Social interaction is laden with stereotypes. Throughout history negative stereotypes have been immensely harmful, leading to hatred, vilification, and direct harm such as discrimination, and they continue to be so in almost all societies. It is widely accepted that we ought not to view members of other groups negatively in stereotypical ways, and also ought not to apply negative stereotypes to members of our own group (or even to ourselves). However, is there any special moral obligation on the targets of (...) such negative stereotypes to take care not to confirm them? May one even be blameworthy for not doing so? The very thought seems outrageous. Yet I will argue that it is plausible to think that, in fact, the victims, too, have pro tanto obligations to prevent stereotype confirmation (henceforth sc), in many central contexts. I am not aware of any sustained philosophical discussion making this claim. (shrink)

Teacher strikes have taken place in the United States since the end of the 19th century, became much more common in the 1960s, and have enjoyed a resurgence over the past five years (2018-2023). In this paper, we analyze teacher strikes with two main objectives. First, we examine how sexism and misogyny impact discourse around teacher strikes, as well as the justifications that teachers themselves give for striking. We find that teachers are at risk of being deemed ‘immoral’ unless they (...) justify their decision to strike by appealing to their being in the service of others. Pressure to adopt this framing not only negatively impacts teachers’ dignity as human beings deserving of adequate compensation and working conditions, but it also inadvertently upholds unjust patriarchal norms regarding teaching as care work. In the second part of this paper, we put forward alternative framings teachers can adopt in justifying their decisions to strike. The framings are rooted in philosophical literature that allows for self-regarding actions to be recognized as properly moral in certain circumstances. We argue that by extending this recognition to teachers who strike, we combat covert sexist expectations and uphold the dignity of teachers as persons. (shrink)

In her recent book _A Duty to Resist_ (2018), Candice Delmas contends that both beneficiaries and victims of injustices have a duty to resist unjust laws and to try to change them, and proposes several ways of grounding this duty. One of these proposed groundings appeals to considerations of fairness. Delmas holds that anyone who refuses to participate in resisting some injustice, including victims of that injustice, can be accused of free-riding and thus of unfair conduct that violates the duty (...) of fair play, which means that they have a fairness-based duty to resist. In this paper, I critique this attempt to ascribe a duty to resist grounded in considerations of fairness specifically to victims of injustice. Against Delmas, I argue that victims of injustice do not have this fairness-based duty to resist because, unlike the beneficiaries of an injustice, they cannot be considered free-riders when they do not participate in resistance to the injustice. I then discuss additional problematic implications of Delmas’s view, focusing on the issue of victim-blaming, and show how these problems can be avoided. In this way, I hope to contribute to the urgent project of determining who has a duty to resist injustice. (shrink)

Counterspeech is communication that tries to counteract potential harm brought about by other speech. Theoretical interest in counterspeech partly derives from a libertarian ideal – as captured in the claim that the solution to bad speech is more speech – and partly from a recognition that well-meaning attempts to counteract harm through speech can easily misfire or backfire. Here we survey recent work on the question of what makes counterspeech effective at remedying or preventing harm, in those cases where it (...) is effective, as well as work investigating when and why there is a duty to engage in counterspeech. We suggest that the most fruitful area for philosophical inquiry on this topic, currently, relates to the questions about efficacy. Specifically, we argue that there is a need for better frameworks for conceptualizing the efficacy of counterspeech. Philosophers have collaborative work to do, alongside social scientists, in developing these frameworks. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of Zeynep Tufekci’s capacities approach to social movements, which explains the strength of social movements in terms of their capacities. Tufekci emphasises that the capacities of contemporary social movements largely depend upon their uses of new digital technologies, and of social media in particular. We show that Tufekci’s approach has important implications for the structure of social movements, whether and what obligations they can have, and for how these obligations distribute to their members. In exploring (...) these implications, we develop a tripartite taxonomy of social movements. Each type of social movement in the taxonomy corresponds to a different type of group: social campaigns, social struggles, and social agitations. We show that all three types of social movement can bear obligations in virtue of their capacities. Finally, we argue that a surprising upshot of the obligations of social movements is that members of oppressed groups can have obligations to resist their own oppression in virtue of being members of social movements. (shrink)