“Civilized oppression” is a phrase I coined some years ago³ to refer to oppression that involves neither violence, nor the use of law. It is systematic and disadvantages and demeans members of certain groups and in Western societies it is pervasive. The phenomena involved are routinely trivialized, given their subtle nature, yet both their effects and their nonconsequentialist implications are highly significant. My first book, Civilized Oppression, focuses on the most central goals: analyzing what is involved in such oppression, making such oppression more recognizable, explaining why it is far more important morally than first appears, and uncovering the underlying principles that account for its immorality.

The key focus in this second book is on the moral relations between the key players: victims, agents of civilized oppression, and bystanders. (By “victim” I refer simply to someone at the receiving end of such oppression and someone, therefore, morally wronged. No image or stereotype is implied.) To keep the work here as self-contained as possible, this first chapter contains some key points about civilized oppression worked on in my first book.

There are important differences between civilized oppression (at least, toward one end of the spectrum of civilized oppression) and more dramatic forms that involve violence. I say “at one end of the spectrum” because civilized oppression itself covers a range of phenomena containing some interesting moral distinctions, some of which carry implications for the moral status of the contributing agents.

I am particularly interested in the most subtle cases, since they are the most underexamined, although they reflect powerful forces that routinely derail lives. Here, more than with any other form of oppression, thinking about the moral role of the contributing agents involves thinking about their ability to make fine-grained perceptions, particularly about their own long-standing habits of action. Some socialized habits contribute greatly to subtle but powerfully effective civilized oppression, but the relevant self-awareness requires a level of perceptual skill that involves commitment over time, not simply goodwill, good intentions, and sincere beliefs about the wrongness of discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization.

Here too the stereotype of the agent as “the enemy” (readily justified in cases of violent oppression and some of the more transparent cases of civilized oppression) can be misleading for more than one reason. Sometimes, in fact, contributions to civilized oppression are actually motivated by basically good intentions (e.g., when someone routinely “blames the victim” of some wrongful harm by pointing to something the victim did—and so could avoid doing—with the hope of protecting the victim from similar harms in the future).

A number of these differences are relevant to our conceptions of the key players and so too to what the relationships should be. This matters, since distorted relationships, I argue, lie at the heart of civilized oppression. It is in the very nature of this type of oppression that much of what is morally wrong is not accounted for in terms of material harm (although such harm predictably follows from what is wrong). Thinking about civilized oppression leads us to questions about the relationships that typically hold between those involved and the relationships that should hold, and although the consequences of actions clearly matter a great deal, analyzing the immorality of this kind of oppression solely in terms of the “consequences” of this or that action does not get to the heart of the matter. We need to explore the moral relations involved.

How can actions that seem completely trivial constitute oppression? Consider an example readily found in daily life. Suppose that those in the more powerful position are comfortable chatting with members of one group but not with those of another. Suppose that the powerful men are comfortable talking informally with other men, but far less so with women. It seems at first a purely personal matter, but it can in fact disadvantage members of the excluded group, both practically and motivationally. They do not receive the timely bits of information and quick tips members of the other group receive; they miss the short anecdote about the new manager that makes the person seem more approachable; and they don’t hear the occasional, spontaneous word of praise of encouragement. They miss out on all the richness of the well-disposed, casual encounter. It also means that the socially better positioned are unlikely to know those individuals as well as they do the people they chat with, and in a society where connections can affect success, this can make a difference. What seem like acts of commission or omission of no significance can function in powerful ways.

With all types of oppression the victims have a moral primacy for more than one reason. In cases of violent oppression their suffering demands moral attention and strong action. It is physical suffering that, in principle at least, is highly visible even if committed behind closed doors. It is so blatant and so evil that others cannot turn away from it in good faith. Another reason for the moral primacy of victims is that there are less visible aspects even to this type of oppression. The psychological evil that accompanies such physical suffering has been well documented by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, by battered wives, by physically abused children (often recounted when adults). Children sexually assaulted by priests suffered terribly in physical ways, but they also suffered psychologically when their priest turned into a monster in front of them, when their own parents refused to believe them when they tried to convey their terror and pain, when they were shunned as liars, or at best obsessed with distasteful fantasies or calumnies. They found themselves trapped in social structures that simply dismissed their reports and refused to see their nightmare. Victims of civilized oppression have an even more crucial role to play in getting the phenomena known. There are, by definition, no blatantly violent actions to see, nothing to arouse any deep moral concern in “observers.” Even the agents of the oppression typically do not strike us as immoral, let alone evil. In some cases they are even transparently well intentioned toward the victims they oppress.⁴ We can learn about this form of oppression only from the victims themselves (as Laurence Thomas and Elizabeth Spelman urge us to do).

So what is the nature of the relationship, or rather, what relationship should hold, between these victims and the agents of this kind of oppression? Some of the basic points center around fallibility as a shared feature of agents; it is obviously unreasonable to expect moral perfection, either in others or ourselves. Given that civilized oppression involves phenomena that are far less visible than those found in violent oppression, it is understandable (as has been noted earlier) that many contributing agents are unaware of their role, notably so at the far end of the civilized oppression spectrum where the agents are literally unaware of the habitual and fine-grained actions they engage in. Their oversights call for some empathy, given that they are ones we all share even if in non-oppressive contexts.

Also those agents who are committed to learning about the oppression, primarily by listening to its victims, are engaged in a process of increasing awareness, both of the nature of what is wrong and of their role in it. Acquiring empathetic understanding of the oppression and acquiring an increasing awareness of one’s habitual actions both involve gradual processes. Errors of judgment and oversights are to be expected on occasion. Although the demand for perfection is not one we hear in these situations, it is nonetheless hovering in the practice of condemning someone outright as soon as they make one error of judgment. Victims who are long-term oppressed may understandably have a fairly short fuse when it comes to some kinds of mistakes made by the non-oppressed who would support them, but condemning them in ways that dismiss them permanently as potential fellow fighters in the cause is not only unwise, it is, more to the point, unfair.

When the privileged non-oppressed do try to learn about civilized oppression and what they themselves are doing to support it, when they begin to make changes in their actions, it was pointed out that they usually pay a price for this disloyalty to their socially advantaged group. The costs they pay are as often overlooked as the harms inflicted on the victims of civilized oppression, especially early on in any social change of common and oppressive practices when few of the privileged step out of line. It can be morally appropriate for the victims to be grateful for those who begin to make changes and begin to voice the concerns.

So, unlike situations of violent oppression, I am claiming that victims of civilized oppression have good reasons for being sympathetic to the type and degree of fallibility found in many agents of civilized oppression. These agents are typically not the enemy in any classic sense and the failings of many of them are shared by the victims.

In chapter 2, I examine the traditional claim that gratitude is an appropriate response only to acts of benevolence that are not morally owed and only where the motive is that of trying to help. Otherwise gratitude is uncalled for.

I challenge this tradition in two ways, situating my discussion in relation to civilized oppression. First, I critique what I call the “moral atomism” typically involved, that is, thinking that we can assess a moral situation by looking just at the key players (in this case, the benevolent person and the one helped). Life is lived in relationships: some personal, some at the societal level where power structures can affect both the moral description and the assessment of some situation or incident. (Feminist philosophy fully supports this insight.) Second, I challenge the core of the traditional position and argue that sometimes there may be good reasons for being grateful to someone who fulfills a moral obligation.

Although feminist philosophy rejects the moral atomism of the standard position on gratitude, the actual core of the position (that gratitude is never called for in response to a morally obligatory action) seems to be generally accepted, and in addition, the role of the relationships involved is sometimes oversimplified. As a point of departure from this trend, I argue that it can sometimes be appropriate for the oppressed to be grateful to the thoughtful members of privileged groups—the break-away “heroes”—who contribute to ending oppression, even though such contributions are morally owed.

The chapter also concludes that appropriate relationships of gratitude are part of what can bring to life a notion of a moral community, and if gratitude is seen as inherently demeaning, then something is very wrong with the underlying conception of a moral community and the relationships within it. (This is one of the pointers along the way in considering just a few implications of the book’s findings for a reconception of moral community.)

In chapter 3, I explore a morally rich notion of solidarity and the relationships it promotes. In doing so, I argue for the role of empathetic understanding in the moral response to civilized oppression (a position generally accepted in feminist philosophy), but introduce two caveats that extend the role of moral solidarity in controversial ways.

There is currently no agreed-upon meaning given to “moral solidarity,” so I explore the question, how should we conceive of moral solidarity if we are to reach a morally rich conception of that bond, something morally worth striving for? After rejecting two apparently plausible candidates, I examine the relationship between members of an oppressed group and relatively powerful, non-oppressed others to see what can this suggests about a desirable form of moral solidarity.

That relationship is much discussed in feminist literature and the call for empathetic understanding of the oppressed by the privileged is often central (e.g., Elizabeth Spelman urges the privileged to become “apprentices” to the oppressed in order to understand their situation and experience,⁵ and Laurence Thomas calls for the privileged to show “moral deference” to the oppressed in understanding their experiences and pain).⁶

Building the relationship of moral solidarity around empathetic understanding is a move I fully endorse. That said, I argue for two caveats. The first is that we should beware of allowing paradigm cases to set false boundaries on the role of empathetic understanding. Usually we learn about the situations of the oppressed by listening empathetically to their stories and protests and entering into a relationship of moral solidarity with them. I make the case that we can be in moral solidarity with victims of oppression who are not able to articulate their stories in the standard sense (including systematically oppressed animals).

The second caveat is even more controversial, since it relies on the claim that at one end of the civilized oppression spectrum (involving the most subtle cases), agents contributing to the oppression have an understandable lack of awareness of their role. Is it, then, ever appropriate for victims of civilized oppression to be in a relationship of empathetic understanding, and even, correlatively, moral solidarity, with agents who contribute to their oppression (a complete reversal of the direction of moral solidarity in the paradigm cases)? I explore whether we can make moral sense of being firmly against the oppression, but not against the oppressors.

Akin to the previous chapter, this chapter concludes that appropriate relationships of moral solidarity can morally enrich the notion of a moral community. It is one more piece collected along the way that will be drawn into the final chapter.

In chapter 4, I look at the relationship between civilized oppression, moral community, and resistance. Feminist philosophy has much to say about resisting oppression, but as with a number of other issues, overgeneralizing about oppression leads to misleading conclusions about resistance.

For example, many agents of civilized oppression, unlike those employing terror and violence, are not easily identifiable as the enemy. Also, Ann Cudd speaks of oppressors as people who “intend to act in order to continue or intensify the oppression of a social group,”⁷ but this too is overgeneralized: agents of civilized oppression often have no such intention, and at one end of the civilized oppression spectrum at least, understandably no awareness of their role or their contributing actions. Again, in paradigm cases we think of resistance as fighting against the oppressor, the enemy, with whatever resources can be marshalled, but our attitude toward those contributing to civilized oppression may be justifiably rather different, even while realizing that the oppression itself has to end.

In the rest of the chapter I look at two nonstandard forms of resistance that are especially relevant to civilized oppression.

The first involves educational initiatives. Thinking of education, both formal and informal, as a form of resistance is unusual, but apt in the case of civilized oppression.

I examine the grounds for claiming that victims may even have a prima facie obligation to “educate”—to speak up, protest, explain, and inform the non-oppressed, a claim clearly implied, for example, in Laurence Thomas’s work.⁸ While supporting that prima facie obligation as an imperfect duty, I also argue for a central, but nonobvious, limitation on it.

The more obvious moral limitations are, first, a plausible looking right to protect oneself from serious risks, and second, an equally plausible-looking right to guard one’s personal resources, especially time and energy. The less obvious constraint argued for here is t...