Despite the growing attention to oppression and resistance in social and political philosophy as well as ethics, philosophers continue to struggle to describe and appropriately attribute agency under non-ideal circumstances of oppression and structural injustice. This chapter identifies some features of new accounts of non-ideal agency and then examines a particular problem for such theories, what Serene Khader has called the agency dilemma. Under the agency dilemma, attempts to articulate the agency of subjects living under oppression must on the one (...) hand avoid overemphasizing constraints on agency, and thereby producing paternalistic theories that “deny agency” for oppressed subjects, and on the other hand avoid failing to fully appreciate the effects of oppression on agency, thereby missing crucial features of how oppression unjustly shapes a person’s lived possibilities. This chapter traces this dilemma to a preoccupation with ascribing agency, which produces problematic descriptive and political effects for theorizing agency under oppression: what the author calls an asymmetry problem and a disenfranchisement problem. Finally, the chapter proposes that the agency dilemma might be ameliorated if theorists scrutinize more closely how moral, epistemic, and political agency interact and overlap in life under oppression. (shrink)

When we focus on asymmetries of power in our society, we find that blame and praise are unfairly distributed, partly due to cultural narratives that favour and exonerate the privileged. This paper provides a partial explanation for this skewed distribution of blame and praise. I draw on three analyses of disappearance narratives that erase and exonerate privileged perpetrators and therefore skew the responsibility system in their favour. Then I defend an emancipatory theory of responsibility that treats blame and praise as (...) communicative entities that can, and should, be used to debunk and dismantle these disappearance narratives, along with other oppressive ideologies. Blame and praise, on my emancipatory proposal, serve to identify and take a stand against agents of oppression and to recognize and celebrate resisters. (shrink)