Handbook For Critical Theory

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HANDBOOK FOR CRITICAL THEORY

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Contents

HANDBOOK FOR CRITICAL THEORY 1

THE RACIAL CONTRACT 4


OPPRESSION 6
NORMATIVE FEMININITY 8
ALIENATED LABOR 10
IDEOLOGY 13
UR-FASCISM 15
TESTIMONIAL INJUSTICE 18
HERMENEUTICAL INJUSTICE 20
THE PHILANTHROPIC FALLACY 22
POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY 24
DEHUMANIZATION 27
POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE 29
SPECIESISM 31
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE 33
DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY 35
REFERENCES 38

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I.

The Racial Contract

The concept of the “Racial Contract” (RC) was coined by Charles Mills
to explain and illuminate how racism—or white supremacy—
functions as a political system on a global scale. As Mills says, “White
supremacy is the political system that has made the modern world what
it is today” (1997, 1). In the Seventeenth Century, political
philosophers conceived of the “social contract” as a kind of agreement
made by all members of society about the kind of political system they
would like to have; the resultant government should reflect the will of
the people. But the Racial Contract is an implicit (and sometimes
explicit) agreement made exclusively between white people to develop
a system that serves the general purpose of privileging whites as a group
over non-whites as a group.
The Racial Contract has three primary components: it is (1)
political, (2) moral, and (3) epistemological. The political component
of RC consists of creating laws, policies, and judicial systems that
overtly or covertly enable whites to exploit and subordinate non-whites
for their own benefit. The most obvious historical example of RC’s
political component is slavery and colonialism: whites, by law, couldn’t
be enslaved, and whites, by law, had a right to ‘settle’ and ‘govern’
territories inhabited by preexisting populations. The ‘civilized’ whites
can help themselves to the land, resources and labor of the ‘savage’
non-whites. So, for instance, the Berlin Conference (1884-5) convened
the major European nations in order to discuss how they should
partition Africa amongst themselves. Mills writes, “it is easy to forget that
less than a hundred years ago, in 1914, Europe held a grand total of 85
percent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies,
dominions, and commonwealths” (29). For a more contemporary
example, consider the political practice of “redistricting,” or the
redrawing of district lines to consolidate power and votes for a certain
political party. Redistricting often occurs along racial lines in order to
limit the influence that non-whites have on their political
representatives. This, along with other voting laws, has specifically
targeted the voices of minorities in the United States. The political
component of RC thus remains alive and well.
The moral component of RC involves creating a moral code
that attributes goodness to whiteness and badness to blackness.
Whiteness symbolizes virtue, blackness symbolizes vice. In the
traditional social contract, the participants are all understood to be
“free and equal.” The contract is meant to be egalitarian. But RC
provides moral equality only for whites with other whites; RC
designates non-whites as unequal. So, for example, the only way the
Nazis could reconcile between their white supremacy and their alliance

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with the Japanese was to refer to the Japanese as “honorary Aryans.”
Instead of dismantling the white supremacist presupposition of RC,
they just expanded the circle of whiteness. The moral component of
RC is exemplified today in stereotypes that designate the character
qualities of non-whites as morally pernicious; hence, Michael Brown
was seen as a “demon,” rather than a person, by the officer who shot
him. The (deficient) moral qualities of non-whites are savagery and
barbarism, but ‘Civilization’ is the prerogative of whiteness alone.
The epistemological component of RC prescribes a self-
serving misinterpretation of the world. The epistemological component
is vital for consolidating and perpetuating the domination that whites
exercise over non-whites. For instance, historical amnesia, or the
systematic erasure (‘forgetting’) of the atrocities committed by white
colonialists in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and around the globe from
the educational curriculum and from national memory—most
Americans scarcely know anything about the indigenous populations
they exterminated—all serve to hide the moral depravities and
injustices committed by whites. These practices enable RC to remain
invisible precisely to its white beneficiaries. The widespread ignorance
about slavery, about African history, about indigenous populations,
about life under Jim Crow—these are not features that appeared
randomly in Western culture, they appeared because they serve the
interests of continued Western, i.e., white, domination.
So, to conclude, the Racial Contract, is political, moral,
epistemological, and according to Mills, very much a historical reality.
But, recognizing the super-structure through which our world has been
shaped, namely, the Racial Contract itself, is also the first step towards
the alleviation of its ongoing and longstanding injustice.

Deja White
Marvin Mondragon

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II.

Oppression

Colloquially, the term “oppression” has been associated with the


deliberate and direct domination that is exercised by a ruling group
(like a tyrannical government) over a subordinate group via harsh legal
measures and other violent means. But, in political and philosophical
discourse, the concept of “oppression” is more complex than its
colloquial counterpart. The concept of oppression primarily signifies
the injustices that systematically afflict social groups and their
members not just through tyrannical governments, but through the
“everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society” (Marion
Young 1990, 41). In its philosophical sense, oppression need not be
deliberate, obvious, or enshrined in the law. It can manifest itself in
ordinary social norms, practices, implicit judgments, symbols, habits,
media representations, and so on. Iris Marion Young has argued that,
there are five distinctive “faces” in which oppression may appear:
(1) The first face is exploitation. Exploitation occurs when the
goods produced by the labor of one social group are used primarily
and unfairly for the benefit of another social group. The classic
example is Marx’s theory that the proletariat are being exploited as a
class by the capitalists, or the owners of the means of production, as a
class. The primary beneficiaries of the labor are corporations or owners
of the businesses. They wouldn’t buy the workers’ labor power if they
couldn’t make a profit on it. The workers in sweatshops, for instance,
are making the owners rich while their pay barely affords them the
means to survive another day just so they can work.
(2) The second face is marginalization. Like exploitation, this is
also primarily an economic form of oppression. “Marginals,” Marion
Young says, “are people the system of labor will not or cannot use”
(53). Marginalization occurs, for instance, when the jobs of non-
professional laborers are replaced by automation. People who today
work as cashiers are serving an industry that’s likely to replace them
with profit-enhancing self-checkout machines. Marginalization
contributes to feelings of uselessness, boredom, and lack of a
meaningful existence. (See also Alienated Labor).
(3) The third face of oppression is powerlessness. Powerlessness
is manifested in an unfair deficiency in one’s autonomy and capacity
for engaging in the deliberative activities that have a deep influence on
one’s life. For example, when politicians ignore the voices and
complaints or certain underprivileged populations or when such
populations don’t have any ready access to political representatives
they justly feel voiceless and, hence, powerless. Workers in non-
professional jobs often experience powerlessness in that (a) they have
very little control over the nature and execution of their job; (b) they’re

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often at the mercy of bosses; and (c) they don’t enjoy the respectability,
and therefore, the social influence, that members of the professional
class typically possess.
(4) The fourth face is violence. The violent face of oppression
need not necessarily be physically-inflicted violence by one party on
another. The violent face of oppression can also manifest itself in a
heightened sense of fear that one will be harmed by another because of
one’s membership in a social group, e.g., as when African Americans
are more likely to fear police officers or people with Confederate Flag
regalia than others, or when women have to be constantly on the look-
out against the possibility of sexual assault.
(5) The fifth face of oppression is cultural imperialism. Marion
Young explains, cultural imperialism “involves the universalization of
a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as a
norm” (p. 59). As a result, members of social groups who don’t belong
to the dominant group are defined through the dominant group. Thus,
non-dominant people become reduced to stereotypes. Their
experience is not recognized, they are rendered invisible. For example,
when we’re asked to think of a “lawyer” many will likely imagine a
white man rather than a Latina woman; and if we do encounter a
woman who’s a lawyer we might—if we are in the grip of sexist
assumptions—interpret her behavior as ‘bitchy’ rather than ‘assertive,’
as we would if she were a man.
(6) Sandra Bartky (1990) can be said to add a sixth face to the
list: psychological oppression. This face involves the internalization of
oppressive norms by members of the oppressed social group. The
internalization results in the oppressed persons coming to see
themselves through the eyes of the dominant group itself. Thus, “the
psychologically oppressed become their own oppressors” (22). Bartky
describes this as a kind of self-fragmentation. One part of the self is
used to constantly criticize, police, or judge another part of the self.
For instance, psychological oppression in women may involve turning
the blame onto themselves for something that an oppressive system is
responsible for instead. They might always have the nagging feeling
that they’re not pretty enough, not charming enough, not nurturing
enough, not, in other words, living up to men’s standards for how women
should look and be. They see it as their fault for being ‘deficient.’ “I
am only a woman,” I am not as good or competent as a man.
Psychological oppression is something that we can be subjected to by
force, as well: cat-calling a woman is a way of forcing her to see herself
like an object—a mere body part, a “piece of ass”—rather than a whole
human being. Psychological oppression involves a significant dent in
one’s sense of autonomy and personhood: it’s one thing to be
oppressed by others, but it’s even more difficult when the one who is
oppressing you is also yourself.

Veronica Levia
Kendra Quewezance

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III.

Normative Femininity

Normative femininity is a term that refers to the set of socially


regulated standards for the performance of womanhood. As Sandra
Bartky (2002) explains, womanhood or “femininity” is not a matter of
merely having a certain biological constitution. It is also “a set of
qualities of character and behavioral dispositions as well as a
compelling aesthetics of embodiment” (14). Femininity is a practice
that women are trained and disciplined into. The woman who performs
her gender well—i.e., a woman who lives up to the standards of
normative femininity—will have the following qualities: she will be
“warm, nurturing, expressive, unaggressive, gentle, and genteel … she
would not, for example, scream obscenities at someone who cut her
off on the highway” (15). The evaluative standards and practices of
normative femininity are imposed on women by various social forces
from birth and throughout life. For instance, children are constantly
exposed to the gender roles prescribed by normative femininity via the
media, e.g., magazines, television, advertisements, movies, social
media, and so on. These forces inculcate an aspiration in women and
young girls for the thin, groomed, clean, and often luxurious
appearance of the models featured in high-end fashion shows. That’s
the beauty ideal of normative femininity. This, Bartky notes, partly
explains why so many women and young girls are on a seemingly
never-ending diet and why virtually every women’s magazine features
articles, ads, advice, etc. on how to lose more weight (17). In the pursuit
of the ideal feminine body, many women succumb to anorexia and
bulimia: they would rather be dead than be ‘fat.’ This also explains why
the “beauty industrial-complex” generates billions of dollars in
everything from cosmetics and skin-care products to Botox and plastic
surgery. The pursuit of a youthful, wrinkle-free, soft, and delicate,
ideally feminine look is an integral part of normative femininity—and
the maintenance of this look requires not only lots of good (and often
expensive) products, but also routines, regiments, habits, time, and
even space (e.g., the beauty salon). The effects of normative femininity
on women are deep and, according to Bartky, disempowering. The
pursuit of the ideal, thin, wrinkle-free, smooth-skinned, hairless,
youthful body suggests that feeds the “beauty industry” suggests that
women’s bodies are defective and inferior. Normative femininity
makes women’s self-esteem dependent almost entirely on how
others—especially men—evaluate their physical appearance. Women
who fail to meet its aesthetic and behavioral expectations are regarded
as morally repellant, lazy, unworthy, and, of course, unfeminine. Bartky
notes that it’s society itself, and hence both men and women, that
upholds and reinforces these ideals of normative femininity. But why

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would women embrace and accept this with enthusiasm? There are
several reasons: (1) women who don’t play the game have a much
harder time getting jobs and attracting potential romantic partners; (2)
the practices surrounding normative femininity are often a source of
bonding between women; (3) normative femininity can give a sense of
mastery of a set of skills, mastery in knowing how to perform
womanhood well; and perhaps the most important reason (4)
normative femininity is something very close to women’s identity, to
their selfhood; the elimination of normative femininity is thus
tantamount to the annihilation of the self. Until we have a real
alternative to normative femininity—a non-disempowering way of
‘doing’ womanhood—it will continue to have a strong grip on reality
and will continue to hold us hostage in the future.

Mary Boghossian
Elizabeth Torres

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IV.

Alienated Labor

The concept of “Alienated Labor” comes from Karl Marx. The


concept specifically targets the implementation of labor within a
capitalist economic system. Marx’s claim is that the means of
production (the division of labor and the material methods by which
goods and commodities are produced) under a capitalist system
threatens – alienates – human-beings from their “species-being.” In
other words, humanity’s fundamental essence to be a “universal and
consequently free [producing] being” becomes foreign to humans as
laborers under capitalism. Human beings are alienated from their
essence – from that which is most distinctively human about them –
their productive and creative activity, or labor itself. According to
Marx, this alienation takes three primary forms: (1) Capitalism alienates
the laborer from the products or objects of his labor; (2) Capitalism
alienates the laborer from himself; and (3) Capitalism alienates the
laborer from fellow humans. In order to explain these forms, however,
Marx first establishes the basic relationship between the laborer and
his product.
Initially, Marx notes that the product of labor is merely an
objectification of the worker’s labor. That is, the object represents not
only the labor the worker put into his product, but the laborer himself.
For instance, consider Plato’s Republic. According to Marx, Plato’s
Republic reflects two things: (i) the labor Plato put into the object and
(ii) Plato himself by the ideas expressed in it. Nothing about labor itself
is inherently wrong or bad or undesirable. On the contrary, labor
ideally should be humanity’s self-expression and an “objectification”
of its values and aspirations. Note, also, that in order to produce
anything at all, the laborer must have access to natural resources (e.g.,
wood, stone, etc.) and access to the means of production (e.g.,
carpentry tools). Thus, fundamental to production, by Marx’s
argument, is an access to nature and to the machinery and methods
that enable humans to make something of the materials of nature. So,
if we return to the Plato case, when the labor of a product reflects
neither (i) or (ii), as Marx thinks is the case under capitalism, then
alienation is bound to occur. This is where the first form of alienation
arises.
First, as noted, in order for laborers to produce, they need
natural resources through which they can achieve the objectification of
their subjectivity (to create an object) and also to reproduce
themselves, i.e., they need natural resources in order to exist in general.
But, under capitalism, the laborer is not entitled to the material
products that she creates. It is the capitalist who is entitled to those
products, while the laborer is only entitled to the wages she receives in

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exchange for her labor. Moreover, the capitalist wouldn’t buy the
worker’s labor power if he didn’t make a profit on the commodities
that the worker produces. According to Marx, if the laborer has only
one thing to sell—namely, labor itself—then the capitalist’s is free to
maximize his profits by paying the laborer just enough for sustenance.
Thus, the laborer is capable of reproducing her bare existence, but only
so she can continue producing for another. Under capitalism, Marx
thinks that workers are collectively (as a group) alienated from the
products of their labor; those products come back into their lives in an
alienated form, e.g., as commodities that they’ve created but that they
nevertheless cannot afford. The products reappear only to dominate the
persons who made them. As a consequence, the laborer is not merely
alienated from the product but also from the process of production.
In producing for the capitalist, the laborer is in effect reproducing her
own oppression.
Second, human beings are alienated from themselves under
capitalism. The laborer is not producing to improve herself. Rather,
the laborer is producing and doing her most basic life activity to
survive. The labor process is purely a means to satisfy an end, as
opposed to being an end in itself. To see this point more clearly, consider
the Plato case once more. Suppose Plato is commissioned to write his
Republic instead of writing it for philosophical advancements alone.
Once he completes the Republic, Plato will be rewarded a monetary
sum. Now, if Plato writes the Republic for this reason, he does not write
it for its own sake – i.e., for philosophical advancement alone. In fact,
he writes it as a means to obtain something else – the monetary sum.
The Republic is just an instrument, a means, to an end. Labor, for Marx,
should be for the species-being that is humanity. But one becomes
alienated from one’s species-being when the products of one’s labor
don’t reflect the “being” of the person who made them. The wages, of
course, don’t reflect the laborer’s species-being either; wages only have
exchange value. They are not an expression of the laborer herself.
Workers, then, are not developing themselves under
capitalism. Humans are naturally creative beings who express
themselves through their work. But under capitalism, the physical
sustenance of humans becomes an end in itself or the highest good.
The highest good is precisely not to work, but to eat, sleep, fornicate,
etc. People are limited to their most basic animal functions.
Third, humans are alienated from other human beings. Marx
claims that humanity’s species-being also consists in being able to
produce for one’s community, for humanity in general, rather than
merely for oneself. In a capitalistic economy, laborers become
alienated from each other as they enter into a competition for jobs;
they come to see each other solely as objects that are in the way of
them earning a livelihood. The social nature of people is then limited
because human interaction isn’t an expression of their mutual freedom
but rather resembles more a conflict between slaves battling over the
leftover scraps of their masters. The laborers, like the slaves, are also

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entirely dependent for their existence on the will and whim of another
human being: the capitalist. The capitalist too—like everyone else—
becomes alienated from other human beings as he begins to see them
purely as commodities, instruments, or mere objects, instead of as
persons. These, then, are the three forms of alienated labor.

Faizul Sahibzada
Pary Townson

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V.

Ideology

In ordinary language, the term “ideology” is typically used as a


synonym for “worldview.” But, in social and political theory,
“ideology” is a concept that is used in a critical sense: to refer to
something as “ideological” is to condemn it. In the critical sense,
“ideology” means false consciousness. To be more precise, ideology is a
“form of false consciousness” in the following sense:

(1) Ideology is constituted by an interconnected system of beliefs,


practices, emotional tendencies, and implicit judgments;
(2) Ideology is socially widespread insofar as many people are in the
‘grip’ of these interconnected beliefs, practices, implicit
judgments, etc.; and
(3) Ideology is “false” because it misrepresents significant aspects
of social reality in a way that enables unjust social relations (Geuss,
1981; cf. Shelby, 2003).

Cultural objects, e.g., everything from books and media to social norms
and the legal system, are said to function ideologically when they
reinforce, reproduce, or perpetuate unjust social relations. But
ideology—unlike propaganda or conspiracy theories—isn’t something
that anyone deliberately promotes. It typically exercises a subterranean
hold over people’s shared perceptions and practices. Sally Haslanger
has emphasized ideology’s role as a source of people’s beliefs and their
reason-giving practices; she argues that the considerations that are
recognized as reasons can be shaped by ideological forces. So, for
instance, if the dominant ideology of one’s society includes the
assumption that Jews can’t be trusted, then any claim made by a Jewish
person won’t count as a proper reason for a belief or an action (etc.).
In such cases, ideology can fully exclude a group from participating in
society’s reason-giving practices. Often, however, ideology finds more
subtle ways of suppression than outright exclusion. It is possible, for
example, that Martin Luther King Day—which was written into law in
1983—functions ideologically in the following sense: Martin Luther
King was a major critic of the US government’s economic and
international agendas, i.e., capitalism and imperialistic wars against
communist countries. But King is memorialized specifically as a civil
rights leader who focused solely on racial justice for African
Americans. Martin Luther King Day turns him into an establishment
figure and, hence, it promotes a certain misrepresentation: it promotes
the perception that King’s goals have already been accomplished and
that King’s own agendas are aligned with the agendas of the
government. Thus, it is possible that Martin Luther King Day

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functions ideologically insofar as it halts further critical consideration
of the USA’s economic system and its geopolitical ambitions. The
claim, of course, is not that this was done intentionally. Rather, the
ideological forces that were already at play prompt institutions to find
ways to co-opt, colonize, and inoculate revolutionary forces. Punk rock
and the hippies were perhaps initially revolutionary social movements
too, but they quickly became commodified beyond recognition; they
were absorbed by the same system they sought to critique. According
to Haslanger, this has important consequences for how ideology critique
should be conducted, or for the strategies we should employ in order
to disrupt the grip of ideology. The disruption of ideology cannot be
confined to rational debate and the recitation of facts—these practices
can be useful, but they often fail to appreciate that people’s beliefs and
reasoning-practices are ideologically conditioned. Ideology critique
should also involve providing people with new experiences that can
illuminate the domains that are often rendered invisible by ideological
forces. Haslanger writes, “A crucial step in disrupting ideology is to
create experiential breaks that allow for (and often deepen on) the
creation of new and potentially emancipatory concepts and other tools
for thinking, feeling, and acting” (2017, 11). Thus, the fight against
ideology may require much more than traditional democratic debate;
those who are serious about anti-ideological activism should also
attempt to provide new conceptual and experiential tools for persons
who may have become inoculated to certain forms of moral and
political engagement. (See also Hermeneutical Injustice.)

Tom Hanauer

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VI.

Ur-Fascism

Fascist movements and regimes often seem, on the surface, quite


different from one another. The Catholic Falangist regime under
Franco in Spain is not obviously identical with the polytheistic, anti-
Christian, paganism of the Nazis. Yet, Falangists and Nazis are both
undeniably fascists. The borders between different fascisms, then,
seems to be a ‘fuzzy’ one. Umberto Eco’s concept of “Ur-Fascism”
attempts to dispel the fuzziness by identifying the key features that, when
present in a social movement, a political party, a society, or a culture,
enable Fascism to solidify itself and grow around them. Ur-Fascism
allows us to recognize the diverse—and often inconsistent—forms
that fascism can take. Eco lists fourteen features that characterize Ur-
Fascism:

(a) Ur-Fascism is a “cult of tradition”: Ur-Fascists worship tradition


as (i) an unquestionable source of moral and social guidance, and
(ii) as revealing a primeval, eternal, mythical truth. For the
Nazis, the “cult of tradition” meant glorifying German
folkways as the embodiment of a mythical, divine, pre-
Christian ‘Aryan’ tradition that must be cleansed of its ‘Semitic’
traits.
(b) Ur-Fascism is a rejection of modernism: this, above all, is the
rejection of the egalitarian, democratic, and anti-hierarchical
spirit of the French Revolution. Mussolini and Hitler may have
embraced technology, but they rejected the rationalistic,
scientific, Enlightenment ideals that made technological
development possible. Hence, Ur-Fascism is also irrationalism.
(c) Ur-Fascism values action for action’s sake: the heroic and ideal
individual doesn’t need to deliberate, reflect, or think, he acts
instinctively. The “man of action” overflows with his power;
deliberation and reflection are for the weak, not for the strong.
(d) Ur-Fascism sees disagreement as treason: disagreement means that
there’s deviation from the one traditional truth. Disagreement
implies critique, and critique implies rationalism, and
rationalism implies modernism. Disagreement is, therefore, a
threat to tradition.
(e) Ur-Fascism is fear of difference: disagreement also implies
diversity. The first appeal fascism makes is against the
“intruders,” i.e., the social “Other,” the non-identical.
(f) Ur-Fascism derives itself from individual and social frustration:
The Nazis appealed to a politically humiliated and
economically devastated German public after the first World
War.

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(g) Ur-Fascism is obsessed with a plot: there’s a secretive yet
immensely powerful ‘enemy’ that is constantly seeking to
undermine the nation, or the Volk. The nation is defined in
opposition to its enemies. This, however, also means that there
is a solution to the social frustration: find and destroy the
enemy of the state.
(h) Ur-Fascism requires that its followers (i) feel humiliated by their
enemies, but (ii) believe that they can defeat their enemies.
Thus, there’s a constant shuttling between conceiving of the
enemy as both omnipotent and impotent; the Jews are
simultaneously the ‘masters of the world’ and weak subhuman
Untermenschen.
(i) Ur-Fascism believes that life is permanent warfare: “Life is not a
struggle, life is lived for struggle.” War is always on the horizon;
everything is headed towards a final, world-historical battle, a
“Final Solution,” between the state and its enemies. Ur-
Fascism is thus embroiled in contradiction: The enemy must
be destroyed, but the enemy is an essential component of life.
(j) Ur-Fascism is popular elitism: Ur-Fascism is aristocratic, so in
its appeal to the ‘people’ it advocates the view that they are the
best people, the best nation, of all people and nations on earth.
But aristocratic hierarchy also requires that each person view
his subordinate with contempt.
(k) Ur-Fascism wants everyone to be educated to become a hero: the Ur-
Fascist craves a heroic death in battle, he is ready to die for his
people, for his Fuhrer, for his state; he’s ready to sacrifice
himself in glorious warfare.
(l) Ur-Fascism is machismo: the glorification of war, aristocratism,
heroism, action, and tradition transfers itself over into the
sexual domain. Manhood is dominant, womanhood is
subordinate. Men command, women obey.
(m) Ur-Fascism is selective populism: the individual is nothing, the
state is everything. The “state,” the “people,” the “nation”—
these are words not for a collective, but for a single,
monolithic, uniform entity; and its voice, its supreme
interpreter, its “Will,” is the Leader.
(n) Ur-Fascism speaks in Newspeak: its language, vocabulary,
grammar, and syntax are limited, simplified, uniform, and
basic. Linguistic complexity allows for too much diversity and,
hence, for disagreement, critique, rationality, modernity. The
citizens must be divested of any tools that would allow for
critical thinking. The messages of Ur-Fascism must be easily
conveyed and even more easily digested: short, simple,
accessible, emotionally powerful narratives.

These, then, are the features of Ur-Fascism. According to Umberto


Eco, fascism can take on multifarious forms and even “the most
innocent disguises.” It is therefore our “duty” to keep on guard, “to

16
uncover it” and point it out wherever its genetic elements appear. The
concept of Ur-Fascism provides us with the tools we can use to
“uncover”—and, hence, stop—the early signs of a fascist regime
before it fully matures.

Luis Torres
Rachel Luu

17
VII.

Testimonial Injustice

“Epistemic injustice” is an injustice that someone can suffer


specifically in their capacities as a knower (Fricker, 2007). There are
two main types of epistemic injustice: (1) testimonial injustice; and (2)
hermeneutical injustice. This entry deals with the former. Testimonial
injustice occurs when a speaker suffers an unfair loss of credibility
because the listener is (wrongly) biased against her; the listener harbors
a prejudicial attitude, intentionally or unintentionally, that leads them
to minimize the speaker as a credible “giver” of knowledge. The
listener is overly skeptical of—or even outright rejects—the
information or message that is being conveyed to them. For instance,
people with a strong Southern accent may suffer an undue loss of
credibility because the hearer implicitly believes that Southerners are
unintelligent. In Fricker’s language, the Southerner has incurred a
“credibility deficit.” If he had a different accent, say, a British one, he
might have incurred the opposite effect: “credibility excess,” or he
would have been accorded “extra” or elevated credence in virtue of his
race, education, background, gender, and so on. It is only when a
speaker wrongly suffers a credibility deficit due to an “identity-
prejudice” that testimonial injustice has been committed. Credibility
excess may result in one’s loss of valuable pieces of knowledge, but it
doesn’t involve being disrespected as a knower. That, Fricker thinks, is
distinctive of testimonial injustice.
Credibility-deficit is almost always disadvantageous to the
speaker. In the context of testimonial injustice, credibility deficit can
also result in other major disadvantages: a person is much less likely to
successfully defend himself against government officials, police, juries,
etc., if he suffers from a wrongly attributed stereotype that diminishes
his credibility. Testimonial injustice, then, bears an intimate and
important connection with social power, or the power to exert control
over and influence the actions of others. Social power is essential for
coordinating our actions with one another and, hence, it’s essential for
social functioning in general. “Identity power” is a special subset of
social power that is specifically grounded in a collective and shared
preconception about social groups and the norms that do (or should)
govern their actions and lives. For example, identity power is operative
when you request a coffee from the barista; you and the barista both
recognize his identity as a barista involves making or providing you
with coffee, and you manage to coordinate your actions on that basis.
So, identity power requires social coordination—as all social power
does—that is mediated by the actors’ knowledge of the social
constructs that characterize their identities. This doesn’t mean that the
agents take their identity or its norms as morally correct or legitimate.

18
African Americans during Jim Crow didn’t believe that they ought to
stay out of the ‘white people’s pool,’ but they knew it was the social
expectation and, because of identity power, many complied. Identity
power, then, requires only that each agent understand and adhere to
the conventions, but it doesn’t require the acceptance of those
conventions.
Identity power is the basis of “testimonial exchange,” or the
process of mutual exchange of knowledge. Every listener will come
with some preconceived notions about the (traits) of every speaker.
But, if the listener has an unfounded prejudice against the speaker, then
she will diminish the speaker’s credibility as a knower, and by such
action, the speaker has been wronged and harmed: they’ve suffered
testimonial injustice. Hence, Fricker summarizes testimonial injustice
as identity-prejudicial credibility deficit (2007, 28). The injustice can be either
incidental or systematic. If the identity-prejudice is highly “localized” or
only affects one very specific part of the speaker’s life at a particular
time, then the testimonial injustice is incidental, e.g., not having one’s
article taken seriously by someone because they are prejudiced against
people who use your specific research method. Systematic testimonial
injustice involves a “tracker prejudice,” or an identity-prejudice that is
prevalent and persistently negatively affects one’s life in multiple and
socially significant domains, e.g., education, income, self-esteem, etc.
(2007, 27). Fricker claims that systematic identity-prejudicial credibility
deficit is the “central case” of testimonial injustice since it’s the most
relevant one for social justice: it attests to the importance and
harshness of identity-prejudice. “The most severe forms of testimonial
injustice are both persistent and systematic” because they reinforce,
reproduce, and compound already widespread discriminatory practices
and injustices (2007, 29). Thus, Fricker thinks that addressing
testimonial injustice—and epistemic injustice in general—should
become a part of our main political program since lack of credibility
can have such enormous effects on people’s material, social,
emotional, and economic wellbeing.

Christine Oldham Lopez


Kevin Barrera

19
VIII.

Hermeneutical Injustice

Epistemic injustice is when someone is wronged in their capacities as


a knower. This entry addresses one form of epistemic injustice:
hermeneutical injustice. Hermeneutical injustice happens when one has
insufficient resources for understanding and making sense of
significant aspects of one’s social world and one’s experience because of
“hermeneutic marginalization” (Fricker, 2007, 158). Hermeneutical
injustice places people at a distinctive disadvantage, such as when a
worker who is experiencing sexual harassment lacks the very concept of
“sexual harassment” and doesn’t have recourse to other interpretive
resources that could help her understand the immoral behavior of her
colleagues or boss and that would help her deal with it appropriately.
Hermeneutical injustice—like all cases of epistemic injustice—is a
function of social power, or the capacity to influence the actions of
other social agents. Social power can manifest itself “actively” in
agents, such as when a policeman issues a fine for speeding violations,
or “passively,” such as when the ability of a police officer to give a
speeding ticket leads a driver to avoid risky behavior on the road. Social
power can also manifest itself in a purely structural form, such as when
an underprivileged group doesn’t vote because of some complicated
systemic reason rather than because there are any specific agents who
want to maintain the group’s disenfranchisement. The social power, in
that case, may operate ‘through’ agents but no particular agent is
responsible for its exercise. Identity power is a subset of social power
that depends on “shared imaginary conceptions of social identity,” like
what it means to be a man or a woman, or gay or straight, in order to
operate. Someone may actively use their identity power to control
others, e.g., as when a man utilizes his superior epistemic credentials
as a “man” to silence a woman or exclude her opinion from a
conversation. Identity power can operate separately from one’s
personal beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the norms that
govern the identity, or indeed the veracity of the identity itself. That is
why a professor who is well-versed in “normative femininity” and its
problems may still act in ways that affirm society’s conception of
“successful” womanhood (see Normative Femininity). Identity-
power is often a primary component in hermeneutical injustice.
Hermeneutical Injustice is when a person lacks the conceptual and
interpretive resources to understand, communicate, or express a
socially significant experience as a result of hermeneutical
marginalization. Hermeneutical marginalization is when someone—
either a person or a social group—is unfairly and involuntarily
excluded from the sense-making and meaning-making practices that
have the power to generate the crucial interpretive resources that

20
inform collective understanding and facilitate social coordination.
These practices are often tied to powerful social positions, such as
occupying jobs in law, medicine, government, media, fashion, religion,
academia, etc. The (partial) explanation for hermeneutical injustice,
then, is that certain groups are often systematically excluded from
occupying these sorts of positions and, hence, don’t have a hand in
shaping the shared hermeneutical resources that enable people to
communicate and make good sense of their own and each other’s
significant experiences. The worst cases of hermeneutical injustice can
render a person unable to comprehend, conceptualize, and make sense
of deep, widespread, and persistent wrongs and harms that she’s
undergoing because she has been systematically excluded from shaping
the shared interpretive resources. The collective hermeneutical “gap”
or “intelligibility deficit” that results from hermeneutic marginalization,
according to Fricker, entails that the marginalized persons are
structurally and socio-economically highly disadvantaged. For
instance, consider the socially-compromised and economically
vulnerable position of persons affected by mass incarceration; being
labeled a “criminal” is like an epistemic death sentence. Your capacity
to influence or have a share in the meaning-making practices of society
is almost non-existent. People are so hermeneutically deaf to the
experiences of prisoners that it’s commonplace in society to joke about
rape in prison (e.g., “don’t drop the soap”). The interpretation of their
experience is almost entirely geared towards the interests of the
powerful: the incarceration system and its beneficiaries. Hermeneutical
injustice leaves the most vulnerable social groups in a position of being
unable to contest their oppression and domination by the most powerful
social groups who perpetuate, administer, and define the ways in which
we interpret and communicate about the most important matters in
society. That’s why, according to Fricker, it’s integral to address
epistemic injustice if we’re to maintain our commitment to a genuinely
democratic political ideal.

Alexander Camacho
Vanessa Camacho
Noe Torres
James Lim

21
VIII.

The Philanthropic Fallacy

Philosophers, like Peter Singer, have argued that we ought to be giving


as much as we can to charities and organizations—e.g., Oxfam, UNICEF,
etc.—that provide necessary aid to people around the globe who are
suffering from preventable calamities, like famine, lack of clean
drinking water, and inadequate medical supplies. Singer’s conclusion
follows from a basic moral principle: “if it is in our power to prevent
something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing
anything of comparable moral significance, we ought to do it” (1972,
231); and the principle itself is based on a simple thought-experiment:
if you see a child drowning in a pond, you’d be morally obligated to
save it even if that would come at the cost of ruining your new pants
and shoes; the life of a child is infinitely more valuable than anyone’s
unnecessary luxuries. So, Singer reasons, why doesn’t the same
principle require us all to do the same for children (and other innocent
people) who are suffering around the globe? If we can help them, we
are morally obligated to do so. Paul Gomberg has argued, however,
that Singer’s principle—and the conclusion he derives from it—rests
on a fallacious bit of logic. The “fallacy of philanthropy,” Gomberg
claims, is not just logically unsound, it is also socially harmful.
First, the philanthropist’s “logic” is only successful if the
analogy on which it rests, i.e., the assimilation of global poverty to the
case of the drowning child, is an apt one. The analogy isn’t apt, on
Gomberg’s view. Our duty to rescue the child differs contextually from
our duty to the global victims of poverty. Here are the important
differences: (1) the case of the drowning child is an “emergency case;”
it’s a case where we encounter a socially exceptional situation that
involves a particular person who needs rescuing. Calamities appeal to
our sense of emergency. We feel the direness and the exceptional
nature of the situation and the need to offer immediate help. Global
poverty, however, does not appeal to this sense. This doesn’t mean
that global poverty doesn’t rise to our consciousness as a problem, as
it clearly does. Rather, this means that poverty appears to us as a
pervasive or “chronic social” problem (Gomberg 2002, 30). It is not
an exceptional case where we’re being asked to save a particular
individual, and so, the principle or norm that obligates us to rescue the
drowning child may come apart for principle or norm that requires us
to address the problem of global poverty. (2) The second, and even
more important disanalogy between the cases, is that questions that are
morally appropriate to ask in one case are morally inappropriate in the
other. For instance, questions like, “How did the child come to be in
the pond in the first place?” and “What are all the consequences that
may result from rescuing this kid?” don’t belong in a rescue situation.

22
If an agent stops to speculate about all the potential consequences of
rescuing a drowning toddler—‘maybe it will be the next Hitler!!’—then
they would utterly fail to respond appropriately to the situation.
There’s an absolute, non-consequential obligation to save a child in
such a rescue case. But, it is absolutely morally appropriate, if not
obligatory, to inquire about the causes of global poverty and about the
consequences of alleviating it. These are questions we should ask when
we are providing global aid. Thus, there’s a clear distinction between
the two cases. For these reasons, Gomberg argues that “philanthropic
logic” is fallacious. Singer hasn’t earned the principle that underlies his
radical conclusion. The overlooking of the gap between the cases is
what Gomberg designates as the “philanthropic fallacy”.
The fallacy, however, is also socially harmful. Our moral
intuitions, while helpful and apt in the case of the drowning child,
shouldn’t be co-opted for addressing the complex social issues
surrounding poverty. The fallacious assimilation of highly localized
rescue duties to globalized social duties stifles and directs attention
away from vital questions, like “what is causing the starvation?” and
“what’s the best way of addressing it?” Essentially, the philanthropist
deals with the superficial symptoms while leaving the causes—i.e., the
system that is responsible for the symptoms—intact. In urging us to
treat global poverty as an emergency case, the philanthropist
encourages the intuition that raising questions about the causes of global
poverty and the consequences of its alleviation is as morally wrong as
asking, “but why is the child in the pond?” rather than acting to pull the
child out. According to Gomberg, this means, in effect, that the
philanthropist lets capitalism off the hook. The philanthropists’ money
goes into a preexisting market that has the goods that the global poor
need, e.g., medical supplies, food, and so on. But the philanthropist
doesn’t question the price of the market or the obligations of the
producers. The philanthropist is willing to pay whatever price the
market requests for the goods that the global poor need. Moreover,
the market itself is often responsible for maintaining people in
impoverished conditions, for instance, by hiring them at the cheapest
possible prices. Farmers also often sell their land to large
conglomerates in times of destitution, thus forfeiting their livelihoods
and investments as they cease growing food for local consumption and
begin producing cash-crops on (newly) company-owned lands.
Philanthropists stop short of asking if there is a better way to
address global poverty. They therefore fail to recognize the types of
reform these problems may require at their more fundamental levels.
The fallacy of philanthropy diverts attention away from the causes of
chronic and pervasive social ills. It thus spends itself on short-term
relief rather than long-term practical solutions. Philanthropic logic isn’t
merely fallacious, it’s a hurdle for serious social progress.

Heidi Kwok
Jonathan Lauffer

23
IX.

Political Responsibility

The concept of “political responsibility” was coined by Iris Marion


Young (2006) in order to explain how we should theorize about our
responsibilities—and, hence, also moral obligations—towards global
(and not merely local) persons. She claims that the dominant model of
responsibility, the “liability mode,” is ineffective for understanding and
alleviating “structural injustices.” Marion Young explains, “Structural
injustice exists when social processes put large categories of persons
under a systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means
to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time as these
processes enable others to dominate or have a wide range of
opportunities for developing and exercising their capacities” (2006,
114). The paradigm example is sweatshops: the social processes that
enable sweatshops are almost too large to quantify—from individual
consumers, multinational companies, and employers to market
competition, contracts, infrastructure, and domestic and foreign trade
laws—but virtually everyone recognizes the injustice that they
universally involve. To claim that sweatshops are unjust is to claim that
there is someone (person or institution) who bears responsibility to rectify
the purported wrong. The problem, Young claims, is that the
dominant model of responsibility (the “liability model”) doesn’t enable
us to make good sense of the latter intuition. The “liability model”
operates on the model of the legal system: it “assigns responsibility to
a particular agent (or agents) whose actions can be shown to be causally
connected to the circumstances for which responsibility is sought. This
agent can be a collective entity, such as a corporation, but when it is,
the analysis treats that entity as a single agent for the purposes of
assigning responsibility” (116). Young’s position is not to reject the
“liability model” but to supplement it. The “liability model” Is still
necessary and helpful, but it can’t rectify cases of deep structural
injustice, like sweatshops: who exactly is the responsible party? The
governments? The companies? The employers? The individual
consumers? The competing model of “political responsibility” gets
around this problem. On Young’s model of responsibility, “individuals
bear responsibility for structural injustice because they contribute by
their actions to the processes that produce unjust outcomes. Our
responsibility derives from belonging together with others in a system
of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition through
which we seek benefits and aim to realize projects” (119). Those who
commit structural injustice, then, are responsible insofar as they aided
the process that generated the injustice, but it’s crucial to note that they
are not responsible “in the sense of having directed the process or
intended its outcomes” (114). These acts can be associated with the

24
concept of blameless wrongdoings1 where no specific individual is to be
blamed for the morally wrongful act and the harmful or unjust result.
As Young explains, there are five features that are unique to political
responsibility:

(1) Not isolating: Structural injustices are generated by many people


who are acting within multiple different institutions; their
actions collectively produce injustice, but none of them in
particular can be isolated as the culprit. The model of political
responsibility, therefore, requires us to examine the ways in
which agents are socially connected to one another as part of the
processes that result in structural injustice.
(2) Judging background conditions: There are certain “background
conditions” that hold in order for any structural injustice to
take place; but the liability model disregards the background
conditions and simply assumes that those conditions are
unproblematic, i.e., morally permissible. The political
responsibility model requires us to examine the background on
which the agents’ decisions (and, consequently, the injustice)
has taken place, e.g., the formal and informal policies that
direct the parties’ behavior the financial situation of the
different parties, etc.
(3) More forward-looking than backward-looking: Young’s new
conception of responsibility is devised with a certain aim in
mind, namely, to alleviate structural injustices, rather than
merely punishing crimes. The “liability model” is
fundamentally retributive, or backward-looking. It focuses too
much on punishment and on assigning blame. Political
responsibility is not about blaming anyone, however. It seeks
to illuminate the relation we and others have to structural
injustices in a way that can motivate change.
(4) Shared Responsibility: Political responsibility holds people
responsible for their causal contribution to structural injustice,
i.e., “Those who contribute by their actions to the structural
processes producing injustice share responsibility for such
injustice” (122).2
(5) Discharged only though collective action: If someone is politically
responsible for an injustice, then that means she has some
obligation to rectify it. But, “Responsibility can be discharged
only by joining with others in collective action,” rather than
highly localized, individualistic actions, like refusing to buy
products from a certain company (123). As Young says,
“responsibility consists in changing the institutions and

1 Blameless wrongdoing is a term by Derek Parfit where wrong or immoral acts are committed
however blaming an individual is suspended from the committer.
2 This is to be distinguished from “collective responsibility,” which is responsibility that is

ascribed to a collective, like a corporation, even if some of its members or employees had
absolutely no hand in its processes at all.

25
processes so that their outcomes will be less unjust” (ibid).

Structural injustice is a moral wrong that occurs when groups of


individuals or institutions act (often unintentionally) in ways that
perpetuate certain relations of subordination and domination. Young’s
new conception of responsibility—political responsibility—can
provide us with some important direction for theorizing about the
ways in which we are responsible for people with whom we’re
‘structurally’ enmeshed and the moral obligations we have to alleviate
the injustices that they suffer.

Dan Tran
Nicole Wong-Franklin

26
X.

Dehumanization

Dehumanization is a well-known tactic that has been commonly


employed as a justification and explanatory motive for some of the
worst atrocities in human history. There’s an abundance of examples:
the Nazis referred to Jews as subhuman “rats,” the Hutus referred to
the Tutsis as “cockroaches,” and American slavers referred to Africans
as soulless “beasts.” David Livingstone Smith uses the term
“dehumanization” to mean specifically conceiving of others as subhuman
creatures (2016, 419). This definition is connected to—but not
synonymous with—the commonsense ways in which people use the
term, for instance, as interchangeable with degradation, treating people
like ‘animals,’ objectifying others, etc. To see others as subhuman often
involves licensing their mistreatment or seeing them as manifestations
of non-human creatures (demons, parasites, viruses, rats, etc.).
Dehumanization, Smith explains, is a solution to a problem:
ambivalence. It is often in one group’s interest to engage in violent
suppression of another, e.g., by taking their resources, enslaving them,
or otherwise asserting their dominance over them. But, harming and
murdering other humans is a psychologically burdensome task for
ultra-social creatures such as ourselves. Dehumanization—conceiving
the other as a (typically) dangerous, less-than-human creature—works as a
psychological enabler for violence by inhibiting our capacity to
empathize. Thus, dehumanization also often serves as a justification for
humiliation, torture, and other indignities that characterize mass-
atrocities.
Some philosophers (like Kate Manne), however, have pointed
out that many cases of dehumanization also involve the dehumanizer’s
implicit awareness of the humanity of the dehumanizee. For instance,
the Nazis believed that the Jewish “rats” they killed during the
Holocaust deserved the horrendous torture and punishment they
received. But it wouldn’t make much sense to claim that a rat or a virus
morally deserve anything. Dehumanizers also often want their victims
to know that they are “cockroaches” or “rats” (etc.) in order to
humiliate them—but it would never humiliate an actual rat to be told
that it’s a rat. The very act of dehumanization seems to contradict itself.
This challenge suggests that, perhaps, perpetrators do not really see
their victims as subhuman. Smith’s response to the challenge is that,
“in dehumanizing others, we categorize them simultaneously as human
and subhuman” (418). First, dehumanization involves some “folk-
metaphysical assumptions,” e.g., that the “essence” of something, or
that which makes something what it is, can come apart from its
appearance. The “essence” of the human in Seventeenth Century
Europe, for instance, was the soul. So, if a creature looks human but

27
doesn’t have a soul, then it was a nonhuman by Seventeenth Century
European standards. Second, Smith claims (using Noel Carroll’s work)
that the dehumanized person often arises to dehumanizers’
consciousness, quite literally, as a monster, or a dangerous being that
violates culturally sanctioned metaphysical categories. The zombie, for
example, is a dangerous creature that is both alive and dead—it violates
our core metaphysical separation between the two conceptual domains
of life and death. There’s nothing metaphysically transgressive about a
rat in rat form; but there’s something surely monstrous about a rat in
human form. Monsters tend to give us a feeling of “uncanniness.” The
“uncanny” refers to that which is discomforting, unsettling, and
horrific, usually due to the disparity between their appearance and their
assumed essence. Dehumanization sometimes involves merely the
judgment that someone looks human but really isn’t. But if the
dehumanized person is seen as also a threat to a person or society, then
they are not merely uncanny, they are monstrous.
Therefore, if dehumanizers sometimes recognize the humanity
of their victims, e.g., in degrading, humiliating, and ‘animalizing’ them,
we need not be surprised. Dehumanizers can’t shake their tendency to
see their victims as humans despite their belief in the victims’
subhumanity. That’s what we should expect if dehumanization is as
Smith describes it. It’s a crucial piece of Smith’s analysis:
dehumanization involves seeing the other as both human and
subhuman. To dehumanize someone by calling him a “rat” doesn’t
show that dehumanization isn’t happening; it might simply be an
attempt by the dehumanizer to persuade herself that the person who’s
being dehumanized isn’t really—as her senses seem to show—a
human being after all. Finally, it is worth noting that dehumanization
is not something that typically motivates conflict. Rather,
dehumanization is often something that proceeds and grows out of
inter-group conflict, for instance, over resources and power.
Perceiving others as demons, diseases, and animals, especially violent
ones, ‘authorizes’ the right to kill or harm them: “We dehumanize
others because we want to kill, harm, or oppress them, rather than the
other way around” (426). So, although dehumanization is a common
phenomenon, we see that it is more complex than is typically assumed.

Ariga Amirian
Monica Chavez
Jazmin Gomez

28
XI.

Politics of Difference

Iris Marion Young (1990) distinguishes between two ideals of social


justice: (1) the politics of difference and (2) the politics of assimilation. The
latter endorses the removal or overcoming of differences between
social groups. The assimilationist argues that true democratic equality
is only possible if we transcend our differences, i.e., if we achieve the
ideologically sanitized version of Martin Luther King’s “dream” and
learn to see each other’s race, gender, religious identity, etc. as of no
more importance than the color of one’s eyes. The politics of
difference, conversely, endorses the recognition and appreciation of
these differences as a better way of achieving genuine democratic
equality. Marion Young argues in favor of the politics of difference.
But, assimilationism (rather than difference) has dominated politics, as
is reflected in the common push for policies and laws that attempt to
achieve equality specifically through prescribing the exclusion of
attention to race, sex, cultural background, and so on. This
‘Humanistic’ approach—which focuses exclusively on our ‘common
humanity’—attempts to implement the assimilationist ideal on the
grounds that it provides a clear and unambiguous standard for justice.
Identity-related difference is always irrelevant for matters of justice.
There’s a sense in which this is correct: the notion of a universal
humanity that deserves equal moral worth has been historically essential for
the struggle against oppression and for basic rights, e.g., freedom,
political participation, etc. However, assimilationist politics also has its
limits. First, the rules and standards that govern the political domain
have always already been set by some previous group, i.e., the
dominant one. Assimilationism treats these rules and standards as if
they were universal; it asks oppressed groups to simply accept those
standards and rules rather than providing an opportunity to contest
them. Second, in universalizing the dominant group’s views,
assimilationism discourages the dominant group from recognizing
itself as a particular social group with a particular set of norms amongst
a diversity of social groups who have their own norms. Finally,
assimilationism can create “double-consciousness” amongst the non-
dominant, who may come to see their own cultural practices as socially
deviant insofar as they stray from mainstream practices and norms
they’re being asked to assimilate into (see also oppression).
Marion Young claims that, “a positive self-definition of group
difference is in fact more liberatory” than assimilationism (157). She
argues that we ought to keep social differences in mind especially when
creating legislation, and that’s precisely because certain groups have
been historically restrained from participating in framing the rules and
standards that govern the political domain. “Equality,” in the context

29
of the politics of difference, means equality of participation and
representation in light of social differences. The politics of difference,
then, involves recognizing that not everyone is similarly situated with
respect to their values, material resources, social influence, and so on.
Equality “sometimes requires different treatment for oppressed or
disadvantaged groups” (158). For instance, it would have been fair to
give a greater weight in debates about certain policies to the voices of
those groups who will be or have been most deeply disadvantaged by
those policies. Young traces the politics of difference to several social
movements. The Black Power movement “criticized the integrationist
goal and … encouraged Blacks to break their alliance with whites and
assert the specificity of their own culture, political organization, and
goals. Instead of integration, they encouraged Blacks to seek economic
and political empowerment in their separate neighborhoods” (159).
Liberation, for the Black Power movement, wasn’t about leaving their
social identity behind and assimilating into the white mainstream, but
rather embracing, cultivating, asserting the value of their identity.
Following suit, the American Indian Movement, or the Red Power
movement, “rejected perhaps even more vehemently … the goal of
assimilation … They asserted a right to self-government on Indian
lands;” they “sought to recover and preserve their language, rituals, and
crafts;” and they developed “what has become a fierce commitment to
tribal self-determination, the desire to develop and maintain Indian
political and economic bases in but not of white society” (159).
Indigenous populations recognized that removing their differences is
the not the key to absolving injustices, but rather it would be the
culmination of the ultimate injustice, namely, the genocide of the
indigenous people of the Americas. The loss of their identity would be
the loss of their memory. Both movements, then, recognize that
securing justice requires fighting for the recognition of group identity.
Unlike traditional liberalism, these emancipatory movements
conceive of liberation as having a positive, socially recognized, and
politically respected sense of group difference. In their vision, “the
good society does not eliminate or transcend group difference. Rather,
there is equality among socially and culturally differentiated groups,
who mutually respect one another and affirm one another in their
differences” (163). This kind of mutuality, which embraces group
difference, is both liberating and empowering. By reclaiming and
protecting the identity of their own distinct cultures and perspectives,
these (oppressed) groups can instead affirm it as something to
celebrate, rather than as a tragic fact of social separation. That’s what
the politics of difference is ultimately about.

James Lim
Noe Torres
Vanessa Camacho
Alexander Camacho

30
XII.

Speciesism

“Speciesism” is a type of prejudice: it is a prejudice in favor of one’s


own species at the expense of others. Speciesism is meant to be
understood by analogy with sexism and racism: just as someone might
engage in discrimination against another because of her race or gender,
so might someone engage in discrimination on the basis of species-
membership. Humans certainly seem to fit the charge; we clearly favor
the interests of our own species almost absolutely over those of non-
human animals. So, for instance, we don’t think there’s anything wrong
with subjecting billions of animals every year to the undeniable cruelty
of factory farming just because we enjoy the taste of their meat. As
Peter Singer (1975) argues, the justification for our treatment of
animals is typically grounded in the identification of some morally
relevant feature that humans possess but non-human animals don’t:
rationality, abstract thought, culture, moral sensibility, self-
consciousness, language, personal identity, and so on. Perhaps,
someone might claim, it is permissible to inflict harm on creatures who
lack one or more of these features? But, if that is true, then we would
have to concede the permissibility of harming certain humans as well.
Humans aren’t born with a culture, language, a sense of self, etc., and
some of them—perhaps if they’re born with severe brain damage—
may never come to acquire it either. It hardly seems reasonable to claim
that they should be subjected to any harm because of their ‘lower’
capacities. If we don’t exclude these people from the moral community
for these reasons, it seems we cannot exclude animals for those reasons
either. Typically, we think we morally ought to care for people with
disabilities, why don’t we have a similar obligation to animals? There
are, of course, some animals that we do care about deeply: our dogs
and cats, for instance. But, as Alastair Norcross (2004) argues, if we
think it would be wrong to torture puppies or use them for food, it is
inconsistent not to extend our moral judgment to the animals who are
butchered for factory-farmed meat.
To be anti-speciesism is to be pro-animal equality. In this
context, “equality” is a moral idea: it means seriously taking into
consideration the well-being and interests of non-human animals
rather than disregarding them or shoving them aside. Animals don’t
have to be descriptively equal in order to be morally equal. The fact that
one species has, on average, more of the ‘cherished’ qualities—like
intelligence or rationality—would no more justify torturing, harming,
or enslaving them than a racial group would be justified in doing the
same if it turned out that another racial group lacked such qualities as
well. But what does it mean to take another species’ “interests” into
consideration? To have an “interest” is to have a stake in one’s life; if

31
it matters to a being what happens to it, then that being has interests.
There’s one capacity that’s shared by (almost) all non-human animals:
the capacity for enjoyment and suffering, or sentience. Some advocates
for speciesism might argue that we can’t ‘know’ whether non-human
animals are capable of suffering or not. But, as a response, it’s unclear
whether the standard of evidence such advocates invoke enables them
to ‘know’ that other human beings suffer either—we can’t literally feel
each other’s actual pain. It seems that observation is all we have in
order to substantiate that animals (and humans) are sentient Humans
exhibit pain behaviors, but so do non-human animals: “facial
contortions, writhing, and yelping” and so on. The pain is exhibited in
signs in their nervous system such as “rise of blood pressure, dilated
pupils and perspiration.” Pain is necessary for detecting threats to
one’s life. It is a vital component in the evolutionary history of
biological life. There’s no reason to deny its presence in animals.
The equal treatment of animals doesn’t mean that we should
give the interests of animals and the interests of humans always the
same weight. The interests of humans and animals can be quite distinct
from one another. Animals, for instance, can’t form a life-plan, let
alone one that involves going to college, saving for retirement, having
a political legacy, or attempting to leave a better world for posterity.
This makes humans susceptible to certain types of loss and suffering
that aren’t possible for animals. To take away a human life is, often, to
thwart an entire life-plan; but depriving animals of life typically means
depriving them of some pleasant experiences, like eating, sleeping, and
so on. According to Singer, then, in most cases, there will be greater
reasons to save the life of another human even at the expense of an
animal. But the reason won’t be based on species-membership. The fact
that one creature is biologically human and the other isn’t is morally
irrelevant. As Jeremy Bentham said long ago, “The question is not, can
they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Alana Pagan
Karen Escareno

32
XIII.

Environmental Justice

Environmental justice refers to the connections and relationships


between environmental issues and social justice. There are two
fundamental dimensions to environmental justice: (1) distributive justice
and (2) participatory justice (Figueroa and Mills, 2002). The distributive
dimension concerns how environmental benefits and burdens are
distributed across populations, while the participatory dimension
concerns who takes part in the decision-making process when it comes
to determining the distribution of these benefits and burdens. These
dimensions exist on both the domestic level and the global level. On
the domestic level, environmental justice is concerned with
“environmental policies laws, and practices, along with political
relations between different societal groups … of a particular nation-
state or region” (Figueroa and Mills, 427). So, for example, the
Environmental Justice Movement in the United States was initially
concerned with “environmental racism,” or the intentional or
unintentional environmental disadvantages that people of color incur
as a result of environmental policies, laws, and so on. People of color
are, on average, exposed to greater environmental risks in the
workplace, have more toxic waste and other pollutants dumped in their
communities (e.g., the Keystone pipeline in Standing Rock), and have
less access to parks and natural resources (e.g., the water crisis in Flint,
MI). These burdens may sometimes be the result of intentional racist
attitudes, but it’s perhaps more often the result of structural processes
that are unintentionally geared towards the interest of dominant social
groups and to the disadvantage of non-dominant ones (see also
Political Responsibility). People of color are also much more likely
to suffer participatory injustice in this context. They don’t have
sufficient representation in the decision-making process that
determines the environmental burdens their communities often incur.
The denial of the existence of environmental racism, however,
is not uncommon. For instance, one common assertion is that
environmental burdens are distributed on a socio-economic basis,
rather than on the basis of race. But that’s quite inadequate as it
disregards the fact that racial minorities constitute a disproportionate
number of those on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Racism
and economics are deeply intertwined. Yet a second argument suggests
that the uneven distribution of environmental burdens or benefits is
due to ‘market forces’ rather than racism. For example, people in lower
socio-economic communities are less likely to oppose hazardous waste
facilities compared to higher income communities. This, too, is an
inadequate argument. ‘Market forces’ aren’t entirely divorceable from
people’s biases and from institutional discrimination. Finally, some

33
argue that corporations provide ample compensation to communities
that are receiving disproportionate amounts of environmental
burdens—like waste facilities—by providing them with benefits, such
as community improvement plans and employment opportunities.
This, however, is hardly admissible. Poor communities often need
benefits because they lack other meaningful options, e.g., for
employment. They often take these hazardous jobs because there’s
nothing else for them. But it hardly seems fair that someone should
have to work in poorly compensated and environmentally risky job just
because the only other option is unemployment or homelessness. The
companies also don’t have any incentive to ensure that these
communities are adequately informed about the environmental hazards
they are ‘agreeing’ (or being pressured) to undertake. Disadvantaged
communities are consequently often unaware of the environmental
burdens they are incurring when they’re being offered these benefits.
The global level of environmental justice includes those “parts
of the earth’s environment that all humans share and in principle
cannot be owned,” such as the oceans and the atmosphere (Figueroa
and Mills, 433). In this domain, concerns about the problem of climate
change are often paramount. Industrialized Western nations—or the
“Global North”—have historically contributed much more to global
warming than so-called “developing” nations, or the “Global South,”
As Figueroa and Mills argue, the very label of “developed” and
“underdeveloped” nations implies something problematic, namely,
that the Western, industrialized nations are the normative standard to
which developing nations should strive to conform; they should aim
at forming strong economies, with the most advanced technologies,
with a powerful military, and extreme consumerism. This direction,
however, is a sure path towards the impending climate disaster. Thus,
the “developing” Global South often engage in environmentally
harmful practices, such as deforestation, in their climb towards rapid
industrialization. Additionally, taking Western industrialized nations as
the normative standard disregards indigenous ways of life, ruins
traditional economies, and is otherwise an unsustainable model that is
very unlikely to be achieved. As the Global South is keen to point out,
the North’s excessive consumption is as harmful as industrialization.
Global environmental justice is arguably more difficult to
achieve because the international organizations that are overseeing its
progress lack the power to implement their policies as a national
government-backed organization would. This suggests that global
environmental justice requires or can be best secured by cosmopolitan
political bodies that can effectively determine the distribution of
environmental benefits and burdens that nations should incur. The
future of the environment—and of the humans and non-human beings
who inhabit it—seems otherwise to be rather bleak.

Citlali Hernandez
Caitlin Ng

34
XIV.

Democratic Legitimacy

Governments always subject their populations to some form of


coercion. Laws, policies, regulations, etc. are by their nature coercive
insofar as they interfere with—directly or preemptively—people’s
choices and their possibilities of action. The task of democratic theory
is to explain the grounds on which such coercion can be legitimated or
justified. According to Arash Abizadeh, democratic theory stipulates
that the state’s exercise of power is legitimate only if “it is actually
justified by and to the very people over whom it is exercised, in a manner
consistent with viewing them as free (autonomous) and equal” (2008,
41). That’s the essence of democratic legitimation: political coercion
must be justified to and by those who are subject it. 3 This means that
democratic legitimation requires a commitment to ensuring a certain
type of political process is undertaken whereby laws, policies, etc. are to
receive their legitimation, i.e., they require some form of political
participation and representation in the deliberative procedures that
determine the content of those laws, policies, and so on.
The core value that lies at the heart of democratic theory is
autonomy. Autonomy, on Joseph Raz’s influential view, is the ability to
“set and pursue” life projects; it involves three components: (1) the
mental capacities to “formulate personal projects and pursue them;” (2)
having an adequate range of valuable options that one can pursue; and (3)
having independence from being subjected to the will of others (see
Abizadeh, 2008). Democratic legitimation is always, therefore, a matter
of showing how some form of coercion is consistent with upholding
the value of autonomy.
The relevance—and radical nature—of democratic legitimacy
is perhaps most clearly demonstrable in the context of border control.
Traditionally, it was claimed that states have an absolute or unilateral
right to determine their borders for democratic reasons: the right to
determine borders is part and parcel of the state’s autonomy or its right
to self-determination. But, as Arash Abizadeh (2008) argues,
democratic legitimation should actually lead us to the opposite
conclusion. This is because border control involves the exercise of
power over members of the political community and non-members
simultaneously. If democratic legitimation means that justification for
coercive policies is owed to all those who are subjected to those
policies, then this ipso facto means that justification is owed to non-

3 This makes democratic legitimation importantly distinct from liberal legitimation. Liberalist
theory stipulates that “exercise of political power be in principle justifiable to everyone,
including the persons over whom it is exercised, in a manner consistent with viewing each
person as free (autonomous) and equal” (Abizadeh 2008, 41). But democratic theory requires
that the exercise of power should in fact be justified by and to those whom it is exercised upon.

35
members, i.e., to would-be immigrants and foreigners, rather than just
to the current and presiding members of the state. Border policies are
always coercive; they infringe on people’s independence by limiting
their possibilities of movement and habitation. It seems, then, that in
order to uphold people’s autonomy, border policies require a much
more robust and cosmopolitan process in order to be democratically
legitimated.
Defenders of the unilateral right to the state’s determination of
its borders might nevertheless balk at this claim. The defenders might
still argue that “democracy is supposed to refer to a set of civil or
political rights enjoyed by persons qua members of particular political
communities,” (2008, 43). This conception of democracy may be called
the “bounded demos conception.” It distinguishes between “members and
nonmembers,” and asserts that democracy only requires that the
government and its laws be justified to and by the members, or the “will
of the people,” the demos. But Abizadeh argues that this conception of
democracy is “incoherent” (2008, 45). The incoherence is encapsulated
in two problems for the bounded demos conception. (1) First, there’s
the boundary problem. When one posits that democratically legitimate
exercises of power corresponds to the “will of the people,” one must
answer a question: who are “the people”? This question cannot be
answered by reference to the principle of participation. As Abizadeh
notes, “we would once again have to ask, whose participation must be
sought to answer the question of membership, which in turn raises a
second-order membership question, ad infinitum” (46). The people in
question have to already exist in order to serve as the grounding source
of political power. After all, nothing comes from nothing. Ex nihilo
nihil fit. But this means that democratic theory—under the bounded
demos conception—doesn’t have the internal resources to tell us to
whom democratic justification of coercion is ultimately owed. (2)
Second, there’s the externality problem. Democracy’s claim to legitimacy
relies on “reference to those over whom power is exercised.” But, if
borders always exercise power on both members and non-members of
the state, then the bounded demos conception leads to an obvious
incoherency: power is exercised over those non-members—who by
definition partly constitute the borders themselves—but their
participation can be denied and their interests can be completely
ignored because they’re not part of the demos. Thus, the bounded
demos conception of democracy implies that the exercise of political
power is both owed and not owed to non-members; and that’s
straightforwardly incoherent.
But this isn’t a flaw within democratic theory. The problem,
rather, is that the bounded demos conception presupposes an entity—
"the people”—which legitimizes political power. But this people must
be pre-politically constituted. A bounded demos does not give answers
on how to determine membership. It simply presupposes it. Once we
reject this premise and accepts that the demos of democratic theory is
in principle unbounded, then the path to democratic legitimation is clear:

36
replace coercive relations with relations of discursive argumentation
between all of those persons, whether members or non-members, who are subject
to state coercion. From there, “the remaining instances of coercion” can
be dealt by means of “participatory discursive practices of mutual
justification” that are “consistent with the freedom and equality for all”
(Abizadeh 2008, 48).

Hang Xu
Ravinder Singh

37
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