Oppression and Responsibility
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Oppression and Responsibility

A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory

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eBook - PDF

Oppression and Responsibility

A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory

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About This Book

Combating homophobia, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and violence in our society requires more than just focusing on the overt acts of prejudiced and abusive individuals. The very intelligibility of such acts, in fact, depends upon a background of shared beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that together form the context of social practices in which these acts come to have the meaning they do. This book, inspired by Wittgenstein as well as feminist and critical race theory, shines a critical light on this background in order to show that we all share more responsibility for the persistence of oppressive social practices than we commonly suppose—or than traditional moral theories that connect responsibility just with the actions, rights, and liberties of individuals would lead us to believe.

First sketching a nonessentialist view of rationality, and emphasizing the role of power relations, Peg O'Connor then examines in subsequent chapters the relationship between a variety of "foreground" actions and "background" practices: burnings of African American churches, hate speech, child sexual abuse, coming out as a gay or lesbian teenager, and racial integration of public and private spaces. These examples serve to illuminate when our "language games" reinforce oppression and when they allow possibilities for resistance. Attending to the background, O'Connor argues, can give us insight into ways of transforming the nature and meaning of foreground actions.

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Yes, you can access Oppression and Responsibility by Peg O’Connor in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Ethics & Moral Philosophy. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Penn State University Press
Year
2015
ISBN
9780271032429
Topic
Philosophy
Subtopic
Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Copyright
  3. Contents
  4. Preface: Why Wittgenstein?
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Abbreviations
  7. 1 The Necessity of Practices and Backgrounds
  8. 2 The Stability of Rationality
  9. 3 Conspiracies and Connect the Dots: The Search for Motive in the Church Burnings
  10. 4 The Meaning of Assaultive Speech: Its Harmful Uses
  11. 5 Moving to New Boroughs: Transforming the World by Inventing Language Games
  12. 6 Lesbian Barroom Brawls: Racial Integration in the 1950s
  13. 7 If Everybody's Responsible, Then Nobody Is
  14. Postscript: Contra Determinism and Fatalism
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index
  17. Back Cover