Table Of ContentCivilized Oppression and Moral Relations
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Civilized Oppression and
Moral Relations
Victims, Fallibility, and the
Moral Community
By
Jean Harvey
Edited by
Antonio Calcagno
CIVILIZED OPPRESSION AND MORAL RELATIONS
Copyright © Jean Harvey, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-50699-3
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-50600-2 ISBN 978-1-137-49806-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137498069
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harvey, Jean, 1955–
Civilized oppression and moral relations : victims, fallibility and the
moral community / by Jean Harvey; edited by Antonio Calcagno.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-137-50699-3
1. Oppression (Psychology)—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Liberty—
Philosophy. 3. Equality—Philosophy. 4. Social justice—Philosophy.
I. Calcagno, Antonio, 1969– II. Title.
HM1266.H373 2015
303.3(cid:25)72—dc23 2014040015
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Introduction: Further Discussions of Civilized
Oppression 1
2 Civilized Oppression and Gratitude 15
3 The Relationship of Moral Solidarity 39
4 Moral Community, Solidarity, and Civilized
Oppression 71
5 The Irreducibly Individual: “Interactional Justice” 101
6 The Irreducibly Individual: Authentic Social Justice 125
7 A Rich Sense of “Responsive Reflection” 145
Notes 183
Index 193
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the assistance of Antonio Calcagno in preparing this
book for final publication.
Reworked material drawn from earlier studies has been incorporated
into this monograph. I thank the publishers for their permission to repro-
duce some of that material here in this new book:
1. “Victims, Resistance, and Civilized Oppression,” in Symposium:
Responsibility for Resisting Oppression: cocontributors, Bernard Boxill
and Thomas E. Hill; commentator, Sarah Buss; Journal of Social
Philosophy 41, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 13–27.
2. “Authentic Social Justice and the Far Reaches of ‘The Private Sphere,’”
Social Philosophy Today 26 (2011), 9–22.
3. “Moral Solidarity and Empathetic Understanding: The Moral Value
and Scope of the Relationship,” in Special Issue on Solidarity, Journal of
Social Philosophy, ed. Carol Gould and Sally Scholz, 38, no. 1 (2007),
22–37.
4. “The Burden of Securing Social Justice: Institutions, Individuals, and
Moral Action,” Social Philosophy Today 22 (2007), 137–152.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Further Discussions of
Civilized Oppression
In The Atrocity Paradigm1 Claudia Card discusses genocide, war
rape, torture, and spousal and child abuse as cases of “atrocities.”
They are “uncontroversially evil,” they deserve “priority of atten-
tion,” and the “core features of evils tend to be writ large in the case of
atrocities, making them easier to identify and appreciate.”2 (The ease of
identification is a major difference between these cases and the phenom-
ena of civilized oppression. It is much harder to recognize the latter.)
When directed to members of some group because of their membership
in the group, it becomes systematic and an instance of violent oppression,
and the examples Card cites have been (and still are) used to terrorize and
oppress certain groups. The moral urgency of tackling such oppression
is obvious. Nonetheless, I think it would be a major error to collectively
tackle only such shockingly violent forms of oppression.
“Civilized oppression” is a phrase I coined some years ago3 to refer
to oppression that involves neither violence, nor the use of law. It is
systematic and disadvantages and demeans members of certain groups
and in Western societies it is pervasive. The phenomena involved are
routinely trivialized, given their subtle nature, yet both their effects and
their nonconsequentialist implications are highly significant. My first
book, Civilized Oppression, focuses on the most central goals: analyz-
ing what is involved in such oppression, making such oppression more
2 (cid:77) Civilized Oppression and Moral Relations
recognizable, explaining why it is far more important morally than first
appears, and uncovering the underlying principles that account for its
immorality.
The key focus in this second book is on the moral relations between
the key players: victims, agents of civilized oppression, and bystand-
ers. (By “victim” I refer simply to someone at the receiving end of such
oppression and someone, therefore, morally wronged. No image or ste-
reotype is implied.) To keep the work here as self-contained as possible,
this first chapter contains some key points about civilized oppression
worked on in my first book.
There are important differences between civilized oppression (at least,
toward one end of the spectrum of civilized oppression) and more dra-
matic forms that involve violence. I say “at one end of the spectrum”
because civilized oppression itself covers a range of phenomena contain-
ing some interesting moral distinctions, some of which carry implica-
tions for the moral status of the contributing agents.
I am particularly interested in the most subtle cases, since they are
the most underexamined, although they reflect powerful forces that rou-
tinely derail lives. Here, more than with any other form of oppression,
thinking about the moral role of the contributing agents involves think-
ing about their ability to make fine-grained perceptions, particularly
about their own long-standing habits of action. Some socialized habits
contribute greatly to subtle but powerfully effective civilized oppression,
but the relevant self-awareness requires a level of perceptual skill that
involves commitment over time, not simply goodwill, good intentions,
and sincere beliefs about the wrongness of discrimination, exploitation,
and marginalization.
Here too the stereotype of the agent as “the enemy” (readily justified
in cases of violent oppression and some of the more transparent cases
of civilized oppression) can be misleading for more than one reason.
Sometimes, in fact, contributions to civilized oppression are actually
motivated by basically good intentions (e.g., when someone routinely
“blames the victim” of some wrongful harm by pointing to something
the victim did—and so could avoid doing—with the hope of protecting
the victim from similar harms in the future).
