Annette Martín

You’re on the train home after a long day. You exit at your station, still thinking about work. A few minutes later, you stop; something is off. It takes you a moment to realize that you missed a turn and obliviously walked several blocks in the wrong direction. This paper does three things. First, I identify and provide an account of a familiar phenomenon that I term obliviousness. On this account, obliviousness occurs when an agent non-deliberately fails to take a rational route to some belief p that is immediately available to them at t that they ought to have taken. I propose that an agent ought to take such a rational route to belief when this is directly relevant to pursuing an aim that S is or should be actively pursuing at t. Second, I argue that, despite the reference to aims in the account, obliviousness centrally involves an epistemic failure, thereby indicating that we have positive epistemic duties. As part of making this case, I sketch a non-ideal picture of epistemic normativity on which, in light of our human limitations, practical (including moral) factors help determine the scope of our epistemic duties—without thereby instrumentalizing epistemic rationality. Third, I show that obliviousness can function as oppressive ignorance. I highlight how social conditions shape key cognitive dispositions such as to cultivate patterns of ignorance in ways that often escape our deliberate control and awareness. This suggests that we have epistemic as well as moral reasons to ameliorate unjust social conditions.

This chapter argues that we should reject the standard, group-based view of oppression. On the standard view, groups are taken to be the primary subjects of oppression, and individuals are only oppressed by virtue of their membership in an oppressed group. While this view is so standard as to frequently be taken to be definitional of oppression, surprisingly little has been said to elaborate or defend it. In this chapter, the author elaborates the group-based view in more detail and argues that we should reject it on intersectional grounds. She starts by identifying what she takes to be the central commitment of the group-based view—that groups are the primary subjects of oppression—and argues that it gives rise to an additive and falsely universalizing picture of oppression that fails to do justice to important intersectional insights. The author then considers a revised version of the group-based view that abandons the claim that groups are the primary subjects of oppression, and instead centers the explanatory claim that individuals are oppressed by virtue of their membership in certain groups. On this revision, individuals are oppressed based on their social position, understood as the overall combination of groups that the individual is a member of. The author argues that while we should go in for a positional view, we should not analyze these positions in terms of group membership, because group membership fails to do the relevant explanatory work. She concludes that we should reject the group-based view of oppression.

Feminist philosophers have long worried that intersectionality undermines the viability of the concept and category of woman, thereby undermining feminist theory and politics. Some have responded to this problem by abandoning intersectionality; others have attempted to find some suitably inclusive way of reconceptualizing woman. I provide a novel solution that focuses on conceptualizing oppression in light of intersectionality, rather than trying to provide an account of what it is to be a woman. By enabling us to understand feminism as responding to gender oppression, this account shows that intersectionality does not conceptually undermine and fragment feminism. Feminism should be intersectional.

In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that results as part of a social process that systematically gives rise to racial injustice, and is an active player in the process. I argue that, because of its greater power and flexibility, the Structuralist View better explains the patterns of ignorance that we observe, better illuminates the connection to white racial domination, and is overall better suited to the project of ameliorating racial injustice. As such, the Structuralist View should be preferred.