Serene J. Khader

Serene Khader argues against the widespread view that oppressed people have a self-regarding obligation to resist complying with oppressive norms, in order to preserve their self-respect. Khader notes that the cost of noncompliance is often underestimated. Flouting oppressive norms often poses substantial threats to an agent’s welfare and even her self-respect, and compliance may express self-respect, by affirming a commitment to the importance of her own projects and to gaining the means to pursue them. Khader offers an alternative way of maintaining self-respect in the face of oppression, namely to cultivate knowledge of the oppressive situation faced by oneself and one’s group, and to develop a normative perspective that recognizes and seeks to rectify injustices.

It is often argued that oppression reduces freedom. I argue against the view that oppression is wrong because it reduces freedom. Conceiving oppression as wrong because it reduces freedom is at odds with recognizing structural cases of oppression, because (a) many cases of oppression, including many structural ones, do not reduce agents’ freedom, and (b) the type of freedom reduction involved in many structural instances of oppression is not morally objectionable. If the mechanisms of oppression are sometimes indistinguishable from benign, or even ineluctable, processes of social shaping, arguments that oppression is objectionably freedom-reducing risk implausibly suggesting that socialization itself is objectionably freedom-reducing. I show how three strategies for explaining how oppression reduces freedom either fall into the trap of overgenerality, or end up appealing to values other than freedom to avoid it. I conclude by suggesting that oppression might be better thought of as an affront to equality.