Iranian author Azar Nifisi accurately describes Lolita as “a double victim – not only her life but also her life story is taken from her” (ibid.). Nabokov himself requested a cover with “no girls,” perhaps only a “white jacket,” but subsequent publishers increasingly sexualized the eponymous rape victim on the cover, responding to a market that already traded in the hyper-sexualization of young girls (and the infantilization of adult women), thanks in part to Playboy’s massive influence (Lyons 2015). Again, Azar taps into the fact that Lolita is a victim of two types of injustice – sexual injustice as a rape victim, and epistemic injustice as someone who couldn’t tell her story, someone whose experience of sexual violence was twisted into a romantic tryst. The fact that society was so easily bamboozled into accepting HH’s distorted understanding of his relationship with Lolita (as a romance rather than a child rape) speaks to the power of the masculine gaze, a gaze that would interpret a young girl’s rape as ‘the greatest romance of our time.’ Nabokov, who couldn’t have anticipated the sexist reception of his disturbing novel, unwittingly proved that our culture is indeed a rape culture. The worry about these sexualizing and infantilizing scripts isn’t so much that they make men into rapists [though there is evidence of correlation (Orenstein 2016)], but, more so, that these scripts prevent us from identifying and empathizing with women’s standpoints – indeed, from seeing women as autonomous subjects with distinct experiences, separate from men’s rape fantasies and savior complexes and inflated egos. When we over-identify with the masculine standpoint, we lose the ability to identify with the perspectives and experiences of girls and women, and to give them uptake when their experiences from patriarchal norms.

Figure 10.1 Lolita Cover.

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In this connection, Solnit notes that “there is a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not” (2015b). That is, reading enhances empathy, but only under certain conditions. Consistent with this, research confirms that reading literary fiction improves various empathic measures, such as role-taking ability, motivation for prosocial behaviour and altruism, and theory of mind (Koopman & Hakemulder 2015). Across these dimensions, reading literature can enhance empathy. But heightened empathy isn’t necessarily a good thing. Research also shows that empathizing with in-group members in a competitive environment increases “intergroup empathy bias: the tendency not only to empathize less with out-group (relative to in-group) members, but also feel pleasure in response to their pain (and pain in response to their pleasure)” (Cikara et al. 2014). That is, empathy can incite hostility towards perceived outgroup members in an environment of ostensible competition. In a culture that depicts women as other, infantile, ‘mysterious’ (Friedan 1963), and a ‘second sex’ (Beauvoir 1949), it’s reasonable to infer that intergroup empathy bias can trigger hostility towards women as perceived outgroup members. This corroborates Solnit’s theory that reading the male-dominant literary canon will increase empathy specifically (if not exclusively) for the masculine subject, which is in conflict with empathy for the feminine subject, seen as an outgroup member. The fact that reading enhances empathy, then, isn’t necessarily a good thing, since empathy combined with gender bias can give rise to misogynistic hostility and schadenfreude. Sonit’s analysis illuminates how the popularity of the male-dominant literary canon silences and suppresses women’s voices by promoting the masculine gaze, which excludes or marginalizes women and deprives them of an equal opportunity to disseminate their narratives and experiential knowledge. ***** An important caveat is in order here. The masculine gaze is currently losing traction because of a collective effort to diversity the literary canon, along with other canons (e.g., philosophy, history). Still, “women are less likely to be published in top tier literary outlets, or to have their work reviewed, especially by men,” even though women read and publish more than men; and “women are less likely to receive reviews when writing about topics that aren’t deemed ‘feminine’” (Hu 2017). Author Jennifer Weiner characterizes this discrepancy as a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that, when a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it’s romance, or a beach book – in short, it’s something unworthy of a serious critic’s attention. (Pinter 2010)

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In the New York Times Book Review of 2016, two thirds of the reviewed authors were men, and reviewers favoured stereotypical ‘masculine’ topics above stereotypical ‘feminine’ topics (Hu 2017). This revives the old worry that women are taken less seriously when they write about ‘serious male subjects’ and are taken more seriously when they write about ‘frivolous female subjects,’ which produces a double-bind: should we write frivolously about serious subjects, or write seriously about frivolous subjects? Both choices carry epistemic costs. It’s worth mentioning that philosophy shares with literary fiction the dubious distinction of having a gender gap, and a very sizable one at that. Schwitzgebel and Jennings report that gender disparity remains large in mainstream Anglophone philosophy .  .  . By most measures, women’s involvement and visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy has increased only slowly [since the 1970s]; and by some measures there has been virtually no gain since the 1990s. (2017) This means that philosophy departments are not faring much better than English departments in their metrics of epistemic justice – in fact, they may be faring worse. Because women are underrepresented in philosophy, women’s speech is less visible in top-tier journals, at conferences, and in the classroom (Wilhelm et al. 2018), which means that women’s blame, as conveyed in women’s philosophical writing and speech, is being silenced and suppressed. Another type of speech vulnerable to epistemic marginalization is women’s humour, and women’s humour, like women’s literature, contains blame. I turn to this subject in the next section.

4. Women’s Humour Solnit notes that it is only recently that people have started to see rape jokes as un-funny, and this coincides with a growing recognition of ‘rapist jokes’ (about rapists) as funny. In 2013, comedian Sam Morril ‘joked’ (to be generous) that, “my ex-girlfriend never made me wear a condom. That’s huge. She was on the pill.” [Pause]. “Ambien” (in Solnit 2015a). The ‘joke,’ of course, is that he raped his girlfriend. Fortunately, this brand of humour is beginning to wane, largely because of an upsurge in feminist humour. One proponent of this trend is Amy Schumer, whose show, Inside Amy Schumer, uses comedy to debunk rape myths and ridicule rapists. In an episode called Football Town Nights, a new college football coach tries to explain to his team why they’re not allowed to commit rape any more. The team’s ridiculous questions and facile rationalizations (e.g., “What if she’s wearing a sexy Halloween costume?” “What if her mom is the DA and definitely won’t prosecute: can I rape?”) reveal

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rape myths to be absurd to the point of ridicule, and make a mockery of people who endorse them. At the same time, the sketch sheds a critical light on football’s relationship with rape and violence; it ends with the coach asking, “How do I get through to you boys that football isn’t about rape? It’s about violently dominating anyone that stands between you and what you want!” But comedy’s long history of rape jokes is just the tip of the iceberg: the deeper issue is that women are not considered funny according to social scripts, while men are. This bias is evidenced in the gender composition of televised stand-up, which is still male-dominant. In Netflix’s comedy programming from its inception in 1997 to 2014, 57% of comedy specials featured men, 36% featured men and women, and only 7% featured women exclusively (one being Amy Schumer). In recent years, that ratio has hardly budged. In 2014, 82% of Netflix comedy specials were maleonly, while only 14% were female-only (Muller 2016). In addition, men are paid more than women for their comedy specials (Clark & Lynch 2019). This favouritism for male comedians extends well beyond the world of professional comedy: in teacher evaluations, male professors are rated as funnier than female professors across every discipline (Khazan 2015); in intimate relationships, men appreciate humour in women less than vice versa (Barelds & Barelds-Dijkstra 2010); and men care more about whether women appreciate their own sense of humour than whether women are funny (Khazan 2015). These biases against funny women seem to have a chilling effect: research shows that women make fewer jokes when in a mixed-gender group than with women only (ibid). Feminist humour is particularly disvalued in our society. In 2012, after comedian Daniel Tosh was criticized for saying that it would be funny if a woman in his audience got raped, Louis C.K. remarked that this is an example of the “fight between comedians and feminists, which are natural enemies. Because stereotypically speaking, feminists can’t take a joke” (Solnit 2015a). This mirrors Hugh Hefner’s claim that “these chicks [feminists] are our natural enemy. It is time to do battle with them” (Altman 2008). It’s a reasonable conjecture that comedians like Louis C.K. feel threatened by the emerging popularity of feminist comedy because it challenges their presumed authority in the industry and society in general. Sexist comedians allege that feminism is a threat to their freedom of speech, but what feminism really threatens is their ability to make a living out of disrespecting women. Feminist comedian Michelle Wolf was one of the more salient targets of epistemic gender bias this year. At the 2018 White House Correspondents Association Dinner, she mocked Donald Trump and his supporters. For example, she insinuated that Roy Moore is a child rapist (“I’m 32 years old, which is an odd age: 10 years too young to host this event and 20 years too old for Roy Moore”); alluded to Fox’s sexual harassment settlements (“Fox News is here. So, you know what that means, ladies: Cover

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your drinks”); and ridiculed Mike Pence’s anti-choice views (“He thinks abortion is murder, which, first of all, don’t knock it ‘til you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it. You’ve got to get that baby out of there”). In other words, she addressed some of the topics that matter most to women – rape, sexual harassment, and reproductive autonomy; and she used humour to ridicule critics of the laws and policies that support gender equality. After her presentation, Wolf was (predictably) labelled as “mean-spirited, vulgar, and unfunny” by conservative critics (Smith 2018), which is a typical use of civility politics (as discussed in previous chapters) to silence women who defy patriarchal conventions by lambasting powerful misogynists and defending women’s rights. Wolf seems aware that epistemically confident women are stigmatized as ‘unfeminine’ and ‘not nice,’ if her 2017 HBO special Nice Lady is any indication. Therein, Wolf rejects the old adage on which women should be ‘nice’ and ‘ladylike,’ countering that “nice ladies [don’t] get shit done.” This is a rejection of the stereotype on which women with the confidence to infiltrate historically male spaces are ‘monstrous’ and deserve to be cast out. In spite of recent gains, funny women still can’t command the same uptake as men, and those who do manage to outcompete men are labelled as ‘unlikeable’ and ‘unladylike.’ These dynamics silence and suppress women’s comedic testimony. When women’s comedic testimony is dismissed and discredited, their blame, as expressed in their comedic testimony, is silenced and suppressed. This includes women’s jokes about rapists, rape myths, sexual harassers, anti-abortion advocates, and other people and practices that harm women as a group. ***** We have seen that epistemic gender bias is maintained by the logic of the masculine gaze within (1) mainstream pornography, (2) the literary canon, and (3) western comedy, though feminist activists are making strides in these contexts. Interestingly, the interplay of these vectors of epistemic injustice have been brought into focus in the popular New Yorker short story “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian (2017). This story nicely illustrates how (1)–(3) interact with each other in women’s ordinary experiences. The interplay of these epistemic dynamics makes it difficult for women to express themselves and elicit uptake for their testimony. “Cat Person” provides an opportunity to look at these dynamics more closely.

5. Cat Person “Cat Person” is the first piece of literary fiction ever to go viral. It has been widely described as a story about “bad sex” (Bennett 2017), though I think it is better understood as an illustration of how sexual expectations and experiences are structured by the masculine gaze. The story

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describes the protagonist Margot’s encounter with a stranger, Robert, who initially appears to be a sympathetic (albeit enigmatic) character, but is ultimately exposed as a misogynist. Although “Cat Person” is already one of the most-read New Yorker stories of all time, it has not been treated with the seriousness accorded to most literary fiction. As Constance Grady observes, “the trivializing of women’s stories . . . plays into one of the persistent oddities surrounding ‘Cat Person’; namely, the frequency with which readers have called it an ‘article’ or an ‘essay’ or generally treated it as a piece of nonfiction rather than as a short story” (2017). While “Cat Person” has all the hallmarks of literary fiction (e.g., it was written in the third person, it uses elevated language), the fact that it features the narrative perspective of a woman marks it as a ‘confessional tell-all’ to many readers. This exemplifies the convention on which “women’s subjectivity is not for serious literary fiction .  .  . it’s for unserious, uninteresting, unpaid-for online writing” (Grady 2017). The mislabelling of “Cat Person” as an autobiography is an example of gender bias against women’s literary authority. In spite of these dimensions of epistemic gender bias, how did “Cat Person” attract so much attention? One reason is that it gave voice to an experience shared, typically in silence, by so many women: the experience of ‘bad sex,’ though not just in the sense of unpleasant or disappointing or awkward sex, which men also experience, but in the sense of objectifying, infantilizing, and alienating sex – the kind of sex represented in Hugh Hefner’s depressingly mechanical orgies, in the modern MSP that he inspired, and in the masculinist narratives of classic literary ‘heroes’ like ‘Chakowski.’ When Margot ‘has sex’ with Robert – or, more accurately, when Robert fucks her – Robert is described as treating her like a lifeless doll: mov[ing] her through a series of positions with brusque efficiency, flipping her over, pushing her around, and she felt like a doll again, as she had outside the 7-Eleven, though not a precious one now – a doll made of rubber, flexible and resilient, a prop for the movie that was playing in his head. Robert is, in effect, assuming Hefner’s role as pornographer, posing Margot in postures that one might find in MSP, treating her as a ‘doll,’ reminiscent of the Asian child bride from Madame Butterfly, and using her for his one-sided sexual gratification. Robert isn’t concerned about the fact that Margot is 14 years younger than him (20 versus 34 years old), that she appears to be (but isn’t really) ‘a virgin,’ or that she is very intoxicated, having been illegally served alcohol by him. In fact, the power differentials between them only seem to turn Robert on. (He’s irritated when Margot reveals that she’s had sex before, and later slut-shames her for this admission.) Throughout the entire fiasco, Robert never thinks to ask Margot what she might enjoy in bed. At one point, “he slapped her

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thigh and said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you like that,’ with an intonation that made it impossible to tell whether he meant it as a question, an observation, or an order.’” This recalls Rae Langon’s observation that “pornography carries authority as instruction as well as entertainment” (1993, cited in Solnit 2017b): Robert seems to be instructing Margot to enjoy getting fucked by him, rather than asking if she enjoys it, or inquiring into what she might enjoy. There’s no affirmative consent in this asymmetrical interaction, as Margot doesn’t affirm anything – she simply doesn’t actively resist Robert’s theatrics. Langton argues further that “a high percentage of boys and young men regard men’s satisfaction as a right and women’s rights as an irrelevancy” (Langton 1993, cited in Solnit 2017b), which seems to describe Robert’s mindset: he never asks for consent or input, but takes Margot’s agreement and interest as an obvious given. Tellingly, the only time Margot experiences any pleasure is when she envisions herself through his eyes: Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect, everything about her is perfect, she’s only twenty years old, her skin is flawless, I want her so badly, I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else, I want her so bad I might die. While this might feel empowering (or at least less disgusting) to Margot, it’s actually an empathic simulation of Robert’s point of view as he objectifies her via the logic of the masculine gaze. Perhaps she’s willing to assume this perspective because she has been socialized into empathizing with the masculine perspective at the expense of her own agency. This sexual encounter involves epistemic gender bias because it erases Margot’s agency and compels her to adopt Robert’s subject position. This in turn impairs Margot’s ability to say no to his ‘instructions.’ There’s reason to think that Margot could not say no for one or more of the following reasons: (1) she doesn’t realize that Robert is violating the principle of affirmative consent; (2) she’s ‘too nice’ to hurt his ego; and (3) she worries that he might be a rapist, in which case it would be pointless, or dangerous, to say no. There’s evidence that more than one of these considerations may have passed through Margot’s mind. For example, she wonders whether he might “rape and murder her” given that she “hardly knew anything about him,” and, in other moments, she’s excessively worried about hurting his “feelings.” If Margot is silenced because of some combination of (1)–(3), then she’s a victim of epistemic injustice: she’s unable to express dissent or fully exercise her agency in the situation. Throughout the story, Margot consistently gives Robert the benefit of the doubt in spite of her many misgivings, which, if attended to, would provide evidence of Robert’s true character: And, as though fear weren’t quite ready to release its hold on her, she had the brief wild idea that maybe this [his house] was not a room at

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Although Robert isn’t a serial killer, his misogyny becomes increasingly apparent as time goes on. At first, Margot thinks that he’s a sensitive person, and she maintains this belief even after the sexual fiasco. While she lies silently next to him in bed in a state of shock or disgust, he starts “talking about his feelings for her,” confessing that during her reading week, an entire secret drama had played out in his head, one in which she’d left campus committed to him, to Robert, but at home had been drawn back to the high-school guy, who, in Robert’s mind, was some kind of brutish, handsome jock, not worthy of her but nonetheless seductive by virtue of his position at the top of the hierarchy back home in Saline. She takes this confession to indicate that Robert is a sensitive person, but in reality his ‘feelings’ are simply an expression of his masculine ego and his desire to control her. Margot’s romantic illusions are finally shattered when Robert texts her after seeing her at a bar: Is that guy you were with tonight your boyfriend . . . Or is he just some guy you are fucking . . . Sorry . . . When u laughed when I asked if you were a virgin was it because you’d fucked so many guys? . . . Are you fucking that guy right now . . . Are you . . . Are you . . . Are you . . . Answer me . . . Whore. Robert is obsessed with Margot’s sexual history because his masculine vanity doesn’t allow him to accept that Margot has slept with other men, ‘his competition.’ Deep down, he doesn’t care about Margot’s feelings, or her sexual pleasure, or her agency – he only values her as a route to high status in the patriarchal order. Indeed, Margot isn’t an individual subject in his eyes – she’s a trophy, a testament to his ‘masculinity.’ When Margot finally rejects him, he tries to invalidate her testimonial authority by calling her a ‘whore.’ This allows him to interpret her silence not as a snub or rejection, but the ravings of a ‘sexual deviant.’ And this in turn prevents him from learning anything at all from his encounter with her. “Cat Person” isn’t just a feminist narrative, but a comedy of sorts. In fact, it reads much like a comedy of manners, a genre that satirizes social conventions by personifying them in buffoonish stock characters (e.g., the ‘foppish rake’). In spite of its serious subject matter, “Cat Person” satirizes toxic masculinity by reifying it in Robert, the buffoon. When Robert undresses in front of Margot, he is described as “awkwardly bent, his belly thick and soft and covered with hair,” along with other unflattering

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adjectives. In this way, Robert is presented as a clown, and more specifically as the buffoonish personification of toxic masculinity. Robert thinks that he’s impressing Margot by guiding her through formulaic sexual poses, but he’s really stumbling through sex like a clown stumbling across a stage at the circus. He imagines that he’s a sexual virtuoso but he’s actually a sexually incompetent ass. In this way, “Cat Person” can be read as a feminist comedy of manners. If it’s not generally recognized as a comedy, this may be because feminist comedy lacks cultural uptake – something of which Roupenian seems quite aware. At one point in the story, Margot imagines herself in the future, recounting the debacle with Robert to a boyfriend: And then he [Robert] said, “You make my dick so hard,” and the [imagined] boy would shriek in agony and grab her leg, saying, “Oh, my God, stop, please, no, I can’t take it anymore,” and the two of them would collapse into each other’s arms and laugh and laugh – but of course there was no such future, because no such boy existed, and never would. Why can’t such a boy exist? Perhaps, because men are socialized into the masculine gaze, within which this story makes no sense, because it decentres masculine subjectivity and makes a mockery of it. Margot worries that she’ll never meet a boyfriend who can see Robert from her perspective, i.e., as an object of ridicule, because of the hegemony of the masculine gaze. In sum, “Cat Person” highlights multiple dimensions of epistemic gender bias. Specifically, it shows how epistemic gender bias silences and suppresses women’s sexual testimony, women’s experiential testimony, and women’s humour. The story’s success suggests that these experiences of epistemic marginalization aren’t rare aberrations, but the norm. ***** What does this analysis imply about blame? It’s notable, and disturbing, that Margot never overtly blames Robert for his objectifying, self-serving fucking of her, for harassing her about her sexual history, or for calling her a whore. She simply ‘ghosts’ him. One has to wonder: has anyone ever blamed Robert for how he treats women, or is Robert just another Donald Trump, grabbing women’s pussies to his heart’s content3? If Robert has no idea that he’s terrible at sex, that he doesn’t understand consent, that he treats women as trophies affirming his rank in the heteropatriarchal order, that he has no sense of humour, that he’s boring and self-centred, maybe this is because no one – not Margot, nor any woman he’s ever fucked – has held him responsible. Maybe Robert lives in a world, as Solnit describes it, “in which other people only exist to help reinforce [his] magnificence” (2017). When women can’t say no to men, can’t tell men that they’re bad at sex, can’t make fun of men’s sexual

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hubris, can’t tell men that it’s wrong to harass, stalk, and slut-sham them, then women can’t blame men for these transgressions. “Cat Person” is a story, in effect, about how women’s blame is silenced and suppressed by patriarchal conventions and expectations. It raises the disturbing question: How many other women will Robert fuck and harass after Margot ‘ghosts’ him? How many women has he already silenced, demeaned, and commodified? At the end of the day, Robert might not have “a house full of horrors,” but he has a closet full of skeletons, and we don’t know if they will ever be exposed. In a world where women can’t say no to men and can’t blame men for transgressions licensed and sanitized by patriarchal scripts, people like Robert will continue to exist and thrive. The popularity of “Cat Person” speaks to the hope shared by many women that their testimony will be heard, and the fear that it never will.

6. Conclusion Mainstream pornography, the literary canon, and western humour all represent, reinforce, and naturalize the masculine gaze. Thus, the dominant norms in all three spaces marginalize women’s speech, and therefore women’s blame. Fortunately, feminists like Roupenian, Wolf, and Solnit are challenging these norms and making space for women’s authentic voices.

Notes 1. It should go without saying that trans women with a ‘male’ birth-assigned sex don’t acquire the same standpoint as cisgender men because they’re women, not men; therefore, they’re victims of the masculine gaze, not proponents of it. In fact, as women who challenge conventional scientific categories, trans women are susceptible to more adversity than cisgender women, as shown in statistics on violence against trans women vs. cis women. 2. I consider the popularization of feminist pornography to be a possible solution to the negative influence of MSP, though I would not consider feminist pornography to be mainstream at this point in time. Feminist pornography is still ‘fringe,’ whereas depictions of gender-based violence and female subordination are ordinary. 3. According to his own testimony.

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Larson, B. A., & Brodsky, S. L. (2010). When cross-examination offends: How men and women assess intrusive questioning of male and female expert witnesses. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40, 811–830. Lyons, S. (2015, July 9). Cover girl: The difficulty of illustrating Lolita persists, 60 years on. The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/ cover-girl-the-difficulty-of-illustrating-lolita-persists-60-years-on-44305 Miller, A. L. (2019). Expertise fails to attenuate gendered biases in judicial decisionmaking. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(2), 227–234. Muller, O. (2016). Number crunch: Gender gaps in Netflix stand-up comedy specials. Women in Comedy. Retrieved from: www.womenincomedy.org/singlepost/2016/04/11/Number-Crunch-Gender-Gaps-in-NetFlix-Stand-Up-ComedySpecials Mulvey, L. (1997). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism, eds. Warhol-Down & Herndl. New York: Rutgers University Press. Neal, T. (2014). Women as expert witnesses: A review of the literature. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 32(2), 164–179. NPR. (2013, Nov 13). Online dating: Asian women preferred. NPR. Retrieved from: www.npr.org/2013/11/13/244991552/online-dating-asian-women-preferred Ogas, O., & Gaddam, S. (2011). A billion wicked thoughts: What the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire. Dutton/Penguin Books. Orenstein, P. (2016). Girls & sex: Navigating the complicated new landscape. Oneworld Publications. Pearson, D. (2018, Jan 10). Here’s what we learned about people’s porn habits in 2017. High Snobiety. Retrieved from: www.highsnobiety.com/p/pornhubporn-search-habits-2017/ Pinter, J. (2010, Aug 26). Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner speak out on Franzen feud: HuffPost Exclusive. Huffington Post. Retrieved from: www.huffingtonpost. com/jason-pinter/jodi-picoult-jennifer-weiner-franzen_b_693143.html Pitzulo, C. (2017, Oct 3). I’ve spent years looking at what was actually in Playboy, and it wasn’t just objectification of women. The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/ive-spent-years-looking-at-what-was-actually-inplayboy-and-it-wasnt-just-objectification-of-women-84935 Pornhub Insights. (2017, Jan 4). Pornhub’s 2016 year in review. Retrieved from: www.pornhub.com/insights/2016-year-in-review Robinson, N. J. (2017, Sep 28). Good riddance to an abusive creep. Current Affairs. Retrieved from: www.currentaffairs.org/2017/09/good-riddance-to-anabusive-creep Roupenian, K. (2017, Dec 4). Cat person. The New Yorker: Fiction. Retrieved from: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person Schumer, A., Powell, D., Giamatti, P., Posey, P., Charles, J., Comedy Central (Firm), & Paramount Pictures, Inc. (2015). Inside Amy Schumer. Schwitzgebel, E., and Jennings, C. D. (2017). Women in philosophy: Quantitative analyses of specialization, prevalence, visibility, and generational change. Public Affairs Quarterly 31(2), 83–106. Schwyzer, H. (2012, Feb 8). Why do men love ‘barely legal’ porn? Jezebel. Retrieved from: https://jezebel.com/why-do-men-love-barely-legal-porn-5881335 Shapiro, M. A. (2009, Feb 25). Sourcing a blurb. Seaspawn and Seawreck. Retrieved from: https://mikeashapiro.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/sourcing-a-blurb/

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Smith, K. (2018, Apr 30). Even liberals decry the White House Correspondents Dinner fiasco. The National Review. Retrieved from: www.nationalreview. com/2018/04/michelle-wolf-speech-even-liberals-decry-vulgar-unfunny/ Smith, M. (2017, Oct 10). Playboy, Brook Shields, and the feitshisation of young girls. The Conversation: Performing Femininity. Retrieved from: https:// theconversation.com/playboy-brooke-shields-and-the-fetishisation-of-young-girls85255 Solnit, R. (2017a). The mother of all questions. Chicago: Haymarket Books. ———. (2017b, Mar 8). Rebecca Solnit on silence, pornography, and feminist literature. Literary Hub. Retrieved from: https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-onsilence-pornography-and-feminist-literature/ ———. (2015a, Aug 10). If rape jokes are finally funny, it’s because they’re targeting rape culture. The Guardian. Retrieved from: www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2015/aug/10/jokes-finally-funny-because-culture-at-the-butt-ofthem ———. (2015b, Dec 17). Men explain Lolita to me. Literary hub. Retrieved from: https://lithub.com/men-explain-lolita-to-me/ ———. (2014, Nov 2). The war is over (if you want it), feminism and men. Tom’s Dispatch. Retrieved from: www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175917/ Sun, A. (2015, Apr 13). Mainstream porn has taught you a lot about Asian Female Sexuality – but it’s all a direct result of racism. Everyday Feminism. Retrieved from: https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/04/porn-asian-woman-sexuality/ Swenson, R. A., Nash, D. L., & Roos, D. C. (1984). Source credibility and perceived expertness of testimony in a simulated child-custody case. Professional Psychology: Research and practice, 15(6), 891. Talmon, N. (2018, Apr 3). The real story that inspired ‘Lolita’ is somehow more disturbing than the book. Weird History (blog). Retrieved from: https:// medium.com/@editors_91459/the-real-story-that-inspired-lolita-is-somehowmore-disturbing-than-the-book-d14167cd157a Trombetta, S. (2018, Sep 11). The real ‘Lolita’ brings to life the true story of the kidnapping that may have inspired Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel. Bustle. Retrieved from: www.bustle.com/p/the-real-lolita-brings-to-life-thetrue-story-of-the-kidnapping-that-may-have-inspired-vladimir-nabokovsfamous-novel-11852501 Turse, N. (2013, Mar 19). Rape was rampant during the Vietnam war: Why doesn’t history remember this? Mother Jones. Retrieved from: www.motherjones. com/politics/2013/03/rape-wartime-vietnam/ Walters, A. P. (1994). Gender and the role of expert witnesses in the federal courts. Georgetown Law Journal, 83, 635–664. Wang, J. (2014, July 30). The Madame Butterfly effect: Tracing the history of a fetish. Bitch Media. Retrieved from: www.bitchmedia.org/article/the-madamebutterfly-effect-asian-fetish-history-pop-culture Weiss, S. (2015, Oct 13). 10 iconic Playboy articles everyone should know, because you can actually read it just for the articles. Bustle. Retrieved from: www.bustle.com/articles/116648-10-iconic-playboy-articles-everyone-shouldknow-because-you-actually-can-read-it-just-for-the Wilhelm, I., Conklin, S. L., & Hassoun, N. (2018). New data on the representation of women in philosophy journals: 2004–2015. Philosophical Studies, 175(6), 1441–1464.

11 POC’s Blame in Conditions of Epistemic Injustice

1. Introduction The last chapter argued that women’s blame is marginalized in conditions of epistemic injustice. The current chapter makes the same case for the blaming speech of People of Color (POC). I argue that POC are vulnerable to race-based epistemic injustice, or what I shall call ‘epistemic racial bias,’ in addition to epistemic gender bias, which interacts with epistemic racial bias in complex ways. The current analysis adds depth to the previous chapter by looking at how race and gender are co-constructed through the lens of white masculinity, or the ‘white masculine gaze.’ This standpoint produces gendered and racialized forms of epistemic injustice (namely, epistemic gender bias and epistemic racial bias), which affect differently racialized identities in distinct ways. The ensuing analysis will follow the structure of the last chapter, adding one epistemic context: the entertainment industry. Hence, I will analyze epistemic injustice across four male-dominant and white-dominant spaces: (1) mainstream pornography, (2) the entertainment business, (3) literary fiction, and (4) western humour. Within these spaces, gender bias and racial bias intersect to epistemically marginalize racialized subjects in distinct ways.

2. Mainstream Pornography, Sexual Stereotypes, and Race In the previous chapter, I argued that women are sexually objectified by the masculine gaze, which sees women as other and lesser than men, and therefore less capable of knowing things about the world and testifying credibly about their experiences. One vehicle for the masculine gaze is mainstream pornography (MSP), which presents women as objects of male desire and control as opposed to subjects in their own right. Because MSP has been so influential in the west, it has promoted epistemic gender bias across many epistemic spaces. In what follows, I will make a similar case for POC, who are objectified by sexualizing scripts in distinct ways across all genders. Specifically,

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racialized minorities tend to be sexualized as either childish and subservient, or sexually deviant and threatening, or a (paradoxical) combination of the two. These dualisms function to silence and suppress POC’s speech, no matter what they do. To limit the scope of the analysis, I will focus on four race-gender intersections: Asian Femininity, Asian Masculinity, Black Femininity, and Black Masculinity. Once again, this should be seen as a rough sketch of the terrain, not the full picture. 2.1. Asian Women Asian women, as we saw in the last chapter, are rated as the “most sexually desired” by all men except Asians (NPR 2013), but this desirability status doesn’t confer epistemic benefits – it creates epistemic disadvantages. As aforementioned, stereotypes of Asian Femininity represent Asian women as “dually exotic and subservient creatures able to please men in special ways” (Chang 2006). This racial-sexual stereotype, recall, was popularized during the Vietnam, Korean, and World Wars of the 20th century, when American soldiers had sex with and raped Asian sex workers and sex-trafficking victims, many of whom were underage. After U.S. Congress passed the War Bride Act, Asian women were depicted as “war prizes” and symbols of American imperial power (Chang 2006), and American culture was quickly “saturated with impressions of Japanese women as excellent homemakers with ‘wifely virtues’ and malepleasing attributes,” transforming Asian women from war trophies into pliant domestic servants in the social imagination (Uchida 1998: 166; cited in Chang 2006: 14). These racial-sexual schemas persist today, as Asian women still tend to be stereotyped as either “exotic and submissive or treacherous and lustful” (Chang 2006). Both sides of this double-bind are epistemically silencing, as ‘submissive women’ are not testimonial authorities, and ‘treacherous outsiders’ are not credible sources of knowledge. 2.2. Asian Men In contrast to Asian women, Asian men are rated as the “least sexually preferred” (NPR 2013). This is the flip-side of the hyper-sexualization of Asian women: Asian men have been de-sexualized and de-masculinized by cultural schemas. As Michael Park observes, “many contemporary stereotypes of Asian American men embody an emasculated image, and unlike the hyper-masculinized image and perceived menacing sexual threats associated with the Black male body, Asian American males are viewed as effeminate, asexual and passive” (2013: 5). At the same time, Asian men who don’t conform to this stereotype are seen as sexually deviant and threatening. Thus, Asian Masculinity is mythologized as either “sexually excessive” or “asexually feminine,” both of which conflict with

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the “‘normal’ heterosexual gender norms implicit in White middle-class families” (Kim & Chung 2005: 75). This dualism can be traced back to the perception of Asian men as threats to American imperialism during the 20th-century wars in Asia, and later, threats to white men’s dominance in the America patriarchal order. When Asian men began to immigrate to America in large numbers, they were regarded as “‘inscrutable, sneaky, competitive,” and as “military, cultural, or economic enemies and unfair competitors for education and jobs’” (Yen 2000: 6, cited in Park 2013: 9). To protect the supremacy of the white male subject, American policy-makers introduced “immigration practices and laws [that] barred citizenship to Asian men, and in effect designated them as ‘other’ and emblematically ‘non-male’” (Park 2013: 6). These laws and practices included “restricting [Asian men’s] access to heterosexual norms and ideals, including nuclear family relations,” and limiting Asian men’s employment opportunities to femininecoded work such as “cooking, cleaning, and washing” (Okihiro 2001: 76, cited in Park 2013: 11). These laws and policies forced Asian American men into feminine-coded social roles, reinforcing the stereotype of Asian Masculinity as either domestic and docile, or unruly and treacherous. This double-bind, which still exists, essentially denies Asian men the presumption of testimonial authority within the American context. Another reason for the production of this script was to create a “racial wedge” between Asian Americans and other racialized minorities (Chow 2017). In the U.S., Asian Americans have been increasingly mythologized as ‘model minorities’ who are complacent with the racial-sexual contract that privileges white masculinity. This stereotype was fiercely promoted “within the context of the civil rights movement,” during which Images of effeminate Asian men and submissive Asian women were used to counter images of violent and vociferous African Americans and feminists and to demonstrate that familial stability, social mobility, and ethnic assimilation could be achieved without militant social activism. Thus, the Asian American model minority became the symbolic antithesis of militant Civil Rights activists and feminist groups. (Kim & Chung 2005: 75) While Asian Americans are compared favourably to other racialized minorities (and feminists), they are not exempt from objectification or epistemic marginalization. They are still subject to “the whims of racial antagonism” and “the image of Asian Americans as ‘forever foreigners’” (Tuan 1998, cited in Kim & Chung 2005: 75), which carries epistemic costs. These stereotypes persist to this day, as revealed in the results of machine-learning algorithms showing that the adjectives most associated with Asians in 2018 were “inhibited,” “passive” and “sensitive”

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(Shashkvich 2018). This is an improvement over the top adjectival associations from the 1910s, which were “barbaric,” “monstrous,” and “cruel” (ibid.), but the modern stereotypes still reflect the othering lens of the postwar propaganda machine. The stereotyping of Asian Masculinity as either-submissive-or-threatening deprives Asian men of epistemic status, as both sides of the divide involve epistemic defects. 2.3. African American Women Similar to Asian men, African American women are rated as the “least sexually preferred” women (NPR 2013). This disfavouring of African American Femininity can be traced back to slavery in the U.S., under which African American women were seen as commodities to be traded and used by white landowners. Naomi Zack observes that, within the plantation economy, “slaves were livestock to be bred as other livestock, for eventual monetary profit” (1997: 149); the black female race was sexualized by white slave owners due to its profitability as a medium for the reproduction of black children. At the same time, black male race was desexualized and black males denied aspects of masculine gender, due to white male dominance and competitiveness. (1997: 9) But Black women weren’t sexualized in the same way as Asian women, i.e., as war trophies and obedient housewives: they were sexualized as potential breeders of future generations of slaves. And because Black women could produce ‘too many’ or ‘too few’ offspring for an enslaver’s needs, their sexuality was seen as problematic – something to be controlled and disciplined by the white aristocracy. This schema of Black women’s sexuality persists in modern stereotypes, as noted by Zack: “holding social class constant, black women who have more than two or three children are popularly stereotyped as irresponsible, selfish, over-sexed, and scheming” (1997: 151) – a myth crystalized in the stereotype of the “Welfare Queen” (Pilgrim 2002). This is a sharp contrast with favourable stereotypes of white maternity: “Motherhood is somehow able to spiritualize white women while at the same time it reveals what whores black women really are” (Zack 1997: 151). The negative associations with Black maternity were sustained in the 20th century through federally funded eugenics programs, under which African American women were involuntarily sterilized and designated as “degenerate stock” (Ko 2016). These programs inspired Hitler to pronounce admiringly, “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings towards a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German

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Republic, but the United States” (Bold 2015). The U.S. was (accurately) described as the vanguard of racist eugenics. While cultural schemas represent Black women’s maternity as a social problem, they simultaneously represent the rape of African American bodies as unthinkable, a “conceptual impossibility,” which serves to justify “the American tradition of failing to recognize, in law, and public and private morality, acts of rape which were committed against black women” (Zack 1997: 152). Under slavery, African American women were raped by white enslavers without recourse because they were designated as property. This practice has been carried forward by the cultural stereotype of the “Jezebel Whore” with an “insatiable appetite for sex,” which is used to rationalize sexual violence against African American women today (Pilgrim 2002). Zack’s analysis reveals Black women’s ‘undesirability’ to be a function of negative stereotypes about Black women’s maternity (‘irresponsible’ and ‘excessive’), and Black women’s sexuality (‘promiscuous’ and ‘irrepressible’). These are in contrast to stereotypes of white women’s maternity as cleansing and purifying, and white women’s sexuality as ‘chaste’ and ‘civilized.’ These stereotypes epistemically marginalize African American women by depicting them as either property or sexual deviants, each of which is incompatible with testimonial authority. This denies them the presumption of epistemic agency and of authority in moral conversations. 2.4. African American Men African American men are rated as less “sexually preferred” than white men (NPR 2013), again, because of the interplay of racism and sexism in the white masculine gaze. Naomi Zack argues that “the use of Black males for breeding more slaves” was rendered redundant by white men’s ability to rape Black women to replenish the stock of slaves; therefore, Black men’s sexuality “would have been rendered at best unnecessary and at worst a competitive threat to white men” (1997: 152). Black Masculinity was seen as a problem because it could lead to ‘overbreeding’ or ‘sexual competition.’ Because Black male sexuality was seen as redundant, “it would of course have seemed exaggerated from a white male perspective,” and this perception was one of the things that gave rise to the myth of the Violent Black Man (1997: 153). Continuing this line of argument, Tommy Curry writes that Black Masculinity has been mythologized as paradoxically threatening and childish. In the white intellectual tradition, ethnologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have “exerted great efforts to describe Black males as childlike and immature” (Curry 2018: 249). One of the preeminent anthropologists of the 19th century, Franz Pruner-Bey, proclaimed that “the black man is to white man what woman is to man in general, a loving being and being of pleasure” (Hunt 1864: 39, cited in Curry 2018: 249). At the same time, this “denial of Black manhood – his effeminization – did not stop

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ethnologists from believing that slavery contained the brutish nature of the Black male, and that emancipation unleashed the primordial rage of Black male rapist” (Curry 2018: 250). One Texas physician pronounced that, “despite torture and certain death staring him in the face, the rape fiend, the negro sadist, wreaks his vengeance and spite on some innocent child and gratifies, in that unnatural manner, his abominable lust” (Daniel 1904: 459, cited in Curry 2017: 250). During the Jim Crow era, social scientists perpetuated the myth that “there is much more aggression and violence with the Negro caste than there is in the white code” (Dollard 1937: 269, cited in Curry 2018: 252). These conflicting mythologies erected a “boogeyman” of Black Masculinity, seen as somehow childish and criminal, naïve and treacherous, asexual and sexually aggressive, all at the same time. These double-binds deny Black men the very possibility of a coherent cultural identity, as well as the presumption of testimonial authority, as children and rapists both lack presumed credibility. In this connection, Curry quotes Arthur F. Saint-Aubin as attesting that, “even when black men are the ostensible subjects, [they are in fact objects] of workshops, special journals editions, etc., they are still marginalized theoretically and compared to a norm by which they are usually judged lacking” (1994: 1056, cited in Curry 2017: 236). Curry adds that “Black men are censored” under the mythology of Black Masculinity, and “under this gender schema, Black males emerge as distorted and pathological in their responses to anti-Black racism/white supremacy” (2018: 237). That is, Black men’s testimony about racial oppression is discredited by schemas about Black Masculinity that depict them as angry and violent. This boogeyman of Black Masculinity is perhaps epitomized in the American classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, in which a Black man (Tom Robinson) is falsely accused of raping a white woman – a lie that the whole town easily buys into because the American myth of the Black Male Rapist is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of society. Harper Lee’s classic is truly the archetypal story of American history, though not for the reasons that school children are usually taught; rather, it’s because it depicts one of the most abiding stereotypes, that of the Black Male Rapist. This is ironic because it was actually white men who were exclusively allowed to rape their Black slaves as well as their white wives. To protect this exclusive prerogative, white intellectuals constructed an incoherent boogeyman of Black Masculinity that depicted Black men as both children and rapists, fit for subordination under the white male subject (Curry 2018). Because of these negative stereotypes, Black men are epistemically marginalized. Whether you are a child or a sexual predator, your testimony is not authoritative or credible. ***** In sum, various intersections of race and gender result in complex otherings of POC, which gives rise to specific vectors of epistemic marginalization. In my last chapter, I drew on Rebecca Solnit’s work in feminist

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sociology to show how women as a group are marginalized by pornographic representations of women as sexual objects as opposed to subjects in their own right. The present analysis allows us to make finergrained discriminations amongst differently racialized feminine and masculine identities. On this analysis, Asian women are sexualized as either infantile and obedient or sexually deviant and treacherous. Asian men as sexualized as either sexual competition or docile servants. Black women are sexualized as either breeders of an oppressed labour class or ‘Jezebels’ with unruly sexual appetites. And Black men are sexualized as either children or violent rapists. All of these stereotypes erase the subjectivities of their target by imagining them as simplistic caricatures, either subordinate to the hegemony of the cisgender masculine gaze, or a threat to its authority. These stereotypes all involve double-binds that epistemically marginalize their object. Asian women are either sexual objects or deceptive traitors; Asian men are either military enemies or complacent subordinates; Black women are either ‘Jezebels’ or ‘Welfare Mothers’; Black men are either children or criminals. Each of these dichotomies involves epistemic deficits that impugn the target’s authority. One cannot be both an epistemic authority, on a par with a white male speaker, and also a ‘treacherous seductress,’ a ‘complacent servant,’ a ‘Welfare Mother,’ or a ‘violent rapist.’ Whether the target is seen as a docile sexual object or a threatening outsider, they are perceived as less credible than the white masculine subject, the source of these silencing and alienating dualisms.

3. Television and Film The above racial schemas are not restricted to pornography and sexual representations. They are also visible in the television and film industries, which similarly silence and smother POC. I’ll briefly outline some of these epistemic effects to illustrate the magnitude of the problem. To begin: women, African Americans, and Asian Americans are underrepresented in Hollywood films. Out of a random sample of 414 stories, “half the films and TV shows . . . had no Asian speaking characters, and more than one-fifth . . . had no black characters with dialogue,” while “just one-third of characters with speaking roles were women” (Deggans 2016). Researchers concluded that “the film industry still functions as a straight, white, boy’s club” (ibid.). When POC act as directors, writers and producers, their films tend to be more diverse, but they rarely fill these gatekeeper positions (ibid.). This is one of the reasons why, over the last 10 years, there has been almost no improvement in “the numbers of women and minorities represented in entertainment productions” in the U.S. (Austin 2016; cf. Smith et al. 2017). The entertainment industry is a major source of cultural narratives – perhaps the main source. This industry produces stories that are consumed by millions of people, and these stories contain moral testimony.

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If POC are underrepresented at every level of the industry, then their moral testimony is not going to be broadcast or consumed as much as white people’s, and this will undermine its perceived credibility. Thus, the underrepresentation of POC in film and television translates into the erasure and suppression of their experience based blame and praise. Fortunately, these norms are beginning to change, though not as quickly as one would hope. Black-dominant productions like Black Panther, Get Out, and Dear White People have been watched by millions of people, and these cinematic products don’t just feature Black people in prominent roles – they also offer critiques of white supremacy and racism in America, critiques rooted in Black people’s lived experiences. These are recent offerings, however, and they don’t erase the industry’s history of racism, which flourished during the so-called ‘Golden Age of Hollywood.’ This era includes films that glamorized slavery, like Gone with the Wind; films that presented POC as racist caricatures, like Breakfast at Tiffany’s I.Y. Yonoshi, played by Mickey Rooney; and films that don’t include any POC in speaking roles, viz., the majority of films from this era. Contemporary film and television productions have carried this tradition forward – for example, by whitewashing African American narratives (e.g., Friends is allegedly a remake of Living Single (Blay 2017); casting white people as POC (e.g., Ghost in the Shell, The Outsider, The Prince of Persia); and casting white actors and Black actors in different shows with the same themes (e.g., Beverly Hills 90210 alongside A Different World, Full House alongside Family Matters). When POC are depicted as racial stereotypes, or as supporting characters in white people’s narratives, they are victims of epistemic injustice. Within these white narratives, POC are presented, not as individuals with autonomous standpoints, but as sidekicks and plot devices for white people’s personal growth and formative experiences. The marginalization of POC in television and film thus perpetuates the marginalization of POC’s testimony in general. Their experiential grounds for blame and praise are erased from the cultural record.

4. The Literary Canon Another site of epistemic racial bias is the literary canon, which privileges the voices of white authors. Most adults grew up with a predominantly white and male literary canon, the influence of which will not be overturned for some time. And even in the last decade, diversity in literature hasn’t kept pace with demographic changes. According to Devin Black, although “half of all school edged children are non-white,” only “10.5 percent [of children’s books published in 2013] featured a person of color” (Black 2018). “In 2016, this number doubled to 22 percent, but white is still the ‘default identity’” (ibid.). There are similar diversity deficits at the university level.

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For example, in college reading lists, the top-5 rated books are by white authors, and they all feature white characters (Osborn 2016). Similarly, Authors of Color are underrepresented in literature reviews. In 2012, 88% of authors reviewed by the New York Times were white males (Hess 2012), and in 2013, only two out of 23 authors featured in the Paris Review’s ‘top authors of the decade’ were POC (Berry 2013). Because literary criticism signals respect for the featured author, the underrepresentation of Authors of Color in literary reviews reflects a lack of respect for those authors. These epistemic marginalizations could have an effect on our moral attitudes. In the last chapter, I discussed Rebecca Solnit’s theory that the underrepresentation of women in literary fiction primes us to empathize more with men than women, producing a gender empathy gap that favours men. I pointed out that this theory is consistent with research on intergroup empathy bias, which indicates that empathy enhances hostility towards perceived out-group members in conditions of ostensible competition. And this in turn helps to explain why so many readers are able to sympathize with misogynists, child rapists, and absent fathers. A similar analysis can be applied to POC, who are also ‘othered’ by the literary canon, albeit in distinct ways. This othering can be seen in the Guardian’s list of the 100 Greatest Novels of All Time (2015), in which the top five entries – Don Quixote, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, and Tom Jones – are all written by white men, all feature white male protagonists, and almost all exclude POC except in the roles of racial caricatures. In Don Quixote, Cervantes depicts POC as liars and thieves, deserving of exile from Spain (viz., Johnson 1999). Pilgrim’s Progress omits POC entirely, except for an arguably racist passage in which “Fool” and “Want-wit” wash an Etheopian man “with [the] intention of making him white, but the more they washed him the blacker he was” (Bunyan 1909: S8.357). Robinson Crusoe presents the protagonist’s island-mate Friday as an icon of The Noble Savage, a caricature of a mysterious and magical outsider. Though this stereotype may be preferable to its ‘brutal savage’ predecessor, both have long been recognized as “fantasies of the European mind that kept Indigenous peoples in a suspended state of either elevated purity or perpetual evil” (Gardner 2016). Tom Jones doesn’t include any POC, but the white protagonist accepts the background conditions of slavery as natural and normal. Gulliver’s Travels – though interpreted by some as a symbolic critique of the slave trade – uses (by modern standards) racist language, and only criticizes slavery (if at all) in symbolic form, not as a concrete social institution. While some of these books (particularly Gulliver’s Travels) may have been progressive for their time, they do not present ameliorative narratives by contemporary standards. They don’t analyze modern systems of racial oppression, such as the racial wealth gap and racial segregation. Instead, these literary classics either omit POC entirely, or present them as racial caricatures. There are far more emancipatory books available

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in contemporary libraries – books like Octavia Butler’s The Parable of Sower (1993), for instance, which invites us to explore a post-apocalyptic America as experienced by a Black woman. Reading books that present Black heroes is important if we want to be able to empathize with the standpoint, subjectivity, and intrinsic dignity of the Black subject. On this score, there is evidence that white people empathize more with other white people than POC, resulting in a ‘racial empathy gap.’ In the medical context, studies show that nurses assume that Black people feel less pain than white people (Forgiarini et al. 2011), physicians underestimate pain in Black patients (Staton et al. 2007), and physicians withhold opioids from Hispanic, Black, and Asian patients more than white patients (Forgiarini et al. 2011). These empathy effects are predicted by the dominance of white perspectives in the literary canon, which promotes empathy for white people. These effects most likely play a role in our moral judgments, including our judgments of who deserves blame and praise.

5. Western Humour Racial biases also strongly shape the comedy world, which is, again, predominantly white and male. When POC are represented in sitcoms, for example, they are often depicted as racial stereotypes. Salient examples include Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from The Simpsons, Han from Two Broke Girls, and Buckwheat from The Little Rascals. Sitcoms that don’t trade in racial stereotypes tend to erase or marginalize POC, as can be seen in Friends, Seinfeld, and Sex in the City – all of which are set in New York, one of the most diverse cities in America, but mysteriously don’t feature any POC in the central cast. When filmmakers try to produce shows starring Black actors, they often “struggle to find financing from the biggest movie studios, relying instead on independent producers, black investors and even crowdfunding” (Kang et al. 2014). This was the case for Selma, Top 5, Dear White People, 12 Years a Slave, and The Butler, all of which were denied funding from major studios, and had to turn to alternative financing options. Fortunately, POC are changing the norms of comedy by making fun of racists, just as women are changing the norms of comedy by making fun of sexists. I’ll give a few examples to illustrate. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are some of the most wellknown comedians of the day, largely due to the success of their eponymous comedy sketch show. The show highlights, ridicules, and sheds a critical light on racism in America. In an episode called “Confederate Reenactors” (2012), Key and Peele’s characters show up unannounced at a Civil War reenactment dressed as Jim Crow racial stereotypes, which makes the reenactors uncomfortable and forces them to explain why they don’t want Black people to participate in their event. The leader insists that they’re “not pro-slavery,” they’re just trying to “preserve the pure and beautiful slice of southern history,” to which his fellow reenactor

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adds, “yeah, pure and beautiful slice.” By infiltrating the reenactment poised as racial caricatures, Key and Peele’s characters reveal the enactors’ true motive (of racism), and underscore the absurdity of the reenactors’ facile justifications, all of which tacticly avoid referring to slavery. Amber Ruffin has also produced influential comedy sketches that use comedy as a tool to reveal the absurdity of racism. In a sketch on The Late Show (2018), she appeared as a member of a trio called the “Go Back to Your Country Girls,” a ’60s-style musical ensemble dressed in sequined dresses and elbow-length gloves who speak in an affected mid-Atlantic accent. The women sing their responses to Donald Trump’s advisement to four Congresswomen of Color to go back to their countries of origin (actually America in three cases, while the fourth Congresswoman is a naturalized citizen). Ruffin explains that, as a Black woman, whenever she criticizes America’s laws or policies, critics tend to respond with “the same old song we’ve heard a thousand times before: Go back to your country . . . Go back to Africa.” She explains that this is “confusing, because I’m not from Africa, and Africa’s not a country.” Hence, the sketch combines comedy and musical theatre to ridicule the racist logic of people who challenge POC’s status as full citizens in order to silence them. Ruffin shows these critics to be ignorant about race, citizenship laws, and even basic geography. These are just a couple of examples of how Comedians of Color are supplanting racist humour with anti-racist humour, thereby dismantling the racist conventions of the comedy world. By using humour in ameliorative ways, Comedians of Colour are challenging racist comedic conventions while normalizing jokes about racists and racist policies in the U.S.

6. Concluding Remarks In the last chapter, I argued that women’s blame is silenced and suppressed by epistemic gender bias, particularly within male-dominant spaces such as entertainment, literary fiction, and comedy. Because these domains have a significant impact on the social imaginary, these patterns of marginalization inevitably affect our day-to-day epistemic interactions, and thus our perceptions of each other’s testimonial authority. In this chapter, I have argued that POC’s blame is epistemically marginalized by epistemic racial bias in these same male-dominant spaces, which are also white-dominant spaces – spaces that privilege the standpoint of white masculinity, or the ‘white masculine gaze.’ This gaze excludes, misrepresents, and objectifies POC, thereby erasing their subjectivity and experiences. When POC’s voices are excluded from knowledge-producing spaces, their blame and praise is lost. Because of these erasures, we fail to find experientially certified criticisms of racial oppression in the cultural record. And when we cannot locate these criticisms, we struggle, as a culture, to accord POC’s testimony the credibility that it deserves. In sum,

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the objectification and underrepresentation of POC in dominant epistemic spaces reinforces asymmetries of power between racialized speakers and white speakers, reproducing historical epistemic inequalities.

References Austin, P. (2016, Feb 22). Hollywood whitewashed: White men dominate film industry, studies confirm. Hollywood Patch. Retrieved from: https://patch. com/california/hollywood/hollywood-whitewashed-white-men-dominate-filmindustry-studies-confirm-0 Berry, L. (2013, Feb 15). Women writers and bad writers. Talking Writing: Creating Meaning through Personal Stories. Retrieved from: http://talkingwriting. com/women-writers-and-bad-interviews Black, D. (2018, Apr 25). Reconstructing the canon. Harvard Political Review. Retrieved from: https://harvardpolitics.com/author/devonblack/ Blay, Z. (2017, Aug 7). This detail about ‘Friends’ will change the way you watch Jay-Z’s new video. Huffington Post. Retrieved from: www.huffingtonpost.com/ entry/friends-jay-z-moonlight-living-single_us_59888c22e4b07e7f2150dc1b Bold, M. G. (2015). Op-Ed: It’s time for California to compensate its forcedsterilization victims. Los Angelas Times. Retrieved from: https://www.latimes. com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0306-bold-forced-sterilization-compensation-2015 0306-story.html Bunyan, J. (1909). Pilgrim’s progress (Vol. 15). PF Collier & Son. Butler, O. E. (1993). Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central, 2000. Chang, M. (2006). Made in the USA: Rewriting images of the Asian fetish. Scholarly Commons. Retrieved from: https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1005&context=uhf_2006 Chow, K. (2017, Apr 19). ‘Model minority’ myth again used as a racial wedge between Asians and Blacks. NPR. Retrieved from: www.npr.org/sections/ codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-aracial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks Curry, T. J. (2018). Killing boogeymen: Phallicism and the misandric mischaracterizations of Black males in theory. Res Philosophica, 95(2), 235–272. Deggans, E. (2016, Feb 22). Hollywood has A major diversity problem, USC study finds. NPR. Retrieved from: www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/ 02/22/467665890/hollywood-has-a-major-diversity-problem-usc-study-finds Dollard, J. (1937). Caste and class in a southern town. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Forgiarini, M., Gallucci, M., & Maravita, A. (2011). Racism and the empathy for pain on our skin. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 108. Gardner, H. (2016, Feb 24). Explainer: The myth of the noble savage. The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-mythof-the-noble-savage-55316 Hess, A. (2012, June 11). Why 88% of books reviewed by the New York Times are written by white authors. Poynter. Retrieved from: www.poynter.org/news/ why-88-books-reviewed-new-york-times-are-written-white-authors Hunt, J. (1864). The Negro’s place in nature. New York: Van Evrie Horton & Co.

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Johnson, C. B. (1999). Introduction. In A. J. Cruz & C. B. Johnson (eds.), Cervantes and his postmodern constituencies (Vol. 2114). New York & London: Psychology Press. Kang, C., Thompson, K., & Harwell, D. (2014, Dec 23). Hollywood’s race problem: An insular industry struggles to change. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/hollywoods-race-probleman-insular-industry-struggles-to-change/2014/12/19/d870df04-8625-11e4-9534f79a23c40e6c_story.html?utm_term=.1ab1cfca3355 Kim, M., & Chung, A. Y. (2005). Consuming orientalism: Images of Asian/ American women in multicultural advertising. Qualitative Sociology, 28(1), 67–91. Ko, L. (2016, Jan 29). Unwanted sterilization and eugenics programs in the United States. PBS. Retrieved from: www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwantedsterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/ NPR. (2013, Nov 13). Online dating: Asian women preferred. NPR Special Series: Beauty Shop. Retrieved from: www.npr.org/2013/11/13/244991552/ online-dating-asian-women-preferred Okihiro, G. Y. (2001). Common ground: Reimagining American history. Princeton University Press. Osborn, E. (2016, Feb 18). What college reading lists can tell you about quality, diversity of education across schools. Good Call. Retrieved from: www.goodcall. com/news/what-college-reading-lists-can-tell-you-about-quality-diversity-ofeducation-across-schools-04699 Park, M. (2013). Asian American masculinity eclipsed: A legal and historical perspective of emasculation through US immigration practices. The Modern American, 8(1), 5–17. Peele, J., & Key, K. M. (2012). Comedy Central (Firm) & Paramount Pictures Corporation. Key & Peele: Season 2, Episode 1. Pilgrim, D. (2002). The Jezebel Stereotype. The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia: Ferris State University. Retrieved from: https://ferris.edu/jimcrow/ jezebel/ Porn Hub. (2018, Jan 9). Porn hub insights: Year in review. Retrieved from: www. pornhub.com/insights/2017-year-in-review Shashkvich, A. (2018, April 3). Stanford researchers use machine-learning algorithm to measure changes in gender, ethnic bias in U.S. Stanford News. Retrieved from: https://news.stanford.edu/2018/04/03/algorithms-reveal-changes-stereotypes/ Smith, S. L., Choueti, M., & Pieper, K. (2017). Inequality in 900 popular films: Examining portrayals of gender, race/ethnicity, LGBT, and disability from 2007–2016. Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative. Retrieved from: https://annenberg.usc.edu/sites/default/files/Dr_Stacy_L_Smith-Inequality_ in_900_Popular_Films.pdf Staton, L. J., Panda, M., Chen, I., Genao, I., Kurz, J., Pasanen, M., . . . Rosenberg, E. (2007). When race matters: Disagreement in pain perception between patients and their physicians in primary care. Journal of the National Medical Association, 99(5), 532. The 100 best novels written in English: full list. (2015, Aug 17). The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/17/the-100-bestnovels-written-in-english-the-full-list Uchida, A. (1998). The orientalization of Asian women in America. Women’s Studies International Forum, 21(2), 161–174. Zack, N. (1997). The American sexualization of race. In Race/sex: Their sameness, difference and interplay, ed. Naomi Zack. Routledge.

12 Against Eliminativism

1. Introduction A small but influential minority of philosophers endorse eliminativism, the view that we should eliminate our belief in responsibility and our corresponding responsibility practices (blame, praise). Notable eliminativists include Bruce Waller (2011, 2015) and Neil Levy (2011). There is considerable overlap between eliminativist concerns and intersectional feminist concerns, as eliminativism is often presented as a solution to the pervasiveness of inequality and injustice in our cultural responsibility practices. Unlike eliminativists, however, intersectional feminists seek to reform (or transform) the responsibility system, not to eradicate it. Thus, while eliminativists and reformists agree about the problem (the responsibility system is deeply flawed), they endorse different solutions. In this chapter, I will review and respond to some of the objections raised by eliminativists (especially Waller), in an attempt to bolster support for reformation (specifically, the adoption of an ameliorative approach) over elimination. My argument will proceed as follows. Section 2 will respond to Waller’s scepticism about the possibility of reforming our responsibility practices by anchoring them in our ameliorative aims. Section 3 will address Waller’s objection that focusing on individual responsibility blocks deeper scrutiny into structural explanations of human behaviour. Section 4 will resolve the related worry that scientific inquiry leads to ‘exculpatory creep,’ or the displacement of moral explanations with scientific explanations. Section 5 will respond to Waller’s claim that belief in responsibility should be replaced by belief in free will because the latter alone confers psychological benefits that pragmatically justify free-will credence. And section 6 will rebuff Waller’s claim that philosophers who defend blame on pragmatic grounds are answering the ‘wrong question,’ a question about blame’s pragmatic value as opposed to the ‘real’ question of whether blame can be deserved in a deterministic universe. In responding to these arguments, I aim to show that an ameliorative solution is preferable to an eliminativist one because it is both more psychologically tenable and more capable of ameliorating the sources of human misery the eliminativists are interested in eliminating.

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2. Blame as a Strike-Back Emotion Eliminativists and reformists share eminently reasonable concerns about prevailing paradigms of moral responsibility and their roles in society. If we consider the daily operations of the U.S. prison system, it is easy to sympathize with the elminativist position. The prison system is supposed to hold people responsible for their criminal actions (on a retributive model), or make people more responsible citizens (on a rehabilitative model). But the prison system pursues these ends using inhumane practices ranging from forced penal labour to solitary confinement to racially biased sentencing norms (Sawyer & Wagner 2019). On top of this, America’s prison population is the largest in the world, and its continued expansion is incentivized by privatization and the use of prison-labour slavery, which allows U.S. prisons to compete with sweat shops for corporate partnerships and profits. Prisoners who object to their situation of oppression can suffer a range of penalties including solitary confinement (Shahshahani 2018), which is a form of torture (Conley 2013). In short, America’s prison system is racist, dehumanizing, and exploitative. The paradigms of responsibility – and related schemas – that structure U.S. incarceration practices aren’t confined to that system alone, but influence many other institutions as well as our moral judgments. In light of all of this, Waller has good reason to believe that the responsibility system is broken and a radical solution is needed to address the human misery that results. What Waller and I disagree about is how to address these kinds of problems. Waller is skeptical that we can adopt any effective set of ameliorative practices. His skepticism rests (in part) on his characterization of blame, which he describes as rooted in “strike-back” emotions that we share with rats (2011: 10). When hurt or startled, rats “desire to strike back at something: [their] assailant, or an innocent bystander, or a gnawing post if nothing else is around” (ibid.). Waller thinks that humans are also hardwired with a strike-back impulse that can be traced back to our evolutionary past: “evolution would most likely reward victims who – even if unable to retaliate against the actual perpetrator – conspicuously ‘take it out’ on someone else” (2011: 12). This retributive impulse, as opposed to lucid reasoning, underpins our cultural blaming practices. Because we’re hardwired to ‘strike-back’ at antagonists, we can’t reasonably hope to structure our responsibility practices around constructive social aims. Our best hope is to try to repress our evolutionarily deep instincts. This pessimistic evolutionary picture of blame (which stands in stark contrast to Malle, Guglielmo, and Monroe’s cooperative account, as seen in Chapter 7) partly underwrites Waller’s skepticism about the potential for moral reform. But even if we grant (for the sake of argument) the premise that our evolutionary ancestors blamed each other in erratic and

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punitive ways, this doesn’t mean that we have to do the same. Many human dispositions are the results of evolutionary pressures, but are amenable to revision nonetheless. For example, we’re hardwired to crave food, but not every culture enjoys the same cuisine, and within each culture, individuals have different tastes. Some people have more restrictive palates and others have more adventurous ones. In the same way, responsibility practices differ substantively across cultures, and across individuals within any given culture. Some cultures think that it’s appropriate to discipline children by caning them and others see this as a form of child abuse. Some people think that we should punish ‘lazy’ children but not ‘stupid’ ones, and others think this classification system reproduces ableist discrimination.1 In this way, notions of responsibility – about who can be held responsible, and how they can be held responsible – differ across cultures and individuals. And the fact that they differ reveals that they can be changed and modified based on cultural and personal aims. Indeed, Waller himself observes that responsibility practices differ between the U.S. and Scandinavian countries (2017), the latter of which enjoy higher levels of wellbeing because, by his lights, they have a weaker belief in responsibility. That is, he agrees there are intercultural differences in responsibility schemas, and attributes these differences to differential degrees of responsibility credence. But Ryan Lake (2017) offers a different explanation. He says that Scandinavian countries have equal responsibility credence, but believe in a different notion of responsibility – a less retributive and more restitutive one. That is, Scandinavians punish people less severely because they believe that transgressors are liable to restitutive demands, not punishment for its own sake. The same differences can be observed in different members of the same culture, of course: different individuals subscribe to different notions of responsibility, based on different beliefs and values. Some responsibility schemas are more restitutive and others are more retributive. Some are more prejudiced and others are less prejudiced. And so on. While philosophers tend to frame responsibility as either retributive or restitutive, this classic framing neglects the fact that there are also moreor-less racist, sexist, heteronormative, and ableist notions of responsibility. As we have seen, sexists tend to think that women are responsible for gender-based violence, and racists tend to think that Black people are more responsible than white people for committing homicide, all else being equal. In short, the fact that there is substantive variation in notions of responsibility across cultures and individuals demonstrates that we do have some say over how we hold people responsible, and we can revise our responsibility-structuring schemas by drawing from available pools of information, understandings, and values. As Lake attests, adopting a restitutive framework would help to reduce punitive judgments of blame. And by the same logic, adopting an ameliorative framework could help to reduce prejudiced judgments of blame, which structure the U.S. prison system and other American institutions.

226 Against Eliminativism Waller doesn’t seem to care that he himself is committed to a revisionary policy that would require a massive amount of willpower and cooperation to implement, viz., the complete elimination of responsibility. It’s not at all clear that it would be easier to adopt this policy than a reformist one, especially if the urge to blame is hardwired as a result of our evolutionary history, as Waller himself believes. Surely it would be easier for us to revise our responsibility practices than to completely extinguish them from our moral psychology and interpersonal life. In fact, this psychological consideration was one of Strawson’s reasons for rejecting the “panicky metaphysics of libertarianism” and preferring an interpersonal model: he believed that belief in determinism couldn’t displace our natural inclination to hold people responsible (1963: xii). One reason is that we can’t suspend our reactive attitudes because of the kind of creature we are – one that evolved to regulate relationships on the basis of norms; and another reason is that we wouldn’t want to suspend these attitudes given that they enable us to have norm-governed relationships that we value as social animals. We can modify our responsibility practices, but we can’t do without them. On this, Strawson and I agree. ***** A second concern about the viability of eliminativism concerns our ability to implement it in an unbiased way, given how biased normally-socialized people are. Given that we live in conditions of epistemic injustice, the adoption of an eliminativist program, without the adoption of any biasreducing constraints, would only serve to reinforce epistemic inequality within the responsibility system. This is because marginalized people’s blame is already seen as less worthy of uptake than privileged people’s blame, even when the content is the same in both cases. As we have seen, women and Black people tend to be seen as overly emotional and angry because of stereotypes about their identities. Under an eliminativist regime, the moral testimony of women and Black people is likely to be coded as ‘strikeback emotionality’ rather than constructive criticism or some other ‘rational’ and ‘temperate’ form of speech. Due to the pervasiveness of identity prejudice, in other words, we can expect eliminativism to be unfairly enforced on epistemically marginalized groups – those who are more likely to be seen as sources of ‘irrational’ and ‘intemperate’ strike-back emotions. A related issue is that epistemic minorities will find it easier to adopt an eliminativist policy because they are already vulnerable to stereotype threat, self-doubt, adaptive preference formation, and other epistemic dispositions that make it easier for them to suppress their speech (viz., Mackenzie 2018). In contrast, people higher in epistemic confidence (such as white men) would be the least inclined to adopt an eliminativist agenda and suppress their blame. Therefore, an eliminativist policy, without any changes to background conditions, is likely to increase the clout

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of epistemically confident people within the responsibility system, making it even easier for them to control conversations and silence minorities. Whereas eliminativism seeks to address the problem of excessively punitive blame, intersectional feminism instead identifies the core problem as a matter of asymmetrical power relations: some people can’t articulate their blame or command uptake for their blame due to epistemic inequalities, and some are stereotyped as blameworthy due to identity prejudice. This results in excessive blame being directed at members of marginalized groups, and excessive absolution being offered to members of privileged groups. Eliminativism leaves these inequalities essentially unanalyzed, and therefore threatens to propagate them unwittingly.

3. Agential Analysis vs. Systems Analysis Another of Waller’s worries is that focusing on individual responsibility prevents us from examining the systemic causes of human behaviour: “when we are caught up in the blame and strike-back emotions,” he says, “the deeper scrutiny of causal history is blocked” (2017: 45). To avoid these distractions, we should eliminate responsibility and focus on causal factors. This type of objection has a precedent in the situationist psychology literature, which pits ‘characterological explanations’ against ‘situational explanations.’ It’s worth looking at this debate to get a better grasp on Waller’s objection. In response to landmark social psychological experiments like the Milgram Obedience Experiments, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Good Samaritan Experiment, moral psychologists like John Doris (1998, 2002) and Gilbert Harman (1999) have argued that there is no such thing as ‘robust’ (situation-invariant) character. One piece of evidence for this claim is the Milgram Experiments, in which 65% of subjects ‘punished’ a mock learner (actually a confederate) with increasingly intense ‘electric shocks,’ escalating in 15-volt increments to the maximum threshold of 450 volts – the hypothetical point of death. During the experiment, the mock learner complained of heart problems and eventually fell disturbingly silent, presumably unconscious. Yet only 35% of subjects refused to continue. This defied the experimenters’ initial prediction that most would defect before the 150-volt mark. The high rate of compliance seems show that most people don’t have sufficiently robust character (Doris 2002) or control (Upton 2009) to act on their individual values or wills. In other words, the results seem to debunk the construct validity of deep character and deep control, on which two dominant paradigms of responsibility seem to depend. That said, situationist psychologists generally admit that, even if we don’t have robust character, we may have ‘shallow character,’ which would explain why some Milgram subjects did manage to defect (Doris 2008). And most situationists believe that there

228 Against Eliminativism are things that we can do to regulate our behaviour across situations to ensure better moral outcomes. Some theorists have proposed that we use ‘social scaffolding’ to ensure consistent behaviour across different situations (Merritt et al. 2010), and others have suggested ‘life hacks,’ such as avoiding “morally dangerous situations” (Doris 1998: 516) or adopting ‘mitigation methods’ to reduce the effects of implicit biases on our moral reasoning (Kelly et al. 2010). These strategies can help us regulate our behaviour across situations, enabling us to pursue our goals – including restitutive and ameliorative ones – more effectively. Just as having a plan to pursue your academic goals can help you finish university, having a plan to pursue your moral goals can help you achieve certain moral outcomes in spite of unexpected situational forces, given supportive background conditions. This argument isn’t likely to persuade sceptics like Waller, however, because they don’t think that patchy agency suffices for responsibility. Rather, they think that responsibility depends on the existence of ultimate agency, which is a type of agency completely independent from the influence of the world and everyone in it. This libertarian understanding locates responsibility in the capacity to be an ‘unmoved mover’ with godlike powers, and eliminativists sensibly reject this type of agency as an impossibility. Of course, no amount of social scaffolding or life hacks will give you libertarian agency, since these aids are meant to foster dependence on external reinforcements, not independence. On scrutiny, there are a number of problems with the libertarian notion of agency, ranging from the fact that it’s metaphysically strange, to the fact that it’s nonrelational, to the fact that it’s not objectively valuable, to the fact that it treats qualitatively different relationships (e.g., slavery and freedom) as if they were equally agency-impairing. Suffice it to say, libertarian agency jars with intersectional feminist commitments. A more adequate understanding of agency would tie it to relationships and interdependencies that allow us to pursue IF aims. If we accept that (causal) situational forces can contribute to responsible agency, then we don’t have to see situational explanation and moral judgment as mutually exclusive, since moral judgment can be a part of situations that scaffold (relational) agency, and moral analysis can help us select social scaffolding and life hacks that help us pursue our moral goals.

4. Exculpatory Creep A related objection to the ‘situationist challenge’ is the argument that scientific explanation leaves no room for moral agency or moral appraisal. As Thomas Nagel puts it, once we understand the role of external causes in the production of human behaviour, “[t]he area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point” (1979: 66). Daniel Dennett describes

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this problem as “the specter of creeping exculpation” (1984: 156), and although he ultimately rejects it, Waller takes exculpatory creep to be a real threat. As he puts it, If this [technological progress] continues unchecked – if science externalizes more and more of what we had once thought our own free and morally responsible actions – then we will eventually shrink to nothingness. Without a policy for drawing limits on creeping exculpation, we will become smaller and smaller until everything is externalized and we vanish away entirely. (Waller 2014: 174) If exculpatory creep is real, then why do we persist in explaining behaviour by reference to agential factors like character and reasonsresponsiveness? The answer offered by social psychology is that we are susceptible to committing the Fundamental Attribution Error, the tendency to exaggerate the significance of characterological explanations to the exclusion of situational explanations (Harman 1999). Another reason is our tendency to favour individualist explanations over collective ones, or to evince an individualist bias (Levy 2018). These biases distract us from the systemic causes of human behaviour, as Waller claims. That said, the worry that exculpatory creep will eliminate responsibility rests on something of a false dilemma. Even if it’s true that we’re biased against situational explanations, that doesn’t mean that situations are the only valid explanations for human behaviour, i.e., that individualist explanations are completely illusory and explanatorily otiose. This would be to go too far in the opposite direction. Similarly, collective analysis isn’t the only adequate strand of explanation: it’s compatible with, and partly dependent on, individual analysis. Specifically, we can’t adequately understand collective actions without knowing something about the individual members of the collective, and we can’t adequately understand individual actions without knowing something about the individual’s social position. For these reasons, I am against situational-agential and collectivistindividualist dualisms. On my understanding, a relational explanation – which is the one I favour – is one that combines situational and agential, collective and individual levels of analysis in a holistic fashion, giving rise to an understanding of individual responsibility as a function of the individual’s role in situations and collectives. In my view, individual responsibility cannot be understood independent of a proper appreciation of the individual’s roles in society. We can find something akin to this view in Tracy Isaacs’ book (2011), which provides an account of individual responsibility in collective contexts – an account that (tacitly) provides a response to the problem of exculpatory creep. To begin, Isaacs argues that individual acts performed

230 Against Eliminativism as part of a collective can’t be adequately explained without reference to the individual’s role in the collective. Collective analysis may reveal normative information about an individual’s transgression. Suppose that I know that someone has committed an anti-Semitic murder, but I know nothing about the social context. An individualist analysis reveals the person’s action to be anti-Semitic. But if the person acted as part of a genocidal collective (e.g., the Nazi regime), it would be wrong to describe the person simply as an anti-Semitic murderer, since the person also perpetrated an act of genocide. Isaacs refers to the Rwandan genocide to demonstrate the explanatory importance of collective analysis and the relationship between collective analysis and individual responsibility: In Rwanda, for example, though individuals were incited to participate and did so in the tens of thousands, the extensive nature of the genocide reveals it as a collective act, that is, the act of a collective. No one individual can be said to be responsible for the massive atrocity. The presence of collective responsibility in cases such as this does not discount the responsibility of individuals. Not only are individuals responsible for their contributions but also . . . the normative character of individuals’ contributions flows in large measure from the collective endeavor of which they are a part. (2011: 5) So, the individualist explanation of the act of genocide as an ‘antiSemitic murder’ isn’t simply descriptively inadequate – it’s normatively inadequate, in that it doesn’t fully capture the wrongfulness of the individual’s action, which depends on the individual’s role in the collective. To explain the distinct wrongfulness of collective wrongdoing (like genocidal murder), Isaacs appeals to Bernard William’s theory of ‘thick description.’ As Isaacs puts it, Normative facts may be among the information contained in a description of an action, especially when we invoke a description that falls into the category of what Bernard Williams calls “thick moral terms.” Thick moral terms, such as “stealing” and “murder,” have moral evaluations built into them or are at least suggestive of particular moral judgments. For example, when I flip the switch I might also detonate an explosive. When I detonate an explosive, I might also kill a rival. If I kill the rival intentionally, then the killing is a murder. When we describe it as such, we invoke a description with moral resonance: we recognize that acts warranting the description “murder” are wrong. That’s what makes “murder” a thick moral term. We do not describe accidental killings or justified killings in the same way. Though they result in death, they do not qualify as murders. (2011: 101–102)

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To explain an action in thin moral terms when a thicker description is available is to omit valuable moral information – information about the moral significance of the action. The same is true of using an individualist explanation when a collective one is on offer: to give the individualist explanation as the final explanation is to omit valuable moral information – information about what the actor actually did and what the person can be blamed or praised for. While an anti-Semitic murder and an act of genocide are both unthinkable crimes, the latter involves more wrongs, and therefore admits of a ‘thicker’ description. An act of genocide involves both individual crimes against individual victims, and a collective crime against an entire group. This discrepancy can be seen in the legal status of the two transgressions: racist murder is a hate crime, prosecutable in domestic courts, while genocide is both a hate crime and a crime against humanity, which falls under the jurisdiction of international law. As a hate crime and a crime against humanity, the crime of genocide is more blameworthy than a hate crime, because it involves more transgressions (against a protected group and humanity itself), and incurs more harms (to a specific group and the human race). Isaacs focuses exclusively on responsibility for participation in group agents (i.e., organized collectives), but there’s no reason to think that her argument can’t be extended to loose collectives, which don’t share explicitly represented joint intentions or common awareness. As we saw in Chapter 2, Larry May and Robert Strikwanda believe that all men bear responsibility for rape because male bonding and socialization . . . contributes to the prevalence of rape in western societies rape . . . in a way which parallels the collective responsibility of a society for crimes against humanity perpetrated by some members of their society. (1994: 135) Thus, even if men don’t belong to an organized, highly structured group (or ‘group agent’), they participate in processes of sex-role socialization that confer shared dispositions and privileges, which makes them collectively responsible for the prevalence of rape. This argument expands Isaacs’ account of individual responsibility in group contexts to include individual responsibility in collective contexts, or contexts in which people play responsibility-conferring roles in loose (largely unstructured) social networks such as social groups. The important thing about both Isaacs’ and May and Strikwanda’s analyses of collective responsibility, for present purposes, is that they both imply that collective wrongdoing is weightier than individual wrongdoing, in part because it involves multiple transgressions, and in part because it involves collective harms. Genocide is weightier than anti-Semitic murder because genocide involves two levels of transgression – an individual act

232 Against Eliminativism of anti-Semitic murder and (participation in) a collective act of genocide. Committing gender-based violence is worse than committing an indiscriminate act of violence because gender-based violence involves both a transgression against the victim and a transgression against all women. In both cases, the collective transgression involves ‘extra wrongdoing.’ And in each case, to describe the collective transgression in individualist terms would be to misdescribe the wrongness of the transgression, and hence what the person actually did, and can bear responsibility and liability for. The individual description effectively erases moral information: it misdescribed crimes against humanity as hate crimes, gender-based violence as indiscriminate violence, and so on. By the same token, it misdescribes the amount of harm caused by the transgression, by misrepresenting a collective transgression as an individual one, perpetrated on an individual victim only. Anne Cudd presents an argument similar to May and Strikwanda’s, but within the legal context. She argues that the justice system should dispense with two flawed commitments: the “individual actor thesis,” which “claims that crimes are committed by one person against another,” and the “level field hypothesis,” which claims that “criminal offenses are an upset in the existing balance of power between people” (2006: 210). The conjunction of these theses creates the illusion that men and women are equally situated, and that violence against women is as harmful as violence against men. This false equivalency erases the reality of patriarchal oppression, and denies that violence against women harms women as a group due to background patriarchal dynamics. That is, it treats collective harms (patriarchal violence) as if they were individual harms (crimes against a specific plaintiff). In this way, the court favours the ‘thin’ description of violence against women, thereby erasing the severity of the crime – the reproduction of patriarchal relations. It misrepresents the number of transgressions committed (in reality, both against an individual defendant and all women), as well as the magnitude of the harm caused (in reality, the reinforcement of patriarchal relations). These legal assumptions also draw a false equivalency between violence against women and violence against men, thereby erasing the reality of the patriarchal context within which violent crimes against women are committed (against women as a group). This makes it impossible for the court system to protect women’s right to equal security and freedom under the law. The upshot of these convergent analyses is that systemic analysis can reveal that people are more culpable than they would seem on an individualist analysis, thereby expanding the scope of responsibility and blame. That is, once we appreciate people’s roles in systems and collectives, we don’t find that their responsibility ‘shrinks to an extensionless point,’ but instead that it expands beyond the limits of their embodied agency, an agency facilitated by social structures that enable people to perform actions that no unassisted individual could pull off. Collective wrongdoing is weightier than individual wrongdoing because it involves

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more transgressions and more harms, making the transgressor more eligible for blame. Thus, rather than leading to exculpatory creep, a proper appreciation of people’s roles in social systems and collectives reveals that people are moral responsible (blameworthy, praiseworthy) than we tend to think. Once we dispense with our individualist bias, we don’t, as a matter of fact, find that there are no individuals, but rather that individuals are embedded in systems and collectives and bear responsibility for their roles in these social networks and organizations. And we find that people who participate in oppressive collectives are actually moral blameworthy than previously thought. Exonerating them would do nothing to highlight the existence of hierarchies of power in our society, nor to eliminate popular false equivalencies between people who commit systemic harms and people who commit truly individual ones.

5. Free Will Belief and Psychological Wellbeing While Waller is skeptical of the pragmatic value of belief in responsibility, he describes belief in free will as being “of vital importance to . . . wellbeing” (2017), and he takes this to justify belief in free will (even if free will is actually illusory). However, Waller’s optimism about the effects of free-will credence isn’t universally accepted, and it’s not clear that wellbeing is as valuable as Waller thinks. There is evidence that belief in free will predicts greater support for the kinds of harsh punitive judgments that Waller is against (Martin et al. 2017). And there’s also evidence that disbelief in free will promotes prosocial behaviour, such as a disinclination to harshly punish an offender (Caspar et al. 2017). Moreover, lack of wellbeing in conditions of oppression could confer epistemic benefits such as ‘depressive realism,’ or the tendency to see things with depressing accuracy. It’s not clear that a society in which everyone is blissfully epistemically deformed is better than our current reality. In short, there are many reasons to question the value of wellbeing as a virtue in conditions of inequality. This becomes particularly evident when we consider the role of wellbeing in an imperfect world. One of the reasons people value wellbeing is that it is associated with life satisfaction, which most people desire. But it’s not clear that life satisfaction is intrinsically valuable – that is, valuable for every kind of life. If you could be fully satisfied with your life in a society structured by patriarchal, racial, cisheteronormative, and ableist prejudice – a society in which certain groups are oppressed only because of morally irrelevant bodily markers that are culturally coded as ‘other,’ ‘lesser,’ and ‘impure’ – would you want to be satisfied with your life under the circumstances? Regardless of which social rank you occupy, there is something unsettling about satisfaction with a life lived in that kind of society. But maybe you think that wellbeing could be a valuable source of motivation, enabling you to resist oppression more effectively. Notably,

234 Against Eliminativism Waller says that belief in free will is valuable even if you have no control over your life – in fact, it’s especially valuable to oppressed people who can’t do anything about their dismal situation, as such an illusory belief will make an enormous difference to assembly line workers deprived of alternatives and control, to impoverished persons who lack the resources to explore options and exercise control, and to residents of long-term care facilities who are denied the fundamentally important options of and control over when to socialize and when to be alone, what time to get up, what time to eat their meals and with whom, when to take a bath, when to go to bed. (2017) There can be little doubt that an illusory sense of control could enhance life satisfaction under such oppressive conditions, but one has to ask why people should be satisfied with such a life. In reality, few people would be satisfied with a life of wage slavery. And I doubt that they would choose to cultivate a false sense of satisfaction if they could. Nozick (1974) presents a compelling experiment in which people are presented with the option of plugging into an ‘experience machine,’ which generates a stream of pleasant but illusory experiences. Most people wouldn’t want to connect to the machine because it doesn’t provide them with an authentic life – one in which there is a reason to be happy. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World presents a variant on this experiment, depicting a world in which everyone is satisfied (largely due to propaganda and the use of pharmaceuticals), but no one has any reason to be. This society, unbeknownst to its citizens, is a totalitarian regime, in which the leaders use eugenics and disinformation to keep people in a state of complacent ignorance. It’s unlikely that most people would want to live in Huxley’s dystopian nightmare, especially given that most wouldn’t choose to plug into Nozick’s experience machine, which doesn’t involve political oppression. In general, people don’t want to live in a state of delusional subordination to an oppressive regime. The reason people in the real world aren’t abjectly miserable is that they are largely ignorant of the nature of reality – like Huxley’s characters, they are subjects of false consciousness and artificially manufactured happiness. If the nature of reality were more transparent to everyone, then people would be less content than they are. Yet, while Americans aren’t particularly politically active, they are far from happy. By some measures, America is the most depressed country in the world (Jowit 2018)! Arguably, that’s a good thing: on some level, people sense that there’s something deeply wrong with their social ontology and their lives in it. Having said this, Americans aren’t equally unhappy or unwell. Researchers have found that women report lower subjective wellbeing than men (Gómez-Baya et al. 2018), and Black people, in spite of substantive gains since the 1970s, still report lower subjective wellbeing than

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white people (Stevenson & Wolfers 2012). Women and African Americans are also more vulnerable to depression by some estimates (Albert 2015; National Institutes of Health 2018). Waller’s proposal seems to imply that women and African Americans can increase their wellbeing by cultivating an illusory sense of free will, and that they have good reason to do this. I am highly suspicious of both claims. First, I doubt that illusory beliefs can completely undo the adverse effects of real adversity on members of oppressed groups. We have a lot of pharmaceuticals but people are only getting more depressed and anxious. Second, I don’t agree that equal wellbeing across social groups is valuable in the absence of wellbeing-supporting social conditions. If we could equalize satisfaction across groups by deceiving members of oppressed groups into a state of false consciousness about the conditions of their lives, I don’t think that that’s something that we should do – though many governments are currently trying (for example, by promoting drugs). But I would prefer that people be less-than-satisfied with less-thansatisfactory social conditions. That is, I deny that subjective wellbeing is intrinsically valuable, and I also deny that an illusory sense of wellbeing is a viable solution to social oppression. If forced to choose between two dystopian realities, one of which contains fully satisfied slaves, and the other of which contains dissatisfied slaves, I would choose the less satisfied society of slaves. But I doubt that the former scenario is even a psychological possibility for creatures with our evolutionary history – creatures hardwired to favour equality and to struggle against oppression. Indeed, the reason Americans are so depressed is that their society is so unequal. Even the most privileged Americans are suffering the ill effects of stratification and social isolation. I would not prefer a world in which Americans are less depressed under the same conditions. ***** Waller doesn’t just think that belief in responsibility is harmful to the individual – he also thinks that it’s harmful to society, and he takes this to be demonstrated by differences in belief in responsibility between countries with different levels of psychological wellbeing. Specifically, he claims that “neoliberal” societies such as the U.S. and the U.K. have higher levels of belief in responsibility than “social democratic” societies such as Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark (2017), which explains why neoliberal societies have lower levels of wellbeing. Ryan Lake (2017) challenges this claim by providing an alternate explanation. He argues that Scandinavians believe in responsibility just as much as Americans, but they subscribe to a different notion of responsibility – a restitutive rather than a punitive one. In restitutive justice systems, people don’t aim to punish transgressors for the sake of retribution, but rather to “compel transgressors to make restitution to those who have been harmed by

236 Against Eliminativism their transgressions” (Lake 2017). This reduces the amount of suffering caused by the justice system because retributive punishment isn’t one of its goals. As Lake points out, restitutivism depends on belief in responsibility just as much as retributivism, because the notion of responsibility determines who owes restitution to whom – it identifies someone or some group as liable to pay compensation to someone else. Without any notion of responsibility, a restitutive system wouldn’t be able to demand compensation from anyone. If Lake’s argument is right, then Scandinavian countries enjoy higher levels of wellbeing not because they don’t have any working notion of responsibility, but because they subscribe to a different notion of responsibility than Americans. I agree with Lake that Waller’s account misunderstands the differences in responsibility schemas between neoliberal and social-democratic countries. But I don’t think that the retribute-restitutive difference is the only, or even the primary, reason for the wellbeing gap. In fact, I think that debates about retributivism-versus-restitutivism distract from a deeper problem: institutionalized racism. As many scholars have suggested, another reason for the wellbeing gap is that the U.S., insofar as it is a neoliberal country, subscribes to a racist notion of responsibility, which is at the heart of neoliberalism. On its surface, neoliberalism is a political-economic doctrine that favours a self-regulating free market, one that generates maximum wealth and distributes gains as efficiently and widely as possible. But in practice, neoliberalism is an economic system that extracts capital from racialized labourers and transfers it to white landowners, perpetuating the racial dynamics of the planation economy. As Jonathan McCombs observes, during the rise of neoliberalism in the post-war era, “the ‘spread’ of capital across the nation-state was marred by institutional and structural racism,” which deprived African Americans of equal economic opportunities, wealth, and income (2018: 28). The racial distribution of wealth was achieved in large part through the implementation of redlining policies, “which impeded mortgage lending to the vast majority of AfricanAmericans [during that era]” (McCombs 2018: 28). Another source was the racial income gap, which persisted in spite of the introduction of Title VII, a statute designed to prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. But Deborah Dinner argues that the conceptual convergence between Title VII and neoliberalism enabled employers, business trade associations, courts, and even liberal scholars to interpret the statute in ways that expanded managerial freedom and undermined workers’ economic security and control over the terms of their jobs, increasing workplace discrimination along certain dimensions (Dinner 2017: 1059). Racial inequality was also maintained through the

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defunding of “social programs in education, health care, emergency management and response . . . through extreme forms of tax reduction while increasing military, security, and prison expenditures and investments” (G2009, p. 80) – that is, through a combination of austerity measures and military spending that, in the words of J. Inwood, “can only be understood through the intersectionality of race and class positions which have long dominated the USA” (2015: 419). In these ways, neoliberal policies transferred wealth and power from racialized labourers to white corporate owners. These are just a few examples of how neoliberalism operated throughout the 20th century to perpetuate white supremacy. As Inwood notes, from the nation’s genesis the USA was built through the extraction of surplus value from racialized bodies (e.g., dispossession of indigenous lands, slavery, share cropping, prison industrial complex, forced labor camps), that are connected to “racially ontologized hierarchies of space, which permitted the hyper-exploitation of certain (colorized) bodies and lands.” (Inwood 2014: 411, citing McIntyre & Nast 2011) These mechanics of racial oppression under slavery were carried forward by neoliberalism, which was disguised as a ‘color-blind’ system of free-market principles designed to benefit everyone. Because neoliberalism was presented under the false guise of a meritocracy, it perpetuated the myth that socioeconomic inequalities are the result of Black people’s ‘irresponsible choices,’ not the effects of structural racism. The neoliberal myth of meritocracy is summarized by the editors of Whitewashing Race as follows: Racism has been defeated . . . If racial inequalities in income, employment, residence, and political representation persist, [supporters of color-blindness] say, it is not white racism. Rather, the problem is the behavior of people who fail to take responsibility for their own lives. If the civil rights movement has failed . . . it is because of the manipulative, expedient behavior of black nationalists and the civil rights establishment. (Brown et al. 2003: vii) In this way, neoliberalism rests on and propagates a notion of responsibility that is inherently racist. Neoliberalism scapegoats racialized minorities for problems created by white supremacists. As such, countries with a stronger belief in neoliberalism, such as the U.S., must surely subscribe to a more racist notion of responsibility – a notion that explains racial disparities in wealth, education, health, and practically every other metric of wellbeing. Retributivism can’t adequately explain America’s excessively

238 Against Eliminativism punitive practices because those practices aren’t imposed equally on white and racialized bodies: they disproportionally harm racialized minorities, who are treated as proper objects of subordination. Ultimately, racism is a core feature of America’s social ecology and socially embedded responsibility system. If this analysis is right, then addressing neoliberalism’s retributive bent won’t resolve the disproportionate use of force and aggression against racialized minorities in the U.S. Our responsibility practices aren’t just ‘too punitive’ – they’re also racist, and racism is an underlying feature of the neoliberal order. Our cultural paradigm of responsibility is also built on a historical foundation of sexism, heteronormativity, and ableism, which explains why people who don’t fit the culture’s ideal of the cisgender, white, abled, male subject are susceptible to epistemic silencing, smothering, resentment, indignation, contempt, hatred, and political disenfranchisement.

6. The ‘Wrong Question’ Argument While I have focused on Waller’s objection to pragmatic defences of responsibility, his main objection to pragmatist philosophers isn’t that they don’t offer compelling pragmatic arguments, but that they’re answering the wrong question – a question about blame’s pragmatic value as opposed to the “basic question” of whether blame is deserved (2015: 9). No answer to the pragmatic question will resolve the ‘basic desert question.’ And if we reflect adequately on the basic desert question, we’ll find that no one deserves blame, because no one is responsible in a deterministic universe, which is the universe that we inhabit. Somewhat strangely, while Waller denies that responsibility can be defended on pragmatic grounds, he believes that punishment can be, because people “cannot get along without some punishment” (2015: 194). Similarly, in spite of his persuasive critique of the American prison system, he thinks that incarceration can be defended on pragmatic grounds, because there are “violent and dangerous people who must be isolated from society” (2015: 197). Yet he doesn’t allow the same sorts of pragmatic considerations to carry over to blame. But surely if blame can be used to reduce the ‘need’ for incarceration and punishment – which Waller admits are administered unfairly and excessively – it has some value in that capacity. And it seems to me that blame can be used to reduce levels of incarceration and punishment, as well as inequalities in enforcement norms, because it has played these roles in the past. For one, blame has been a factor in the repeal of many unjust laws, from anti-miscegenation laws to anti-abortion laws to sodomy laws to cannabis laws. These repeals were the result of many years of political activism and moral testimony against central figures in conservative politics. To give just one example, Faye Wattleton, “the first black woman to serve as president of Planned Parenthood, stood on the steps of the

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Supreme Court in the summer of 1989 to condemn its decision on the abortion rights case Webster v. Reproductive Health Services” (Whaley 2019). She said that the “Supreme Court decision once more slaps poor women in the face and says you do not have constitutional protections if your state sees fit to restrict them, and you do not have the resources to circumvent those restrictions” (ibid.). As recently as last month, I attended a Planned Parenthood rally in which local women spoke out against Governor Mike Parson’s attempt to revoke the license of the only abortion clinic in St. Louis, thereby limiting women’s reproductive autonomy and increasing the rate of maternal mortality, which is already higher in America than any other wealthy country due to sexist abortion restrictions (Thomas 2019; Martin & Montagne 2017). Many women condemned Parsons and spoke about their own abortions and how they had made the responsible choice even though the state wanted to deprive them of the right to choose. These uses of moral testimony to identify agents of oppression and challenge hegemonic responsibility schemas have helped women dismantle systems of patriarchal oppression in the past, and our collective voices can help us block and dismantle patriarchal laws in the future. But the problem obviously isn’t just that there are unjust laws; part of the problem is that the laws are enforced unfairly. And activists have been using blame to challenge prejudiced enforcement norms as well, a salient example being the Ferguson protests, in which activists demanded accountability from the city and the police force after the murder of Michael Brown. These activists weren’t just protesting this one homicide, but the broader context of racist scapegoating and racially-motivated police brutality against which it took place. The use of moral testimony to challenge the culture’s racist scapegoating logic and to hold social institutions and individuals accountable for racism is another valuable role for blame. On my account, blame contains moral information that, if granted sufficient uptake, can transform cultural norms and practices. Blame in the ameliorative sense plays a central role in protests and political activism: it constructs ameliorative narratives, challenges hegemonic norms, and rallies epistemic peers around shared aims. In these capacities, blame has pragmatic value. To say that blame, unlike punishment and incarceration, has no pragmatic value is to artificially separate these normative practices and deny their interconnections. Activist uses of blame have been instrumental in reforming laws and policies. Indeed, one can reverse Waller’s argument and claim that he fails to answer the basic question about responsibility – the question of whether we can use responsibility practices to improve society. The question of blame’s compatibility with metaphysical determinism isn’t the basic question, even though it’s the question that philosophers have been asking for centuries. But those philosophers weren’t going to protests and observing how blame is used on the ground. The metaphysics of responsibility is

240 Against Eliminativism actually a distraction from the question that matters morally: how can we use blame to promote our ameliorative and transformative ends?

7. Concluding Remarks Eliminativsts and reformists are worried about the same problems but are committed to different solutions. Both solutions are transformative, but in different ways: one seeks to eliminate responsibility while the other seeks to rehabilitate it. I have argued that eliminativism isn’t as psychologically tenable or politically fruitful as responsibility reform. I see blame as a naturalistic interpersonal practice that contains normative information, and that can and should be used to promote intersectional feminist aims. And I believe that we can put it to this use, if we so choose. Not only can we adopt an ameliorative approach to blame, but this program is easier to implement than the complete suspensions of our blaming instincts, given that blame is (as Waller say) an evolutionarily deep urge. In light of our evolutionary history, it should be easier for us to revise our blaming practices than to eliminate them, especially if blame is a natural response to experiences of oppression. If we focus on the dynamics of power and oppression that are the deep sources of human misery in our society, it will be easier for us to deploy blame (and praise) in fair and beneficial ways.

Note 1. This is a reference to Smart’s understanding of appropriate school discipline from 1963.

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———. (1998). Persons, situations, and virtue ethics. Nous, 32(4), 504–530. Gómez-Baya, D., Lucia-Casademunt, A., & Salinas-Pérez, J. (2018). Gender differences in psychological well-being and health problems among European health professionals: Analysis of psychological basic needs and job satisfaction. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(7), 1474. Harman, G. (1999). Moral philosophy meets social psychology: Virtue ethics and the fundamental attribution error. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian society (pp. 315–331). Aristotelian Society. Inwood, J. F. (2015). Neoliberal racism: The ‘Southern Strategy’ and the expanding geographies of white supremacy. Social & Cultural Geography, 16(4), 407–423. Isaacs, T. (2011). Moral responsibility in collective contexts. New York: Oxford University Press. Jowit, J. (2018, June 4). What is depression and why is it rising? The Guardian. Retrieved from: www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/04/what-is-depressionand-why-is-it-rising Kelly, D., Machery, E., & Mallon, R. (2010). Race and racial cognition. In The moral psychology handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lake, R. (2017, Feb 19). Stuck in the middle. Contribution to the Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility Symposium. Retrieved from: https://syndicate. network/symposia/philosophy/the-stubborn-system-of-moral-responsibility/ #farah-focquaert Levy, N. (2018). Socialising responsibility. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. (2011). Hard luck: How luck undermines free will and moral responsibility. Oxford University Press on Demand. Mackenzie, C. (2018). Moral responsibility and the social dynamics of power and oppression. In Social dimensions of moral responsibility, eds. Hutchison et al. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Martin, N., & Montagne, R. (2017, May 12). U.S. Has The Worst Rate Of Maternal Deaths In The Developed World. NPR. Retrieved from: https://www.npr. org/2017/05/12/528098789/u-s-has-the-worst-rate-of-maternal-deaths-in-thedeveloped-world Martin, N. D., Rigoni, D., & Vohs, K. D. (2017). Free will beliefs predict attitudes toward unethical behavior and criminal punishment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), 7325–7330. May, L., & Strikwerda, R. (1994). Men in groups: Collective responsibility for rape. Hypatia, 9(2), 134–151. McCombs, J. (2018). The class-to-race cascade: Interrogating racial neoliberalism in Romani Studies and urban policy in Budapest’s Eighth District. Critical Romani Studies, 1(2), 24–39. McIntyre, M., & Nast, H. J. (2011). Bio (necro) polis: Marx, surplus populations, and the spatial dialectics of reproduction and ‘race’ 1. Antipode, 43(5), 1465–1488. Merritt, M., Doris, J. M., & Harman, G. (2010). Character. In The moral psychology handbook. Oxford University Press. Nagel, T. (1979). In: Moral Luck, ed. Daniel Statman. State University of New York Press, Albany: New York, 1993. National Institutes of Health. (2018, May 4). African Americans and Latinos are more likely to be at risk for depression than Whites. Retrieved from:

242 Against Eliminativism www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/african-americans-latinos-aremore-likely-be-risk-depression-whites Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, and utopia (Vol. 5038). New York: Basic Books. Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (2018, Mar 19). Mass incarceration: The whole pie 2019. Prison Policy Initiative. Retrieved from: www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/ pie2019.html Shahshahani, A. (2018, May 17). Why are for-profit prisons subjecting detainees to forced labor? The Guardian. Retrieved from: www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2018/may/17/us-private-prisons-forced-labour-detainees-modernslavery Strawson, P. F. (1963). Freedom and resentment and other essays. Routledge, 2008. Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2012). Subjective and objective indicators of racial progress. The Journal of Legal Studies, 41(2), 459–493. Thomas, C. (2019, May 30). Parson says Planned Parenthood must comply with Missouri probe of St. Louis clinic. The Kansas Star. Retrieved from: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/parson-says-planned-parenthood-mustcomply-with-missouri-probe-of-st-louis-clinic/ar-AAC6pKI Upton, C. L. (2009). Virtue ethics and moral psychology: The situationism debate. The Journal of Ethics, 13(2–3), 103–115. Waller, B. N. (2017, Feb 19). Contribution to the Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility Symposium. Retrieved from: https://syndicate.network/symposia/ philosophy/the-stubborn-system-of-moral-responsibility/#farah-focquaert ———. (2015). The stubborn system of moral responsibility. MIT Press. ———. (2014). The stubborn system of moral responsibility. MIT Press. ———. (2011). Against moral responsibility. MIT Press. Whaley, N. (2019, Mar 25). Black women and the fight for abortion rights: How this brochure sparked the movement for reproductive freedom. PBS News. Retrieved from: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-women-fightabortion-rights-how-brochure-sparked-movement-reproductive-n983216

Conclusion

1. Reasons for Optimism The main draw of eliminativism is that it identifies genuine flaws in our responsibility system and offers a solution to those flaws. The problem is that the proposed solution – eliminating responsibility – may not be psychologically tenable for animals with our evolutionary history, and is normatively unappealing given that responsibility practices underpin human relationships as norm-governed communicative exchanges, and these relationships are important to us. Without the ability to hold one another responsible, it’s not clear how we can ever hope to cultivate symmetrical and mutually respectful relationships, as it’s not clear how we’re supposed to demand respect and recognition from each other. Laws and policies can regulate people’s public behaviour, but they can’t regulate every aspect of our private lives, nor do they regulate public behaviour fairly and impartially. Rather than replacing blame and praise with laws and policies authorized by the (colonial) state, I have argued that we should use blame and praise as tools of anti-colonial disruption and emancipation. That is, I have recommended that we adopt an intersectional feminist responsibility program. At the same time, my description of the responsibility system as essentially broken may inspire despair, not hope, and I don’t want people to feel hopeless. Even though the situation is dire, we can take steps to improve the moral landscape. We know that this is true because substantive gains have been made in just the last few decades: marital rape is no longer legal, same-sex marriage is no longer illegal, young white people seem to be less prejudiced than their grandparents (Hagerman 2018). At the same time, I wouldn’t deny that some asymmetries of power are getting worse: the racial wealth gap continues to swell (Shermerhorn 2019); there are concentration camps at the U.S.–Mexico border (Puckett 2019); and the gender pay gap has barely budged over the last 10 years, in spite of tireless activism from feminists (Graf et al. 2018). That said, some countries have adopted more egalitarian policies and practices, and we can follow their example. To give one example, Canada has a much less inegalitarian education system than its

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southern neighbour. Canada scores higher than most other wealthy countries for post-secondary educational attainment, and socioeconomic differences have less of an impact on Canadian students than students in other countries. According to the Program for International Student Assessment (2018), “the variation in scores in Canada caused by socioeconomic differences was 9%, compared with 20% in France and 17% in Singapore” (Coughlan 2017). Though Americans are mired in student debt in some cases besieged by educational inequality, they’re not powerless to change this situation. It will take a great deal of political will, but change is possible. Indeed, change is inevitable, given that political discourse is more polarized than at any point in the last two decades, at least (Pew Research Center 2014). The country will eventually swing in one direction or the other. Still, it can be difficult to know how to resist oppression, or how to maintain one’s morale. I believe that we can find inspiration in moral exemplars who have succeeded in living an intersectional feminist lifestyle by courageously opposing hierarchies of power. In what follows, I’ll give two examples of intersectional feminist modes of resistance as embodied in two exemplary individuals. One method seeks to resist by surviving and living authentically under oppression, and the other seeks to resist by overturning systems of oppression.

2. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back Indigenous peoples have survived colonial oppression for generations. We can learn about resistance and resilience from their stories and practices. Many Indigenous communities have constructed community-based ethics that present an alternative to imperialist hegemonies. One notable example is Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a distinguished scholar of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg ancestry who works at Ryerson University in Toronto and is the author of Dancing on our turtles’ backs: stories of Nishnaabeg re-creation, resurgence and a new emergence (2011).1 Simpson uses Nishnaabeg narratives and practices to reconstruct and articulate an authentic Nishnaabeg ethic. This restorative project is important because the colonial state tried to destroy the Nishnaabeg community’s cultural heritage. The method that Simpson uses to recover this heritage is based on her community’s story-telling traditions. This method derives or consolidates knowledge from community narratives about cultural values. In Simpson’s experience, the Nishnaabeg tradition places great “importance on self-actualization, the suspension of judgment, fluidity, emergence, careful deliberation and an embodied respect for diversity” (2011: 208). These values emerge and exist within a “web of non-authoritarian leadership, non-hierarchical ways of being, non-interference and non-essentialism” (2011: 184). Because of these generative contexts and focal points, the Nishnaabeg perspective is quite different from the perspective of the Canadian state, which embodies “the

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lens of colonial thought and cognitive imperialism” (2011: 133). As Simpson puts it, “at their core, Indigenous political movements contest the very foundation of the Canadian state in its current expression, while most theories of group politics and social movements take the state for granted” (2011: 143). Because the Nishnaabeg and Canadian perspectives are so oppositional, the concepts of the former cannot be translated into the concepts of the latter without a loss of meaning or intelligibility. The stories of Nishnaabeg Elders will not be fully comprehensible to an outsider who lacks any experiential, emotional, or practical connection to those teachings, much less to someone socialized into a colonialist way of thinking and being. To give one example of the intertranslatability problem, Simpson claims that Indigenous resistance cannot be captured by the western frame of reference (epitomized in “social movement theory” [SMT]), which sees resistance as “large-scale political mobilization” (2011: 133–134). She clarifies that “few Indigenous scholars use this [SMT] approach to explain Indigenous resistance and mobilization,” because it “ignores the historical context of Indigenous resistance – spanning over 400 years for some Indigenous nations – by disregarding differences in political organization, governance and political cultures between Canadian and Indigenous societies” (2011: 143). Indigenous peoples’ survival through hundreds of years of colonialism is not framed as resistance under social movement theory, and is therefore erased. Indigenous peoples are thus misrepresented as lacking in political structures and political will on that framing. Because conceptual common ground is lacking between Indigenous and Canadian frameworks, reconciliation on symmetrical terms will not be a live possibility. As Simpson puts it, “I wonder how we can reconcile when the majority of Canadians do not understand the historic or contemporary injustice of dispossession and occupation, particularly when the state has expressed its unwillingness to make any adjustments to the unjust relationship” (2011: 228). Due to this lack of shared understanding, mutually agreeable reconciliation isn’t feasible: If Canadians do not fully understand and embody the idea of reconciliation, is this a step forward? It reminds me of an abusive relationship where one person is being abused physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally. She wants out of the relationship, but instead of supporting her, we are all gathered around the abuser, because he wants to “reconcile.” But he doesn’t want to take responsibility. He doesn’t want to change. (2011: 232) In articulating a Nishnaabeg ethic and a corresponding political ethos, Simpson demonstrates one valid method of resistance: constructing an ameliorative ethic using community resources. Simpson acknowledges

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that many of her colleagues are invested in decolonizing western thought, and she doesn’t deny that this is a valid enterprise, but she denies that it is the best or only mode of resistance, even if it is framed that way in western thought. Yet if mainstream culture doesn’t contain the epistemic resources needed to understand the Nishnaabeg narrative, then a reconstructive project may be the only mode of resistance available. And it may also be the best way of resisting erasure by a colonialist logic. Simpson’s work reveals that we can resist oppression without engaging with hegemonic ideologies in any capacity. We can do this by consolidating epistemic resources within our own epistemic subcultures and in conversation with our epistemic peers. These peer-group conversations enable us to see ourselves and our communities in an authentic and unbiased way. One of Simpson’s goals as an author was to overcome “the shame” that she feels “from the legacy of colonial abuse,” and “the unspoken shame we carry collectively as Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg” (2011). This shame stems from the influence of colonial thought on Simpson’s own community. To construct a narrative of dignity is one potent mode of resistance. The notion that we can resist oppression without engaging with the cultural mainstream is continuous with one of the central premises of this book, which is that blame can be valuable to non-dominant epistemic communities as a source of confidence, courage, and validation, even if it can’t be translated into the dominant vernacular. Blaming the colonial state inverts the dominant logic on which colonial oppression is a longdead historical practice, as opposed to an existing system of relations within western nation-states. This blaming testimony is valuable even if the majority of Canadians can’t give it full uptake. Notably, when Strawson steered responsibility theory away from the ‘panicky metaphysics of determinism’ (1963), he argued that it is epistemically permissible for compatibilists to ignore metaphysical objections and to respond exclusively to concerns “within this general framework,” the framework of our “ordinary interpersonal attitudes” (1963: 14). But Strawson failed to recognize that ordinary morality contains prejudices against marginalized identities, those perceived as ‘other’ through the colonialist hegemony. His theory was flawed because it mis-described the moral landscape from a perspective of privilege. That said, he was right that the credibility of a particular argument doesn’t hinge on its translatability into a methodologically distinct framework, one that operates on the basis of a radically different set of practical concerns. Compatibilists don’t have to respond to incompatibilists to construct a compelling argument about responsibility. Often, constructing knowledge out of culturally disvalued resources and practical concerns has its own epistemic merits. This is especially true for marginalized epistemic communities that contain resources that have not been integrated into mainstream knowledgeproducing networks, and therefore have been largely hidden from view.

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Simpson’s work shows that an adequate ethic can stand on the authenticity of its experiential resources, especially when it presents an alternative to a hegemonic ideology. She doesn’t need to disprove colonialist ideologies to prove the value of Nishnaabeg cultural practices. These practices have value for the people who practice them. In constructing an emancipatory ethic, Simpson practices resistance from within.

3. Nannette Another way of resisting oppression is by engaging with mainstream culture. I think that Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special Nannette provides a good example of this method. During this special, Gadsby reveals why it is so hard to critically engage with mainstream culture without objectifying oneself as a minority. The difficulty of performing as a minority in comedy has a distinct source, on Gadsby’s interpretation. In stand-up, jokes always build up to a punch-line that’s supposed to relieve the audience’s tension. The punchline can’t be too controversial or it will exacerbate the tension rather than relieving it, disrupting the narrative arc of the joke and upsetting the (typical) audience. Therefore, minority comedians can’t end jokes in authentic testimony about their experiences of adversity, as this would be ‘too controversial’ and ‘too upsetting’ to the typical audience. So, minorities can’t talk about sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, and so on, from their own subject position, without ending the story in a joke that makes light of their adversity – that is, that presents their adversity as something to laugh at, to downplay, to dismiss. According to the logic of stand-up, minorities need to make fun of themselves and their adversity to correctly execute a joke. For this reason, in Gadsby’s earlier career she would always hide her experiences of adversity as a gender non-conforming lesbian for the sake of a laugh from the audience. For example, she would often tell a joke about how she was once accosted by a man who confused her gender, but she would never disclose how the story really ended – in physical assault. As she recounts, I told . . . a story about the time this young man had almost beaten me up because he thought . . . I mean, he thought I was cracking on to his girlfriend. . . . I was talking to a girl, and . . . you know, you could say flirting. . . . And . . . out of nowhere, he just comes up and starts shoving me, going, “Fuck off, you fucking faggot!” And she’s just stepped in, going, “Whoa, stop it! It’s a girl!” And he’s gone, “Oh, sorry.” He said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I don’t hit women,” he said. Gadsby initially turned this story encounter into a joke by saying, “What a guy! ‘I don’t hit women.’ How about you don’t hit anyone? Good rule of

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thumb.” But this wasn’t actually the end of the story. In real life, the man turned around and physically assaulted her: “He beat the shit out of me and nobody stopped him. And I didn’t . . . report that to the police, and I did not take myself to hospital, and I should have” (Gadsby 2018). Gadsby had to hide the true ending of the story for the sake of the comedic formula – she had to make light of her experience of trauma, ending the story on a joke about the man’s misgendering of her. She could talk about being harassed, but only if she presented this experience as laughable and easily overcome. She could never disclose that she had been assaulted, nor that she’s been raped more than once, because comedic conventions don’t allow people to talk about trauma from the position of the victim – they only allow people to make fun of victims. In this way, the conventions of stand-up comedy prevent minorities from disclosing their first-person experiences of adversity, because these experiences aren’t funny when told from the subject position. But these conventions do allow people to make fun of the victims of identity prejudice, e.g., rape victims. Hence, comedic conventions favour narratives that present victims of identity prejudice as the butt of the joke. What Gadsby did to resist these oppressive norms was to break them. She ‘went past the punchline’ to disclose that she has been beaten and raped in the past because of identity prejudice. She told the joke about being harassed, as she had always done in the past, but then she revealed that the harasser had turned around and assaulted her. She refused to make light of the situation, or to stop before the true denouement of the story. In this refusal, she publicly challenged the comedic conventions banning ‘controversial’ subject matter. In addition to refusing to make light of her own adversity, Gadsby upends comedic conventions by making fun of privileged groups, giving them a taste of their own medicine, in effect. At one point she speaks to the men in the audience, offering them some time-honoured advice: Jokes aside, if I may just give you a little human-to-human advice. Because I do understand it is a difficult and confusing time for you now. You know, it’s changing, it’s shifting, and I understand that. But .  .  . may I just, you know, suggest that you learn to, sort of, move beyond your defensiveness. Right? That’s your first point, you’re stuck on it, but you need to get some space around it, learn to develop . . . try and develop a sense of humor about it, or you need to lighten up, learn to laugh. Tell you what might help. How about a good dicking? Get a cock up yam, drink some jizz! You gotta laugh! That’s weird advice, isn’t it? It’s weird. It doesn’t. . . . It’s not good, is it? It doesn’t feel very nice, does it? (Gadsby 2018) Gadsby thus takes the sexist tropes conventionally used to belittle women, especially lesbians and feminists, and serves them back to men, revealing

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the absurdity in masculinist humour. This part of her routine may have made some of the men in the audience uncomfortable, which is a complete reversal from the standard use of rape jokes and homophobic slurs, which undoubtedly make many rape victims and gay people uncomfortable. Gadsby refuses to conform to the comedic norms that ‘other’ members of oppressed groups, and instead makes fun of those norms and the people who benefit from them. If Gadsby had given the same stand-up routine fifteen years ago, I doubt it would have been successful as it was, one reason being that the cultural consciousness about sexism, homophobia, and rape culture was lacking at the time. (Or maybe she wouldn’t have been able to come up with these jokes at the time). But thanks to the successes of the feminist movement, feminist comedians and feminist humour are gaining popularity. In upending the conventions of mainstream comedy, Gadsby demonstrates one way of resisting oppression: dismantling mainstream conventions and popularizing counterhegemonic schemas through subversive humour.

4. Two Modes of Resistance Simpson and Gadsby present two distinct ways of resisting oppression, one involving an in-group construction or consolidation of knowledge based on a group’s shared experiential knowledge, and the other involving engagement with the dominant epistemic community. One method seeks to consolidate internal epistemic resources, and the other seeks to challenge hegemonic understandings through critical engagement with the dominant ideology. Both methods of resistance can be valuable and empowering. Sometimes, in-group engagement is the only, or the best, method available, particularly when there isn’t enough common ground across epistemic communities to support symmetrical uptake. In other situations, there is enough epistemic reciprocity to support a by-directional exchange of ideas. But even in such contexts, it doesn’t follow that engaging with the mainstream is better than sticking to one’s own community. My reason for wanting to present both methods of resistance isn’t to pit them against each other, but rather to show that some form of resistance is always possible, even in a genocidal context. After hundreds of years, Indigenous people continue to resist the colonial state’s oppressive and dehumanizing practices. The reason that some form of resistance is always possible is that members of oppressed groups share experiential knowledge that defies the hegemonic ideology and that affirms their dignity. This experiential knowledge grounds counterhegemonic testimonies, narratives, and norms. Thus, members of oppressed groups have the resources to resist in every circumstance. How they use those resources – whether to reinforce anti-colonial narratives within their own community or to decolonize mainstream thought – is up to them. Each method has its own merits.

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People like Simpson and Gadsby can inspire us to continue to fight against oppression. We can look to them for insight, motivation, and guidance. We can follow their example. Having said this, I don’t want to be accused of contributing to what Jose Medina calls the myth of the “epistemic hero,” a solitary genius who single-handedly shifts epistemic paradigms through acts of ideological heroism (2013: 249). While individual resistors can inspire courage and confidence, we should recognize that their successes depend on collective support. I hope that I have captured this reality in my analysis of social oppression above. In this chapter, I recognized that Gadsby’s success depended on support from the feminist movement, which changed social relations such that people became more receptive to feminist humour. This isn’t to downplay Gadsby’s tremendous talent as a comedian, but rather to recognize that her subversive humour could not have been successful without support from feminists. This is one of the reasons I have presented subcultural epistemic practices as a central source of resistance: members of oppressed groups need the support of their epistemic communities to challenge hegemonic logics across epistemic contexts – to mobilize against oppression on a large scale. This is also why I have defended perpetrator-bypassing blame: because it often contains counterhegemonic information that enables resistance and contestation, whether within an oppressed community or across a range of communities. The forms of resistance available to us depend on the background epistemic conditions of our lives. But even when the epistemic climate doesn’t support symmetrical uptake across groups, some form of resistance is always possible, because there are always people who share experiences of oppression, feelings of alienation, and radical hopes in common with each other.

5. Implications for Moral Responsibility Our responsibility practices are shaped by the culture in which we live. This is a culture that suppresses Indigenous knowledge and queer people’s experiential testimony, amongst other epistemic transgressions. These transgressions contribute to asymmetries of power in our day-to-day responsibility-holding exchanges. As blamers and blame-respondents, we need to be critical, insightful, and creative, like Simpson and Gadsby. We need to construct counter-hegemonic discourses based on our shared experiences of oppression, and to listen to the experiential testimonies of other marginalized communities, and minorities within our own communities. We should be willing to make people tense, uncomfortable, and angry by illuminating their status-conferring roles in hierarchies of power, which silence, oppress, and harm minority groups. We’re allowed to ignore and avoid people who demean us, and we’re entitled to focus on building epistemically constructive relationships within our own communities, with our epistemic peers. At the same time, we’re entitled to

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stand up to cultural orthodoxies, scorn them, and subject them to ridicule. Whatever we do, we should be alert to the asymmetries of power that structure our relationships and reinforce inequalities. We should be intent on resisting and dismantling these asymmetries of power, partly through the use of blame and praise. Any contribution to ameliorative moral conversation that we can make is a valuable one. The most important thing is that we are surviving, resisting, and refusing to be silently complicit in ‘banal’ hierarchies of power.

Note 1. I am indebted to my colleague Brandon Fenton, from York University (Toronto), for introducing me to this book.

References Coughlan, S. (2017, Aug 2). How Canada became an education superpower. BBC News. Retrieved from: www.bbc.com/news/business-40708421?SThisF B&fbclid=IwAR0zsGKO1G2QKtWdV1QAoP2Hax5KPP9cJYmRuSLlMX4x 98FFUbKjh4_XZXw Gadsby, H. (2018). Nannette. Directed by Jon Olb, Madeleine Parry. Netflix. Retrieved from: www.imdb.com/title/tt8465676/ Graf, N., Brown, A., & Patten, E. (2018, April 9). The narrowing, but persistent, gender gap in pay. Pew Research Center. Hagerman, M. (2018, Sep 17). Are today’s white kids less racist than their grandparents? The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/aretodays-white-kids-less-racist-than-their-grandparents-101710Shermerhorn Medina, J. (2013). The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and the social imagination. Oxford University Press. Pew Research Center. (2014). Political polarization in the American public. Retrieved from: www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-theamerican-public/ Program for International Student Assessment. (2018). Equity in education: Breaking down barrier to social mobility. Retrieved from: http://factsmaps.com/pisaworldwide-ranking-average-score-of-math-science-reading/ Puckett, L. (2019, June 18). AOC says ‘fascist’ Trump administration is running ‘concentration camps’ on US-Mexico border. The Independent. Retrieved from: www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/aoc-instagram-live-streamtrump-concentration-camps-us-mexico-border-ocasio-cortez-a8964541.html Shermerhorn, C. (2019, Jun 19). Why the racial wealth gap persists, more than 150 years after emancipation. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www. washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/19/why-racial-wealth-gap-persistsmore-than-years-after-emancipation/ Simpson, L. B. (2011). Dancing on our turtle’s back: Stories of Nishnaabeg recreation, resurgence and a new emergence. Arbeiter Ring Pub. Strawson, P. F. (1963). Freedom and resentment. In Freedom and resentment and other essays. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008.

Index

ableism 19, 36, 102 African American Vernacular English 163–164 agency-enhancement theory 60–63, 79–81; see also circumstantialism; scaffolded-responsiveness view American Sign Language 165 Anderson, Elizabeth 31, 127 answerability 7, 17, 20, 43, 52, 56–57, 62, 69, 74 anti-carceral feminism 111 Arpaly, Nomy 46, 86–87 attributability 7, 43–44, 47–78 Beauvoir, Simone de 23, 166, 198 Bell, Macalester xii, 12, 33, 53, 96, 98–100, 104, 110, 141, 147 benevolent sexism 16 Biden, Joe 119, 131 Bilge, Sirma 36–37, 84 Bukowski, Charles 195 Calabrese, Andrew 121–126 Calhoun, Cheshire 121–122, 125–126, 128–129, 131 Cat Person 201–206 circumstantialism 57 Cirne, Alyssa 45–46 cisheteronormativity 2, 6, 35, 38, 77, 102, 104, 129, 130, 182, 225, 233, 238; see also heteronormativity civility 59, 118–133, 201 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 58–60 cognitivism 13 collective responsibility 65–67 Collins, Patricia Hill 36–37, 84 colonialism 13, 21, 105–106, 109, 114, 123–125, 179, 186, 244–249

compassion 96–97 compatibilism 6–7, 246 contempt 18, 89–90, 93–96, 98–101, 103–104, 106–107, 110, 115, 146–147, 157–159, 160, 238 control theory 48–52, 56, 58 Cudd, Ann E. 32, 68, 232 Curry, Tommy J. 214–215 decolonial emotions 13 Delgado, Richard 34–35, 39 Dennett, Daniel 228 disability 2, 4, 5, 29, 35–36, 165 disdain 9, 18, 89–90, 94, 98, 106, 157 Doris, John 47, 50, 79–80, 83–84, 87, 104, 227–228 eliminativism 223–240 empathy 97, 113, 159, 198, 218–219 epistemic: bad luck 45, 75; confidence 12, 19, 23, 76, 140, 201, 226 (see also epidemic, courage); courage 19, 137, 246; friction 127–128, 130, 132; hero 250; injustice 23, 45–46, 110, 123, 146, 160, 163, 178, 193–194, 196, 199–203, 210, 217, 226; peer 11, 18, 69, 134, 239; subculture 76, 77, 130, 136, 246 epistemically deformed agents 18, 62, 81, 115, 233 evolution 134–135, 145, 153–154, 224–225, 235, 240, 243 exculpatory creep 223, 228–229, 233 excuses 15, 17, 44, 57, 81–82, 159 false allegations 78, 80, 83–84 FIFA World Cup 36–37

Index Fischer, John M. 48–52, 87 Flowers, Rachel 13, 105–107, 109–110, 114, 147 forgetting 17, 20–21, 44 forgiveness 17, 63–64, 97, 103, 105, 106, 136, 140 Fricker, Miranda 23, 45, 75, 159, 189 functionalism 43, 57, 63, 69, 73, 84 fundamental attribution error 50 Gadsby, Hanna 247, 248–250 Gay, Roxane 23, 29, 166 gender: the social construction of 189–191, 193–195, 198–201; as a source of epistemic injustice 161–163, 166, 189–191, 189–201 genocide 13, 21, 109, 115, 117, 124, 146, 147, 179, 182, 230–232 Glover, Donald 6, 60 group agency 43, 65–67 hard feelings 18, 96, 99 Harding, Sandra 24, 40 Haslanger, Sally 4, 30–31, 40 hate speech 102–103 Hay, Carol 32–34 Hefner, Hugh 191–192, 194–195, 200, 202 hermeneutical gaps 46, 75, 114 heteronormativity 2, 6, 35, 38, 77, 102, 104, 129, 130, 182, 225, 233, 238; see also cisheteronormative Heyes, Cressida J. 38 historical romanticism 131 Holroyd, Jules 7, 57, 59, 104, 114 Hutchison, Katrina 16, 47–48, 51, 93–94, 96, 104, 112, 144 Huxley, Aldous 234 identity: politics 38; prejudice 14–15, 20, 23–24, 52, 56, 63, 93, 98, 102–103, 110, 112–114, 123, 128, 137–138, 147, 154, 157, 161, 165, 167, 171, 189, 226–227, 248 incarceration 12, 109, 111–112, 164, 224, 238–239 indignation 9, 13, 26, 90, 93, 134–135, 140–141, 158, 166 individualist bias 229, 233 Isaacs, Tracy 229–231 justification gap 71–82, 84

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Kant, Immanuel 32, 38–39, 179–180 Kelsky, Karen 61–62, 101 Kerouac, Jack 195 Key, K. M. 219–220, 222 Kingwell, Mark 123–124 Lake, Ryan 225, 235–236 Langton, Rae 203 Levy, Neil 18, 95, 223, 229 life satisfaction 233–234 List, Christian 65–66 Locke, John 21, 122–124 Lolita 196–197 lone wolves 68 Malcolm X 121, 124, 180 Malle, Bertram F. 143, 145, 147–154 Manne, Kate 68, 95, 97, 136, 171, 174–178, 182, 184–185 Marx, Karl 37, 181 masculine gaze, the xi, 24, 190–192, 194, 196, 198, 201, 203, 205–206, 210, 214, 216, 220; see also white masculine gaze Mason, Elinor 17, 21, 44–46 May, Larry 65–67 McKenna, Michael 6, 10, 14, 52–53, 56, 74, 85, 118, 157 Medina, Jose 45–46, 75–76, 121–122, 127, 130, 250 mental disorders 112–114 Mill, John Stuart 123–126 Mills, Charles 5, 6, 23, 31, 32, 67–68, 98, 171, 178–180, 182, 184 Monroe, Marilyn 191–192 moral conversation 24, 53–57, 106, 109, 132, 136, 157, 159, 167, 251 Mulvey, Laura 190 Nagel, Thomas 228 Nazis 55, 86, 104–105, 119, 136–139, 141–142, 230 neoliberalism 154, 235–238 Niemi, Laura 144, 149, 151 Nietzsche, Friedrich xii, 107 non-ideal theory 3, 5–6, 8, 31–36, 38–41, 43, 98, 108, 138, 145–146, 152–153, 155, 179, 190 Nozick, Robert 192, 234 objective attitude, the 7, 90–98, 101, 103–104, 107–109, 112–115, 118, 160–161, 164

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objectivity 40–41 obligations 17, 33–34, 46, 129 participatory stance, the 89, 99, 141 Peele, J. 219–220, 222 Pereboom, Derk 57, 63–64 Pettit, Philip 65–66 pornography 189–196, 201–203, 206–210 psychic junk 46–48, 69 psychopaths 17–18, 114, 138 queer theory 2, 4–5, 35–36 race: as a social construct 31, 34–35; as a target of epistemic injustice 210–213, 212–215, 163–164 rage ix, xi, xii, 9, 13, 19, 105–107, 110, 146–147 rape ix, x, 15, 23, 48, 60, 63–67, 78, 80–81, 106, 111, 131, 139, 149–150, 172, 174, 186, 192–193, 196, 199–201, 203, 211, 214–215, 231, 243, 248, 249; jokes 200–201, 249 rationality 5, 15, 90–93, 104, 110–111, 114–115, 146 Rawls, John 40, 120, 126–127, 179–180, 182 reactive attitudes, the 6–8, 12–13, 17–18, 23, 52, 90, 94, 96, 98, 103, 115, 118, 140, 159, 184, 226 reconciliation 55, 63–65, 105–106, 136, 245 reflective equilibrium 40 relational analysis 3, 5, 16, 29, 31–32, 35–36, 38–39, 43, 82, 228–229 resentment 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17, 46, 90, 93, 96, 99, 106–107, 135, 140–141, 157–159, 165–166, 238 resistance 20, 34, 86, 105, 107, 110–111, 120, 127, 137, 141–142, 244–246, 249–251 ressentiment xii, 107 restitutitivism 11, 55–56, 106, 225, 228, 235–236 retributivism 118, 224–225, 235–238 rich people 96, 123, 154, 180–182, 185 Roupenian, Kristen 201, 205–206 Ruffin, Amber 220 scaffolded-responsiveness view 57 schadenfreude 198

Schumer, Amy 199–200 self-care 90, 101, 103, 108 self-respect 64, 105–106 Shields, Brooke 191 silencing 64, 120, 125, 127, 132, 157, 176, 189, 178, 189–190, 192, 211, 216 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 244–247, 249–250 slavery 86, 124, 179, 182, 213, 214–215, 217–218, 220, 224, 234, 237 Smith, Angela 20–21, 46, 54, 135–137, 141 smothering 12, 14, 120, 132, 174, 178, 189, 190, 193, 216, 238 Solnit, Rebecca 97, 171–172, 174, 183, 189–190, 192–196, 198–200, 203, 205–206, 215, 218 Stefancic, Jean 34–35, 39 strangulation 178 Strawson, P. F. 1, 6, 7–9, 15–18, 25, 89–99, 101–103, 105, 107, 108, 111–113, 115–119, 140, 184, 226, 246 strike-back emotions 9–10, 224, 226–227 Strikwerda, Robert 65–67 Talbert, Matthew 54, 136–138, 140–141 terrorism 68, 109 testimonial authority 14, 47, 104, 114, 140, 176, 185, 193, 204, 211, 214–215, 220 Toit, Louise du 60, 63–64, 106 Tremain, Shelley 36 Trump, Donald xi, 120–121, 130, 200, 205, 220 unprincipled virtue 86 uptake 9, 11–15, 18, 40, 53–56, 60–61, 69, 73–78, 84, 89–92, 96, 101–103, 107, 113–115, 120–121, 134–141, 146–147, 158–159, 163, 176, 190, 193, 196, 201, 205, 226–227, 239, 246, 249, 250 utilitarianism 38–39, 80, 90–91 Vargas, Manuel 29, 48–51, 57–60, 79–85, 92, 113–115 veridicality 78–79

Index Waller, Bruce 9–10, 87, 91, 223–229, 233–236, 238–240 wellbeing 200–201, 206 white ignorance 35, 67, 114, 180 white masculine gaze, the 210, 214 white translator 60 withdrawal 8, 89–91, 93–95, 97–98, 100–108, 134, 141, 159 Wolf, Michelle 200–201, 206

Wright, Fannie 126 wrong reasons 84–85 Young, Liane 144, 149, 155 Young, Marion 166 Zack, Naomi 19, 35, 213–214 Zurn, Christopher F. 121–122, 125–127

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