Mich Ciurria

Sally Haslanger identifies three standard philosophical approaches – conceptual, descriptive, and ameliorative – and defends an ameliorative analysis of race and gender as the most effective at addressing social injustice. In this paper, I assign three influential theories of moral responsibility to these categories, and I defend the ameliorative approach as the most justice-conducive. But I argue that existing ameliorative accounts of responsibility are not ameliorative enough – they do not adequately address social injustice. I propose a new ameliorative model that defines ordinary responsibility as part of a political apparatus of power that polices and enforces oppressive norms. And I argue that we should create new, counterhegemonic discourses about responsibility through collective political resistance.

Historically, philosophers have tended to see moral responsibility as a matter of having a certain metaphysical status. Strawson shifted the debate by defining responsibility as part of an interpersonal practice, but he did not discuss the relationship between interpersonal relationships and the politics of oppression. His view, in other words, was an example of ideal theory. This article adopts a non‐ideal theoretic framework to explore how ordinary responsibility practices uphold intersecting logics of oppression. It argues that the reactive attitudes function to police double binds, creating situations of oppression for marginalized groups.

This chapter brings feminist moral psychology into conversation with dominant theories of blame. There are three main areas of concern in feminist moral psychology: the value of marginalized emotions like care and anger; the role of distorted states in moral reasoning; and the notion that agency is collective or relational. Feminist debates in each of these areas have implications for the dominant theories of blame: cognitive theory; emotional theory; conative theory; and functional theory. These debates call into question some commonly held beliefs about blame, including that it is a personal (apolitical) response to a target agent; that blaming emotions do or should track individual agency; and that blaming norms are generally felicitous and not in need of significant revision. Key words: feminist moral psychology, blame, responsibility, agency, moral reasoning, oppression, social justice

When we focus on asymmetries of power in our society, we find that blame and praise are unfairly distributed, partly due to cultural narratives that favour and exonerate the privileged. This paper provides a partial explanation for this skewed distribution of blame and praise. I draw on three analyses of disappearance narratives that erase and exonerate privileged perpetrators and therefore skew the responsibility system in their favour. Then I defend an emancipatory theory of responsibility that treats blame and praise as communicative entities that can, and should, be used to debunk and dismantle these disappearance narratives, along with other oppressive ideologies. Blame and praise, on my emancipatory proposal, serve to identify and take a stand against agents of oppression and to recognize and celebrate resisters.

This paper argues that diversity and uptake are required for objectivity. In philosophy, women are underrepresented with respect to teaching, publishing, and citations. This undermines the objectivity of our research output. To improve women’s representation and objectivity in philosophy, we should take steps to increase women’s numbers and institute uptake-conducive conditions. In concrete terms, this means fostering an appreciation for diversity, diversifying evaluators, integrating women’s contributions into mainstream discourse, and reducing implicit bias.