Moral philosophy is often said to be about what we owe to each other. Do we owe anything to ourselves?

This paper reconsiders the contemporary moral reading of women’s oppression, and revises our understanding of the practical reasons for action a victim of mistreatment acquires through her unjust circumstances. The paper surveys various ways of theorising victims’ moral duties to resist their own oppression, and considers objections to prior academic work arguing for the existence of an imperfect Kantian duty of resistance to oppression grounded in self-respect. These objections suggest that such a duty is victim blaming; that it distorts the (...) normative direction of self-regarding duties; and that consequentialist reasons are inapt for justifying self-regarding ethical responsibilities. The paper then argues that the need for normative coherence in our very concept of a moral duty is of paramount importance, and especially so in the fight against patriarchal oppression. Accordingly, we should acknowledge the salient differences between pro tanto or defeasible moral reasons and fully fledged moral duties identifying agent-relative obligatory action. The paper concludes that we better respect and defend women’s rights when first we understand them as having, at best, defeasible moral reasons to oppose their oppression; and second, ensure that we make adequate allowance for a woman’s interpretative right to choose how to respond to her oppressive circumstances. (shrink)

It is common in the autonomy literature to claim that some more demanding theories of autonomy disrespect certain individuals by giving the result that those individuals lack autonomy. This claim is often made in the context of the debate between substantive and content-neutral theories of autonomy. Proponents of content-neutral theories often argue that, in deeming certain people non-autonomous—especially certain oppressed people who seem to have internalized their oppression in certain ways—the substantive theories disrespect those people. They take this as reason (...) to accept content-neutral views over substantive views. Despite its ubiquity, this concern about disrespect is hard to pin down precisely. In this paper, I articulate two questions that need to be answered before we can understand the disrespect objection. First: Who, exactly, is supposedly being disrespected by substantive views? Second: Why is it that excluding people with these features is disrespectful? I consider a number of possible answers to each of these questions, and I argue that none of them gives us a plausible explanation of why we should think substantive theories of autonomy are disrespectful to anyone. No matter how we fill in the details, I will argue, there is simply no reason to prefer content-neutral theories of autonomy over substantive ones on the grounds of respect. (shrink)

I argue that Kant's ethical framework cannot countenance a certain kind of failure to respect oneself that can occur within oppressive social contexts. Kant's assumption that any person, qua rational being, has guaranteed epistemic access to the moral law as the standard of good action and the capacity to act upon this standard makes autonomy an achievement within the individual agent's power, but this is contrary to a feminist understanding of autonomy as a relational achievement that can be thwarted by (...) the systematic attack on autonomy that occurs within oppressive social conditions. Insofar as Kant's negative duty of self-respect is unable to accommodate the ways immersion in oppressive social environments can warp an individual's understanding of what she is owed and capable of as a moral agent, it perpetuates the cruelty of unjust social systems in the guise of respecting individual autonomy. I conclude by considering Carol Hay's argument that those who are oppressed have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression, in order to explore how this limitation in how Kant conceives of the duty to respect the self may reach expression in contemporary ethical theory inspired by Kant. (shrink)

The moral community is a social community, and as such it is vulnerable to social problems and pathologies. In this essay I identify a particular way in which participation in the moral community can be constrained by social factors. I argue that features of the social world—including power imbalances, oppression, intergroup conflict, communication barriers, and stereotyping—can make it nearly impossible for some members of the moral community to hold others responsible for wrongdoing. Specifically, social circumstances prevent some marginalized people from (...) engaging in what Stephen Darwall calls “felicitous moral address” (Darwall 2006). We should think of some members of the moral community as having “second-class moral citizenship” in ways that parallel second-class political citizenship. The injustice of second-class moral citizenship can be understood by drawing an analogy with Miranda Fricker’s notion of “epistemic injustice” (Fricker 2007). Fricker’s account of how people can be undermined in their capacity as knowers can be extended to show how people can be undermined in their capacity as makers of moral claims, which can be called “claimant injustice”. (shrink)

Much of the literature on practical authority concerns the authority of the state over its subjects—authority to which we are, as G. E. M. Anscombe says, subject “willy nilly”. Yet many of our “willy” (or voluntary) relationships also seem to involve the exercise of practical authority, and this species of authority is in some ways even more puzzling than authority willy nilly. In this paper I argue that voluntary authority relies on a form of voluntary obligation that is akin (in (...) some respects) to the kind of obligation one undertakes in making a promise. Voluntary authority depends, that is, on the possibility of taking on certain obligations more or less at will. It is generated through an interpersonal transaction that involves a directed act of deference, on one side, paired with appropriate uptake of that deference, on the other. Deference, in the relevant sense, should be understood as a normative power that is exercised when agents transfer deliberative discretion to others, undertaking directed obligations to treat others’ directives as content-independent and peremptory reasons. Voluntary authority, thus understood, is both grounded in and constrained by the equal moral authority or autonomy of the participants, since only autonomous agents have the standing to defer in a normatively significant way. (shrink)

While it is intuitive to many that oppressive socialization undermines autonomy in virtue of its ability to shape the desires and values of the oppressed, it’s difficult to provide a plausible account of autonomy that can explain when and why socialization is autonomy undermining. I provide such an account, arguing that self-respect is a necessary condition for autonomous choice and that oppressive socialization functions in part by undermining the self-respect of the oppressed. On my account, our choices lack autonomy to (...) the degree that they are motivated by a failure to respect ourselves as beings whose plans and desires matter as much as anyone else’s; whose capacity for rational deliberation and practical reasoning are valuable; and whose particularities and interests contribute to our value. This theory of personal autonomy is able to account for the lack of autonomy in a wide range of cases, for example, a cult member being brainwashed by a cult leader, or a wife being subservient to her husband. I defend this account against objections which claim that it is disrespectful to the oppressed to claim that their autonomy is undermined by their oppression, and in the final chapter, I expand my theory to explain not only what our minds must be like for us to be autonomous, but also what the world outside of us must be like. (shrink)