An Intersectional Feminist Theory of Moral Responsibility

Michelle Ciurria

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000024845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book develops an intersectional feminist approach to moral responsibility. It accomplisheses 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.

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 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 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 non-ideal 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 non-ideal 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.

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 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 responsibility-holding 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 consequential-ist 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 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 ve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Moral Responsibility
• 1 Intersectional Feminism
• 2 Intersectional Feminism and Five Theories of Moral Responsibility
• 3 Intersectional Feminism Refined
• 4 The Moral Psychology of Responsibility: What It Means to Take a Stand Against Someone
• 5 Against Civility Constraints
• 6 Third-Party-Addressing Blame
• 7 Blaming Cognition
• 8 Responsibility and Conversation
• 9 The Mysterious Case of the Missing Perpetrators: How the Privileged Easily Escape Blame and Accountability
• 10 Women’s Blame in Conditions of Epistemic Injustice
• 11 POC’s Blame in Conditions of Epistemic Injustice
• 12 Against Eliminativism
• Conclusion
• Index