Handbook For Critical Theory
Handbook For Critical Theory
Handbook For Critical Theory
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Contents
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I.
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
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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
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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
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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
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
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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.
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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
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VII.
Testimonial Injustice
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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.
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VIII.
Hermeneutical Injustice
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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
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VIII.
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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
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IX.
Political Responsibility
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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 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.
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processes so that their outcomes will be less unjust” (ibid).
Dan Tran
Nicole Wong-Franklin
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X.
Dehumanization
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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
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XI.
Politics of Difference
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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
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XII.
Speciesism
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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
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
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
REFERENCES
Norcross, Alastair. 2004. “Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and
Marginal Perspectives.” Philosophical Perspectives 18: 229-245.
38
Shelby, Tommie. 2003. “Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory.”
The Philosophical Forum 34: 153-188.
39