Jan Stettler

Hope can motivate action and substantially alter our psychological outlook. In this essay, we bring to the fore a largely unaddressed risk associated with hope. Under conditions of social oppression, hope can engender a form of psychological oppression. The phenomenon we describe arises when an oppressed person’s hope is apt, yet imprudent. Apt, because what we hope for is especially valuable. And imprudent, because acting on hope is likely to expose the hopeful agent to exhaustion, failure, or further harm. In such cases, an agent has good reasons both for maintaining hope and for abandoning it. The deliberative challenge of mediating between a hope’s aptness and its prudential risks amounts to a form of psychological oppression. This deliberative challenge can be met, but doing so is much harder for someone living under oppressive conditions than for someone more privileged. Our argument owes much to Srinivasan (2018) who makes a similar argument regarding anger.