Mich Ciurria

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.

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.

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