The Looping Effect and Epistemic Injustice in the Construction of Disability Kinds
Aidan Ryall (ANU)
Abstract: Ian Hacking’s conception of looping effects and Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice have both been hugely influential, foundational ideas in social philosophy. Despite the significance of both Fricker’s and Hacking’s work, these notions have not yet been brought into dialogue with one another. In this paper, I will argue that epistemic injustice creates an obstacle to the proper operation of Hacking’s looping because it can prevent people from being aware of their own status as kind members, and others from being able to recognise them as such. Further, I will argue that because epistemic injustice is rooted in broader patterns of social inequality that risks baking injustice into the nature of certain social kinds themselves.
This paper examines the way that the construction of two chronic pain conditions, Fibromyalgia and Endometriosis, have been distorted by epistemic injustice. In both instances, the ability of kind members interact with the looping effects for disability kinds is complicated, or outright prevented, by external aspects of their social identity, namely their race, gender, and sex. This, I argue, constitutes a further form of social and epistemic injustice which is inherently intersectional.
Vulnerability, Exploitation and Autonomy
Catriona Mackenzie (Macquarie University)
Abstract: Bioethicists who seek to defend commercial transactions that intuitively seem exploitative, such as organ sales and commercial surrogacy, typically pair a liberal analysis of exploitation with a libertarian analysis of autonomy. In this paper, I argue that the liberal analysis of exploitation, which focuses primarily on two party transactions between individuals, occludes the structural dimensions of exploitation. This occlusion then paves the way for the transaction to be understood in terms of libertarian autonomy. I propose that a vulnerability analysis paired with a multidimensional and relational theory of autonomy highlights the structural dimensions of exploitation and exposes the myth-making that underlies claims that these forms of exploitation are autonomy-enhancing.
Acknowledgment and Transformation: Responding to Oppression
Fiona Jenkins (ANU)
Abstract: Public displays of recognition for Indigenous pre-colonial inhabitation, care of country and continued culture have become standard in Australia only in the last decade or so. An Acknowledgment is now requisite to ceremonially opening multiple occasions, taking place in a wide range of institutional settings for activities as diverse as parliamentary sessions, lectures, protests, concerts, conferences and zoom calls. Both the Acknowledgment of Country and the Welcome to Country establish the identity of the Indigenous on terms of continuity in relation to the place of meeting. The ritual thus inscribes a fundamental difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous identities, establishing complex terms of precedence, while overlaying these, for instance in the performance of Welcome, with other figurations such as ‘host’ and ‘guest’. Acknowledgments vary in giving more or less explicit attention to the terms of an oppression that begins in colonisation and remains sequestered in all the injustices bound up with an ‘unceded sovereignty’, including the ongoing vulnerability to domination by the state that this condition of dispossession configures.
The practice is at once powerful and disquieting in its effects and implications, aspects explored in this paper. What is it for an oppression to be publicly acknowledged? And how, in that acknowledgment, does identity take on a particular form or relationality? The paradoxes attendant on this way of offering recognition suggest the importance of a critical ontology of the social categories emerging from responses to oppression. Critical ontology presumes that identities are inherently in-transformation and moreover, that an ethos or ‘manner of being’ is at stake in how the identities we recognise are encountered in their contingency and potentiality. The temporality of collective existence, and thus political being, further specifies this ethos. Drawing on inspiration from Foucault, Arendt, Patchen Markell and Ariella Azoulay, I argue that avowing this critical stance places a demand on Acknowledgment to become an ethos, and in some degree of resistance to the rituals of recognition. I describe my own use of artworks accompanying Acknowledgment as an attempt to generate such a practice.
Three strands of sex/gender concepts
Laura Schroeter (University of Melbourne)
Abstract: Cognitive, social, and developmental psychologists have amassed a wealth of data about the complex patterns of understanding associated with sex/gender terms like ‘woman’ and ‘man’. We focus on three core strands in the conceptual understanding of the term: (1) biological sex, (2) social role, and (3) self-categorisation (identifying as a woman or as a man). In the recent philosophical literature, many theorists have privileged one of these three core strands to argue that ‘woman’ has a univocal reference – a biological kind, a social class, or an affiliative identity kind. We argue against these univocalist approaches and suggest that ordinary sex/gender concepts – and the words used to express them – should be understood as having complex meanings that may be sharpened by context. We contrast our approach with family resemblance interpretations (Stoljar) and standard contextualist proposals (Saul, Diaz-Leon). We draw on the literature on hybrid concepts, polysemy and contextual modulation to show that the complexity of our sex/gender concepts need not lead to confusion or breakdowns in communication.
Who is Oppressed And How Do We Know It?
Louise Richardson-Self (University of Tasmania)
Abstract: This talk is fundamentally concerned with two questions: (1) which social groups can be oppressed? And (2) how do we know whether such a group is oppressed? My interest in these questions stems from the current energies being expended in the explicit protection of religious freedom in Australia. The push for protection of religious freedom gained speed following the legislation of same-gender marriage in 2017. It is widely accepted that the queer community has been—and, some might say, still is—oppressed because of their sexual orientations, and gender statuses and identities. However, some religious groups—and the Christian Right in particular—see this evolution as a threat to their ability to live freely in accordance with the tenets of their religion. Scott Morrison, Australia’s first Pentecostal Prime Minister, said after the postal survey:
There are almost five million Australians who voted no in this survey who are now coming to terms with the fact that they are in the minority. That did not used to be the case in this country for most, if not all, of their lives. They have concerns that their broader views and beliefs are also now in the minority and therefore under threat. They are seeking assurances from this House and this parliament at this time—whether one agrees or disagrees and whether rightly or wrongly—that the things they hold dear are not under threat because of this change. (Commonwealth Parliament of Australia [Hansard], 2017b: 12347)
Are religious groups a kind of social group that can be oppressed? And, if so, how do we know whether believers of a certain religion are or have become oppressed? I begin by surveying the kinds of social groups there are, identifying which sort are capable of being oppressed. They are socially-salient identity-based groups. I then foreshadow inquiry into what is so ‘special’ about these groups by appeal to embodied belonging. I move on to consider what oppression is and is not, investigating further what counts as evidence of oppression. Here, however, is where we may hit an epistemological impasse: one state of affairs may be interpreted by a certain group in one way, whilst another group interprets it quite differently. In such situations, whose interpretation ought we find most plausible? I will suggest that this can only be determined by considering the socially salient groups’ power dynamics in their historico-contextual embeddedness. In other words, I will argue that attentiveness to historico-contextual embeddedness is necessary for the evaluation of whether oppression is manifest in the present.
Australian Muslim women: Moving beyond binary hierarchical thinking with decolonial feminist philosophy
Lutfiye Ali (Victoria University)
Abstract: Despite the postmodern turn, social identities and material processes continue to inform social relationships, subjectivities, and experiences of power and oppression in the contemporary world (Moya, 2012). Following the declaration of the ‘war on terror’ at the turn of the 21st century, Muslim women in Australia and more globally, have had their identities homogenised and constructed as veiled, oppressed, and bound ‘by’ their religious identity. Much academic research, in attempt to challenge the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ discourse, has reproduced colonial imageries of Muslim women with a difference—as veiled, agentic, and bound ‘to’ their religious identity. Chicana, African, African American, Indigenous, and other Women of Colour feminist scholars, through centering their ontologies, have developed epistemologies that bring to the fore, exceed, and disrupt binary and hierarchal categories of modernity (Lugones, 2007). In this presentation, I draw on the philosophical insights of Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana decolonial feminist philosopher, to demonstrate the ways 20 Australian Muslim women from diverse ethnic backgrounds negotiate their subjectivities. I move beyond these static binaries of ‘victim’ and ‘agent’ prescribed by academic scholarship and public scripts by demonstrating the fluidity, contextuality, plurality and multiplicity of Muslim women subjectivities arising from the intersections of Islam, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. I also bring attention to the diverse experiences of oppression and plural expressions of resistance associated with these identity locations.
Conversation-level Meaning and Hermeneutical Injustice
Nick Willis (ANU)
To explain our own experiences and understand others’, we draw on shared hermeneutical resources. Sometimes, gaps in our pool of shared resources leave oppressed groups without the means to communicate important experiences. When the gaps in our shared resources are prejudiced in this way, members of these groups suffer a distinct form of oppression - Hermeneutical Injustice.
Standard accounts of Hermeneutical Injustice assume a shared pool of resources, within which there is some gap. I will focus on the assumed pool of linguistic resources, distinguishing two families of views. On ‘Koinolectical’ views of natural language, the standard accounts’ assumption is unproblematic. Koinolectical views explain communication by appeal to a koinolect – the shared language of a linguistic community (e.g. ‘English’ or ‘Chilean Spanish’). ‘Duolectical’ views of natural language reject the standard assumption: beyond the boundaries of a conversation, there is no shared pool of (relevant) linguistic resources. Duolectical views explain communication by appeal to a duolect – a highly local language, constructed cooperatively by speakers and hearers (e.g. metalinguistic negotiation, lexical entrainment, contextual modulation).
I will argue that a good account of communication with natural language will be partly duolectical. To the extent that we conduct our conversations in duolects, we should add to standard accounts of the wrongs, remedies and cases of Hermeneutical Injustice.
Disability and Public Policy
Nicholas Drake (ANU)
Abstract: Government approaches to categorizing people as disabled standardly use the Social Model of disability, according to which disability is the result of interactions between people with impairments and social barriers that hinder their equal participation in society. Elizabeth Barnes has recently developed a new theory of disability. According to Barnes’s theory, most simply put, disability just is whatever the disability rights movement is promoting justice for. I argue that Barnes’s theory fails to satisfy ameliorative criteria, under which a theory of disability must work well in helping us promote justice for disabled people. Barnes’s theory fails to satisfy ameliorative criteria as it is not suitable for use in public policy, and public policy is an essential vehicle for promoting justice for disabled people.
Arguing for Affirmative Action
Shalom Chalson (ANU)
Affirmative action is not without controversy. It is defined as acts, practices, or policies which afford preferential treatment to members of underrepresented socially salient groups in domains like employment and education. Arguments against affirmative action either deny that it is morally permissible or deny that it brings about the desired consequences. In this paper, I consider the first of those claims.
A straight-forward path to the claim that affirmative action is morally impermissible is to equate it with direct discrimination. Proponents of affirmative action here make a choice: they either deny or (implicitly) accept this claim. Those who deny the claim suggest that affirmative action (i) is akin to anti-discrimination law because it is a tool for resisting oppression (Suk 2018) or (ii) relates to the background conditions of justice and not the domain of application for anti-discrimination law (Nagel 1973). Those who accept the claim suggest that affirmative action meets the definition for discrimination, but can be justified with good reasons. Backward-looking arguments focus on compensation for historical injustice; forward-looking arguments focus on realising principles of justice like equality or liberty, or ideals like diversity and integration.
In this paper, I am concerned with the choice that proponents of affirmative action make. Rather than straight-forwardly accept or deny the claim, I consider what opponents mean when they equate affirmative action with direct discrimination. On the right view of direct discrimination, affirmative action is not discrimination. It is, accordingly, morally permissible.
Contesting Social Oppression
Suzy Killmister (Monash University)
Abstract: It is now widely accepted that membership in social categories such as race, gender, class, and sexuality can be a source of oppression. What is much more contested is whether, and how, such oppression can be mitigated, or even overcome. In this paper, I explore one possible avenue for contesting social oppression. I start by positing a different social category, one which tends to be overlooked in social metaphysics: the human itself. The question I then focus on is whether the social category of the human can – or should – be used as a counter to oppression based on social categories such as race and gender.
Given the justifiable skepticism many feminist and postcolonial scholars have expressed towards the idea of the human, such a proposal needs to proceed with caution. However, I argue that by conceiving of the human in terms of a socially conferred status, rather than in terms of a universally shared essence, many of these worries can be overcome. What remains is the challenge of explaining how we can effectively invoke our membership in the human to counter oppression, without at the same time denying or downplaying our particular identities. In the closing section of this paper I consider what this might look like in practice.
Aidan Ryall (ANU)
Abstract: Ian Hacking’s conception of looping effects and Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice have both been hugely influential, foundational ideas in social philosophy. Despite the significance of both Fricker’s and Hacking’s work, these notions have not yet been brought into dialogue with one another. In this paper, I will argue that epistemic injustice creates an obstacle to the proper operation of Hacking’s looping because it can prevent people from being aware of their own status as kind members, and others from being able to recognise them as such. Further, I will argue that because epistemic injustice is rooted in broader patterns of social inequality that risks baking injustice into the nature of certain social kinds themselves.
This paper examines the way that the construction of two chronic pain conditions, Fibromyalgia and Endometriosis, have been distorted by epistemic injustice. In both instances, the ability of kind members interact with the looping effects for disability kinds is complicated, or outright prevented, by external aspects of their social identity, namely their race, gender, and sex. This, I argue, constitutes a further form of social and epistemic injustice which is inherently intersectional.
Vulnerability, Exploitation and Autonomy
Catriona Mackenzie (Macquarie University)
Abstract: Bioethicists who seek to defend commercial transactions that intuitively seem exploitative, such as organ sales and commercial surrogacy, typically pair a liberal analysis of exploitation with a libertarian analysis of autonomy. In this paper, I argue that the liberal analysis of exploitation, which focuses primarily on two party transactions between individuals, occludes the structural dimensions of exploitation. This occlusion then paves the way for the transaction to be understood in terms of libertarian autonomy. I propose that a vulnerability analysis paired with a multidimensional and relational theory of autonomy highlights the structural dimensions of exploitation and exposes the myth-making that underlies claims that these forms of exploitation are autonomy-enhancing.
Acknowledgment and Transformation: Responding to Oppression
Fiona Jenkins (ANU)
Abstract: Public displays of recognition for Indigenous pre-colonial inhabitation, care of country and continued culture have become standard in Australia only in the last decade or so. An Acknowledgment is now requisite to ceremonially opening multiple occasions, taking place in a wide range of institutional settings for activities as diverse as parliamentary sessions, lectures, protests, concerts, conferences and zoom calls. Both the Acknowledgment of Country and the Welcome to Country establish the identity of the Indigenous on terms of continuity in relation to the place of meeting. The ritual thus inscribes a fundamental difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous identities, establishing complex terms of precedence, while overlaying these, for instance in the performance of Welcome, with other figurations such as ‘host’ and ‘guest’. Acknowledgments vary in giving more or less explicit attention to the terms of an oppression that begins in colonisation and remains sequestered in all the injustices bound up with an ‘unceded sovereignty’, including the ongoing vulnerability to domination by the state that this condition of dispossession configures.
The practice is at once powerful and disquieting in its effects and implications, aspects explored in this paper. What is it for an oppression to be publicly acknowledged? And how, in that acknowledgment, does identity take on a particular form or relationality? The paradoxes attendant on this way of offering recognition suggest the importance of a critical ontology of the social categories emerging from responses to oppression. Critical ontology presumes that identities are inherently in-transformation and moreover, that an ethos or ‘manner of being’ is at stake in how the identities we recognise are encountered in their contingency and potentiality. The temporality of collective existence, and thus political being, further specifies this ethos. Drawing on inspiration from Foucault, Arendt, Patchen Markell and Ariella Azoulay, I argue that avowing this critical stance places a demand on Acknowledgment to become an ethos, and in some degree of resistance to the rituals of recognition. I describe my own use of artworks accompanying Acknowledgment as an attempt to generate such a practice.
Three strands of sex/gender concepts
Laura Schroeter (University of Melbourne)
Abstract: Cognitive, social, and developmental psychologists have amassed a wealth of data about the complex patterns of understanding associated with sex/gender terms like ‘woman’ and ‘man’. We focus on three core strands in the conceptual understanding of the term: (1) biological sex, (2) social role, and (3) self-categorisation (identifying as a woman or as a man). In the recent philosophical literature, many theorists have privileged one of these three core strands to argue that ‘woman’ has a univocal reference – a biological kind, a social class, or an affiliative identity kind. We argue against these univocalist approaches and suggest that ordinary sex/gender concepts – and the words used to express them – should be understood as having complex meanings that may be sharpened by context. We contrast our approach with family resemblance interpretations (Stoljar) and standard contextualist proposals (Saul, Diaz-Leon). We draw on the literature on hybrid concepts, polysemy and contextual modulation to show that the complexity of our sex/gender concepts need not lead to confusion or breakdowns in communication.
Who is Oppressed And How Do We Know It?
Louise Richardson-Self (University of Tasmania)
Abstract: This talk is fundamentally concerned with two questions: (1) which social groups can be oppressed? And (2) how do we know whether such a group is oppressed? My interest in these questions stems from the current energies being expended in the explicit protection of religious freedom in Australia. The push for protection of religious freedom gained speed following the legislation of same-gender marriage in 2017. It is widely accepted that the queer community has been—and, some might say, still is—oppressed because of their sexual orientations, and gender statuses and identities. However, some religious groups—and the Christian Right in particular—see this evolution as a threat to their ability to live freely in accordance with the tenets of their religion. Scott Morrison, Australia’s first Pentecostal Prime Minister, said after the postal survey:
There are almost five million Australians who voted no in this survey who are now coming to terms with the fact that they are in the minority. That did not used to be the case in this country for most, if not all, of their lives. They have concerns that their broader views and beliefs are also now in the minority and therefore under threat. They are seeking assurances from this House and this parliament at this time—whether one agrees or disagrees and whether rightly or wrongly—that the things they hold dear are not under threat because of this change. (Commonwealth Parliament of Australia [Hansard], 2017b: 12347)
Are religious groups a kind of social group that can be oppressed? And, if so, how do we know whether believers of a certain religion are or have become oppressed? I begin by surveying the kinds of social groups there are, identifying which sort are capable of being oppressed. They are socially-salient identity-based groups. I then foreshadow inquiry into what is so ‘special’ about these groups by appeal to embodied belonging. I move on to consider what oppression is and is not, investigating further what counts as evidence of oppression. Here, however, is where we may hit an epistemological impasse: one state of affairs may be interpreted by a certain group in one way, whilst another group interprets it quite differently. In such situations, whose interpretation ought we find most plausible? I will suggest that this can only be determined by considering the socially salient groups’ power dynamics in their historico-contextual embeddedness. In other words, I will argue that attentiveness to historico-contextual embeddedness is necessary for the evaluation of whether oppression is manifest in the present.
Australian Muslim women: Moving beyond binary hierarchical thinking with decolonial feminist philosophy
Lutfiye Ali (Victoria University)
Abstract: Despite the postmodern turn, social identities and material processes continue to inform social relationships, subjectivities, and experiences of power and oppression in the contemporary world (Moya, 2012). Following the declaration of the ‘war on terror’ at the turn of the 21st century, Muslim women in Australia and more globally, have had their identities homogenised and constructed as veiled, oppressed, and bound ‘by’ their religious identity. Much academic research, in attempt to challenge the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ discourse, has reproduced colonial imageries of Muslim women with a difference—as veiled, agentic, and bound ‘to’ their religious identity. Chicana, African, African American, Indigenous, and other Women of Colour feminist scholars, through centering their ontologies, have developed epistemologies that bring to the fore, exceed, and disrupt binary and hierarchal categories of modernity (Lugones, 2007). In this presentation, I draw on the philosophical insights of Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana decolonial feminist philosopher, to demonstrate the ways 20 Australian Muslim women from diverse ethnic backgrounds negotiate their subjectivities. I move beyond these static binaries of ‘victim’ and ‘agent’ prescribed by academic scholarship and public scripts by demonstrating the fluidity, contextuality, plurality and multiplicity of Muslim women subjectivities arising from the intersections of Islam, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. I also bring attention to the diverse experiences of oppression and plural expressions of resistance associated with these identity locations.
Conversation-level Meaning and Hermeneutical Injustice
Nick Willis (ANU)
To explain our own experiences and understand others’, we draw on shared hermeneutical resources. Sometimes, gaps in our pool of shared resources leave oppressed groups without the means to communicate important experiences. When the gaps in our shared resources are prejudiced in this way, members of these groups suffer a distinct form of oppression - Hermeneutical Injustice.
Standard accounts of Hermeneutical Injustice assume a shared pool of resources, within which there is some gap. I will focus on the assumed pool of linguistic resources, distinguishing two families of views. On ‘Koinolectical’ views of natural language, the standard accounts’ assumption is unproblematic. Koinolectical views explain communication by appeal to a koinolect – the shared language of a linguistic community (e.g. ‘English’ or ‘Chilean Spanish’). ‘Duolectical’ views of natural language reject the standard assumption: beyond the boundaries of a conversation, there is no shared pool of (relevant) linguistic resources. Duolectical views explain communication by appeal to a duolect – a highly local language, constructed cooperatively by speakers and hearers (e.g. metalinguistic negotiation, lexical entrainment, contextual modulation).
I will argue that a good account of communication with natural language will be partly duolectical. To the extent that we conduct our conversations in duolects, we should add to standard accounts of the wrongs, remedies and cases of Hermeneutical Injustice.
Disability and Public Policy
Nicholas Drake (ANU)
Abstract: Government approaches to categorizing people as disabled standardly use the Social Model of disability, according to which disability is the result of interactions between people with impairments and social barriers that hinder their equal participation in society. Elizabeth Barnes has recently developed a new theory of disability. According to Barnes’s theory, most simply put, disability just is whatever the disability rights movement is promoting justice for. I argue that Barnes’s theory fails to satisfy ameliorative criteria, under which a theory of disability must work well in helping us promote justice for disabled people. Barnes’s theory fails to satisfy ameliorative criteria as it is not suitable for use in public policy, and public policy is an essential vehicle for promoting justice for disabled people.
Arguing for Affirmative Action
Shalom Chalson (ANU)
Affirmative action is not without controversy. It is defined as acts, practices, or policies which afford preferential treatment to members of underrepresented socially salient groups in domains like employment and education. Arguments against affirmative action either deny that it is morally permissible or deny that it brings about the desired consequences. In this paper, I consider the first of those claims.
A straight-forward path to the claim that affirmative action is morally impermissible is to equate it with direct discrimination. Proponents of affirmative action here make a choice: they either deny or (implicitly) accept this claim. Those who deny the claim suggest that affirmative action (i) is akin to anti-discrimination law because it is a tool for resisting oppression (Suk 2018) or (ii) relates to the background conditions of justice and not the domain of application for anti-discrimination law (Nagel 1973). Those who accept the claim suggest that affirmative action meets the definition for discrimination, but can be justified with good reasons. Backward-looking arguments focus on compensation for historical injustice; forward-looking arguments focus on realising principles of justice like equality or liberty, or ideals like diversity and integration.
In this paper, I am concerned with the choice that proponents of affirmative action make. Rather than straight-forwardly accept or deny the claim, I consider what opponents mean when they equate affirmative action with direct discrimination. On the right view of direct discrimination, affirmative action is not discrimination. It is, accordingly, morally permissible.
Contesting Social Oppression
Suzy Killmister (Monash University)
Abstract: It is now widely accepted that membership in social categories such as race, gender, class, and sexuality can be a source of oppression. What is much more contested is whether, and how, such oppression can be mitigated, or even overcome. In this paper, I explore one possible avenue for contesting social oppression. I start by positing a different social category, one which tends to be overlooked in social metaphysics: the human itself. The question I then focus on is whether the social category of the human can – or should – be used as a counter to oppression based on social categories such as race and gender.
Given the justifiable skepticism many feminist and postcolonial scholars have expressed towards the idea of the human, such a proposal needs to proceed with caution. However, I argue that by conceiving of the human in terms of a socially conferred status, rather than in terms of a universally shared essence, many of these worries can be overcome. What remains is the challenge of explaining how we can effectively invoke our membership in the human to counter oppression, without at the same time denying or downplaying our particular identities. In the closing section of this paper I consider what this might look like in practice.