Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism

Resisting Oppression

C. Hay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349434459, 9781137003898
• eBook ISBN: 9781137003904
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book Hay argues that the moral and political frameworks of Kantianism and liberalism are indispensable for addressing the concerns of contemporary feminism. After defending the use of these frameworks for feminist purposes, Hay uses them to argue that people who are oppressed have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression.

1

Liberalism & Oppression

This chapter lays the groundwork for the remainder of this book. Because I do not assume that my reader has an expert knowledge of the theories of liberalism or of oppression, my goal here is to acquaint parties from each camp with the lessons of the other. I begin by articulating a definition of oppression that synthesizes the ideas of theorists as far back as J.S. Mill. I then summarize what I take to be the four most trenchant critiques of the liberal tradition’s inability to accommodate the reality of oppressive social circumstances, cataloguing along the way the various ways that liberals are responding to these critiques. The literature in contemporary liberalism is vast, so I do not pretend to provide a completely comprehensive survey here. Instead this chapter should be read as a set of orienting remarks that set the stage for the subsequent discussions of Kantianism, liberalism, and oppression.

Liberalism has become extremely unpopular in some academic disciplines – particularly those disciplines that focus on the pernicious historical role liberal ideals have played in causing and justifying imperialism and colonialism, and those disciplines that aim to solve the problems involved in defining and negotiating the diverse multicultural ways of life that characterize our contemporary world. In a time when economic and political hegemonies threaten local traditions and populations, liberalism is now frequently viewed as the intellectual handmaid of homogenization, colonization, and marginalization. Critics of liberalism have argued that (1) because it relies on suspect notions of autonomy and liberty; (2) because it is overly individualistic; (3) because it is overly abstract; and (4) because of its commitment to either universalism or pluralism, liberalism is incapable of properly conceptualizing, much less ameliorating, the harms of oppression. I respond to each of these accusations in turn, admitting that in many cases these charges were almost certainly true of liberalism’s historical incarnations. There is no denying that liberalism has historically failed to address oppression in any systematic way. But I will argue that because these failures are not the necessary result of liberalism’s core tenets, they are not inevitable. We will see that contemporary liberal theorists can and do take these lessons on board. There is a radical potential in liberalism, a potential to use the resources of liberalism to respond to the realities of oppression, that many of its current critics overlook. Realizing this potential, however, requires assenting to a conclusion that neither all liberal theorists nor all anti-oppression theorists will be happy to accept. I conclude the chapter by arguing that anyone interested in social justice must be committed to certain objective, transcultural moral ideals.

A definition of oppression

Almost 150 years ago, in his 1869 The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill articulated what was probably the first liberal theory of oppression.¹ According to this account, oppression is a denial of equal liberty, which, for Mill, is tantamount to a denial of the opportunity to develop one’s rational capacities for thought and action. Mill’s central concern in The Subjection of Women was to establish that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other ... is wrong in itself, and ... one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.”² Establishing this required, Mill thought, undermining the “almost universal opinion” that the subordination of women to men in his society was natural and therefore just.³ To undermine this opinion, he addressed the question of why women in his society appeared to submit voluntarily to their oppression. His answer had three parts. First, Mill showed how women were made to be inferior, or allegedly inferior, to men by being coerced and by not having equal opportunities to develop their talents. The mechanisms that were used to manufacture and entrench women’s inferiority included both social roles, such as motherhood, and legal institutions, such as marriage and property. Second, he showed how these real or perceived inferiorities were used to justify women’s inequalities; women were seen as not fit for the public sphere because of their fragile and flighty natures and inferior mental faculties. Finally, he showed how, unlike other oppressed groups, women were made, not just to obey their oppressors, but to want to obey them:

All men ... desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. ... All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others.⁴

Women were raised to be content with their situation and to believe that their inferiority made their subordination to men natural. Women’s beliefs and desires were manipulated by the oppressive social situations in which they lived so that they appeared to consent to these oppressive situations voluntarily. But women’s choice to acquiesce in their oppression was hollow, Mill argued, because it took place in the absence of meaningful alternatives – the choice was between “that or none.”⁵

Mill’s account of the forces that conspired to oppress the women of his time was comprehensive and thorough; while it focused primarily on women’s lack of legal rights, it also included economic, political, social, and psychological elements. The account that follows owes a great debt to this founding liberal thinker. This account of oppression has two conditions that are both individually necessary and jointly sufficient. According to this account, an individual is oppressed if and only if (i) she is unjustly harmed in a group-specific way, and, (ii) this harm is part of a structural and systemic network of social institutions. We will consider these two conditions in turn.

Unjust group-specific harm

Unlike non-oppressive harms, oppressive harms are directed at individuals in virtue of their membership in a group of people (and not every group of people will count as one whose members can be subject to oppression). This means that, for example, when in a case of oppression a woman is picked out as an individual who deserves harmful treatment, this treatment is directed at her not solely as an individual with particular handicaps or failures, but also as a member of a group – the group comprised of all women – whose members are considered collectively deserving of such treatment. Because oppressive harms come about as a result of judgements that concern the qualities that all members of a group are presumed to share, or that concern what such people are presumed to deserve, a harm counts as oppressive only if it results from the recognition that the individual in question is a member of a certain group or category of people. This is the first condition of oppression – that oppressive harms apply in virtue of group membership.

This condition has to do with how one becomes a candidate for being subject to oppressive harms. An individual is harmed in this group-specific way if and only if:

(i)she is harmed in virtue of being a member of a group, G; and,

(ii)on balance, members of G have a relative lack of social esteem, power, or authority; and,

(iii)on balance, members of another group, G*, benefit from her being harmed; and,

(iv)this harm is unfair, unearned, or illegitimate in some other way.

Because oppression is, fundamentally, a form of injustice that concerns groups, individual people are oppressed if and only if they are subject to injustice because they are members of a particular group. Sexist oppression harms people, then, in virtue of the fact that they are (or are taken to be) women. Racist oppression harms people in virtue of the fact that they are (or are taken to be) members of a particular race. And so on. But we need to ask, what kind of group of people we are talking about here. Do oppressed groups share certain specific features in virtue of their oppression? Iris Marion Young has argued that, because of the wide range of social and historical contexts in which the members of different oppressed groups live, it is not possible to come up with a single set of criteria capable of accounting for all the different conditions of oppression. She argues instead that different forms of oppression share only a family resemblance.⁶ While Young is right to avoid an overly narrow definition of oppression – lest the account leave out some groups that should count as oppressed or leave out some of the ways that members of different groups are oppressed – there is reason to be wary of an account of oppression being too nonspecific. After all, if a definition ends up including groups that we do not intuitively think should count as oppressed, we risk not taking completely seriously the ways in which the harms of oppression are uniquely damaging. Taking account of the many different ways that oppression can be manifested is important, but it is also important that the concept not be diluted to the point where a charge of oppression carries little normative weight.

Also, there simply is more that can be said about the commonalities between different kinds of oppressed groups. This is where the second subcondition of this condition of oppression comes in: one characteristic that is shared by all oppressed groups is the relative lack of social esteem that is accorded them. Members of oppressed groups live in societies where their interests are widely seen as not as important as those of non-oppressed groups. This lack of social esteem means that the members of groups that are oppressed have less power and less authority than the rest of people in society. Oppressed people are more likely to be both politically disenfranchised (by, say, being forbidden or discouraged from voting or holding political office, or by having restricted access to other positions of political power and influence) and economically disenfranchised (by, say, being forbidden or discouraged from working, or by having restricted access to the best jobs, or by not being permitted to own property).

These disparities in esteem, power, and authority result not only in many unfair restrictions on the members of groups that are oppressed, but also in correspondingly unearned privileges for the members of groups that are not oppressed. To count as oppressive, the harms faced by the members of oppressed groups must also, on balance, serve the interests of the members of another group. This is the third subcondition of this condition of oppression: the members of another group must ultimately benefit from the harms experienced by the members of an oppressed group for these harms to be instances of oppression. This subcondition might seem strange, until one realizes that relative advantage can count as a benefit. If members of one group face systematic hardships that members of a second group do not, then members of the second group will be in a better position than members of the first group to compete for limited resources. Not having to compete on fair terms with members of oppressed groups is thus an unearned privilege that members of non-oppressed groups benefit from.⁷ This subcondition rules out the possibility that everyone is equally oppressed. The harms of oppression are not inevitabilities like aging, disease, or death; oppression is not a necessary aspect of the human condition. This condition also explains why many of the harms members of non-oppressed groups experience in virtue of their membership in a group do not count as instances of oppression – because these harms ultimately do not benefit the members of oppressed groups.⁸

There are, however, some situations where the members of one group benefit from the harms experienced by the members of another group, and where the members of the latter group suffer from a relative lack of social esteem that results in a lack of power and authority, and yet these harms do not count as instances of oppression. For example, the systematic restrictions that prisoners face serve the interests of another group – the group consisting of law-abiding members of society at large. And prisoners make up a group of people that is generally looked down upon by society at large, and this relative lack of social esteem results in a lack of power and authority. Were meeting either of these two conditions not merely necessary but also sufficient for someone counting as oppressed, then prisoners would count as oppressed. But surely it is uncontentious to assume that a theory of just punishment can account for at least some restrictions on prisoners’ agency, at least some of the time. When prisoners have earned the restrictions on their agency, these restrictions are legitimate and therefore not oppressive. The legitimacy of a harm – in this case, because it is deserved – should, intuitively, rule out the possi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Liberalism Oppression
• 2  A Feminist Defence of Kant
• 3  The Obligation to Resist Sexual Harassment
• 4  The Obligation to Resist Oppression
• 5  Respect-Worthiness and Dignity
• Selected Bibliography
• Index