Thius edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is on the work of Michelle Ciurria. Michelle Ciurria is the author of An Intersectional Feminist Theory of Moral Responsibility, published by Routledge in 2019. Her work has appeared in such journals Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, The Journal of the APA, and Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
What is your work about?
In “An intersectional feminist theory of moral responsibility,” I develop an intersectional feminist framework, apply it to standard paradigms of responsibility, and examine the sources of identity prejudices that skew our acculturated understandings of responsibility. I engage with a broad swathe of research on responsibility and subject that research to intersectional feminist scrutiny, ultimately pointing in the direction of an intersectional feminist responsibility practice, viz., one that properly addresses malignant asymmetries of power. I argue that the elements of this practice (viz., blame and praise) should function to diagnose and combat hierarchies of power.
Although many people profess to be intersectional feminists, I wasn’t able to locate a comprehensive description of intersectional feminism in the philosophical literature, so I used relevant subdisciplines to develop my own. I drew on five salient (though by no means exhaustive) subdisciplines: feminist philosophy, critical race theory, queer theory, critical disability studies, and intersectionality theory – and I looked for commonalities amongst them. Though each subdiscipline involves substantial diversity and contestation, I focused on broadly-held beliefs amongst the most prominent thinkers within each field. I identified the following (again, non-exhaustive) shared commitments. First, all of the selected subdisciplines aim to be intersectional in the sense that they all recognize that different types of oppression impose different (but interrelated) disadvantages on different groups, and all aim to combat multiple intersections of oppression. Second, all subscribe to what Sally Haslanger (2006) calls ameliorative analysis, which is a form of analysis that seeks to align a specific concept (e.g., responsibility) with certain normative aims (e.g., dismantling the patriarchy), in contrast to conceptual or descriptive analyses (which do not espouse any normative aims). Third, all subdisciplines subscribe to what Charles Mills calls non-ideal theory (2017), which starts from the assumption that some ideal (e.g., racial equality) is not realized in a particular society, and proceeds to analyze why this is the case. (In contrast, ‘ideal theories’ postulate a theoretical ideal that abstracts away from real-world inequalities, leaving those inequalities undertheorized, if not tacitly endorsed). Fourth, all subscribe to relational (as opposed to individualistic) analysis, with a particular focus on the impact of relationships of power and domination on the marginalized. Fifth, all are committed to not only diagnosing systems of oppression, but also actively dismantling them. That is, they see theory and practice, inquiry and politics, as inextricable linked.
Next, I apply this framework to influential theories of moral responsibility to see if these theories live up to intersectional feminist principles. The theories that I analyze under an intersectional feminist lens are (1) attribution theory, (2) control theory, (3) answerability theory, (4) functional theory, and (5) standard group-agency models of collective responsibility. Without going into too much detail, I can simply say that all of these theories run afoul of intersectional feminist commitments in virtue of the fact that none purports to be ameliorative in nature, let alone committed to specifically intersectional feminist aims. Rather, the dominant examples of each paradigm engage in conceptual or descriptive analysis. Besides this, each paradigm admits of counterexamples of an intersectional feminist nature – specifically, each one forces us to excuse acts of oppression that an intersectional feminist would have an interest in diagnosing and combating via blame. As a result, they all epistemically smother intersectional feminists – they force us to bite our tongues when we experience or witness acts of oppression that we are entitled to resist.
A related omission in the responsibility literature is that most theorists don’t start with the assumption that the moral ecology is biased against historically disenfranchised groups, giving rise to prejudiced responsibility-holding dynamics. This includes racist scapegoating and misogynistic victim-blaming (especially in sexual assault cases), and other prejudiced dynamics that shift the blame onto the oppressed, shielding the privileged from accountability, negative appraisal, and social or legal sanctions. Notably, these are not anomalies or ‘glitches’ in an otherwise functional system – they are structural features of the system. Any theory of responsibility that doesn’t treat these asymmetries of power as the very bedrock of the moral ecology will not properly analyze the social dimensions of moral responsibility, let alone position us to improve the situation.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
My larger research project is to ‘politicize’ moral responsibility by depicting blame and praise as, in effect, political artefacts, which, in our society, are informed by western prejudices and western dualisms. On this basis, I hope to entice other responsibility theorists to adopt, if not an intersectional feminist methodology, then at least an ameliorative methodology that focuses on dismantling the asymmetries of power that structure western responsibility practices. More concretely, I want philosophers to start with the assumption that our moral ecology is asymmetrically structured, and investigate how these asymmetrical relations affect the distribution of blame and praise.
Interestingly, eliminativists (who deny the existence of moral responsibility) have done more than most philosophers to draw attention to the malignant asymmetries of power in our responsibility-holding transactions. One example is Bruce Waller (2015), who cites America’s glutted prison system as an example of a dysfunctional responsibility-based institution. (Most people would say that the prison system distributes sanctions and/or rehabilitative resources on the basis of a principle of responsibility). Waller is an advocate of social justice who has worked tirelessly to debunk our society’s belief in a harmful notion of responsibility – one based not on reason but on ‘strike-back emotions.’
While I admire his work, I do not endorse his eliminativist agenda for a variety of reasons discussed in my book. To be brief, I will simply say that the American paradigm of responsibility is not, in fact, guided by arbitrary strike-back emotions, but instead by identity prejudices that disproportionally target the oppressed. The prison system doesn’t simply punish too many people for no good reason: it specifically targets members of oppressed groups and enacts patriarchal-colonialist violence on their bodies. We can’t understand or combat American responsibility-based institutions and practices without understanding the underlying heteropatriarchal, colonialist, ableist logic that guides them. The prison system is brutal but it isn’t illogical: it operates on an age-old imperialist logic. Eliminativism can’t explain that logic without adopting an ameliorative mode of analysis.
My broader aim as an author is to encourage members of underrepresented groups to pursue research on responsibility using their lived experiences as sources of evidence and knowledge. Responsibility theory is currently very male-dominant and white-dominant (for proof, look at the SEP entry on moral responsibility, which was updated just a few months ago). (The author, Matthew Talbert, whose work I greatly admire and cite in my book, is simply accurately summarizing the state of the literature). This homogeneity is (presumably) one of the reasons the literature tends to neglect the politics of oppression. And it’s not clear that tenured professors can solve the problem. If the experience of oppression is a source of subversive knowledge, as Allison Jaggar claims (1989), then it’s not clear that the knowledge needed to revolutionize responsibility theory exists in the upper echelons of academia. That’s why I think it’s so important to include voices from the margins.
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
One of my works in progress is a paper on the moral psychology of blame from a feminist perspective. It applies some prominent feminist critiques to standard theories of blame.
Here’s a short précis. The literature on the psychology of blame can be divided into two camps: theorists who analyze the psychology of the blamer and theorists who analyze the psychology of the blamee. The first camp focuses on the psychological states (e.g., judgments, emotions) that the blamer is entitled to express to a wrongdoer, while the second camp focuses on the psychological features of the blamee (e.g., ill will, control) that justify blame.
I argue that the first camp tends to neglect the positive role that anti-patriarchal emotions (e.g., women’s subversive anger) can play in blame, and the second camp carves the limits of blame too narrowly, excluding targets that feminists have an interest in blaming (e.g., benevolent sexists who don’t harbor any ill will or couldn’t have done otherwise). In sum, blame can play a variety of ameliorative roles in our moral transactions, if we only let it. These include such roles as resisting oppression and fostering relationships of political solidarity.
Aside from this specific project, I plan to apply my intersectional feminist framework to other theories in the responsibility literature. This literature is so vast that a person could mine it for un-feminist and non-intersectional content for an entire lifetime.
Who has influenced this work the most?
Feminist and anti-racist bloggers and journalists have influenced my thinking quite a bit. Grassroots political activists have also influenced me. My current hometown of St. Louis has a great activist scene, which emerged in response to deep-seated structural racism.
Certainly the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements have been sources of inspiration.
The responsibility scholars who most influenced my work are the contributors to a recent edited volume called “Social dimensions of moral responsibility” (Hutchison, Mackenzie, Oshana (2018)), which applies resources from feminist autonomy theory and feminist epistemology to questions of responsibility. This is, to my knowledge, the first book to provide a comprehensive analysis of the malignant asymmetries of power in our responsibility practices. It’s a collection of essays that provide various examples of putatively blameworthy behaviour that can’t be easily explained by the standard paradigms. I identify a common thread amongst these examples: they all involve transgressions that contribute to systems of oppression, which an intersectional feminist has an interest in diagnosing and combating. Therefore, they’re all apt targets of intersectional feminist blame. An intersectional feminist framework provides a comprehensive explanation for why these diverse transgressions are all eligible for blame.
The people outside of this literature who have most influenced my work include Rebecca Solnit (2017), Kate Manne (2018), and Charles Mills (2017). All three speak to the silencing and scapegoating effects of identity prejudice. They all argue, in effect, that culturally accepted ideologies erase or obfuscate hierarchies of power, such as the patriarchal order and white supremacy, and therefore exonerate the people who contribute to those systems. If perpetrators of oppression are rendered invisible, then blame is easily shifted onto their victims.
These scripts simultaneously silence the oppressed by denying the legitimacy of their experiences, preventing them from eliciting uptake for blame directed at the powerful.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that I grew up in the 1980s and experienced very egregious patriarchal oppression by modern standards, and this was exacerbated by cisheterosexist, racist, and ableist prejudices that multiplied the effects of patriarchal control. It was, to be blunt, a toxic environment. On the one hand, patriarchal power dynamics created a climate of sexual violence, silencing, and fear that terrorized, literally terrorized, women, especially Women of Color. Women’s bodies were policed and objectified by men, and ‘unruly’ (or subversive) women were punished with low income, harassment, and violence. On the other hand, racialized minorities were scapegoated under racist labels like ‘super predator,’ ‘thug,’ and ‘rapist,’ which served to conceal the fact that rich white men could rape girls and women, pillage and pilfer Communities of Color, and construct non-inclusive, disablist, masculinist, and racist social infrastructures with virtual impunity. Heteropatriarchal, racist, and disablist prejudices interacted in insidious ways to obscure the ways in which malignant asymmetries of power reinforced each other from colonial times – from the time when white men owned their wives, children, and People of Color – until the present day, in which imperialist conventions and expectations are still the norm.
The 1980s was a terrible time for me – a time when I, as a girl, faced gender-based terrorism, and, when I tried to articulate my experiences, was subjected to gaslighting by institutions telling me that I couldn’t accuse violent men who were rich and white because rich white men are not ‘criminals’ by cultural definition. This was a time of gender-based terrorism and ideological warfare, which affected me deeply. But in some ways, 2020 is even worse. The racial wealth gap has grown consistently since my birth (Gunn 2019). Indigenous women are facing unprecedented rates of violence (Indian Law Resource Center 2019). There are concentration camps at the U.S.-Mexico border! Some of the recent developments caught me off-guard because even I couldn’t imagine that the U.S. government could sink this low, but this reveals that I let my white privilege cloud my judgment. Patriarchal violence, class warfare, and racial oppression are raging in the U.S. and we can’t, and shouldn’t, assume that things will get better rather than worse – we should remember where we came from and appreciate how bad, how much worse, things could get.
The nation is deeply polarized and will inevitably go in one of two directions. We all have to choose now which side we’re going to be on. I wrote this book because I chose my side.
As time goes on, academics may not have the luxury of being ‘apolitical’ – it will become more and more apparent that the academy is a political institution and we are all, every day, making political choices. It’s becoming harder to deny this and to skirt our political responsibilities – our obligations toward our students as gatekeepers and producers of cultural knowledge. The myth of the ‘dispassionate investigator’ was debunked a long time ago by Allison Jaggar (1989) and we need to examine our roles in political architectures.
How have readers responded? (Or how do you hope they will respond?)
I worry about the critical reception, if anyone reads the book.
I regret writing my book as quickly as I did. At the time, I was in a somewhat frenzied state of mind because I had quit my job due to a sexual assault and I was angry. This may not have been the best state in which to pursue a major research project. I hope that readers can overlook any mistakes in the book and instead focus on the point and the infrastructure of the argument. Unfortunately, my experiences compelled me to go off the job market in the midst of a postdoc and take a job as an adjunct, which made it harder for me to focus on research.
How is your work relevant to historical ideas?
My work disputes the relevance of the philosophical canon, so it’s relevant to historical ideas in the sense that it presents those ideas as much less important than we tend to think, if not totally otiose, except for the purpose of unearthing the roots of structural inequality.
As an undergrad, I was subjected to a relentlessly heteropatriarchal, colonialist, and ableist curriculum, which I attribute to the influence of the non-diverse philosophical canon, which, at the time, was populated by dead white men who (implicitly or explicitly) hated women and other members of oppressed groups. Of course, I wasn’t taught the prejudiced aspects of these men’s works, but it was implied, if not explicitly stated, that these colonialist patriarchs were timeless geniuses. Although departments have purportedly been trying to diversify the philosophical canon, Michael Beany has observed that the canon is still “absurdly narrow” (viz., Weinberg 2018), and Eric Schwitzgebel reports that, in spite of recent gains, philosophy is still predominantly white and male (Weinberg 2019).
My radical opinion is that we don’t need a canon comprised of dead white men. Why do we have to read the dead white guys before getting to the ameliorative analysis? I propose that we start with ‘non-standard philosophy’ and then work our way back to the dead white guys, exploring how their ideas were shaped by the structural inequalities of the day.
In other words, the canon should be the non-standard philosophy and the non-standard philosophy should be the canon. The dead white guys should be the footnote to the main lesson.
What writing practices, methods, or routines do you use, and which have been the most helpful?
I’m not going to promote a self-help solution to writing problems (viz., inability to complete writing tasks). The best solution to writing difficulties is being wealthy, white, and having the other kinds of privileges that confer the luxuries of free time and institutional support.
The question of free time is inherently political and time is not equally distributed across social groups. Women still do the majority of domestic labour (Rao 2019), and are pressured to live up to other expectations (e.g., patriarchal beauty standards) from which men are relatively exempt (Wolf 1991). Black Americans get less sleep than white Americans, and theorists have suggested that this may be due to the physiological effects of structural racism and intergenerational trauma (viz., Francois 2019). (And we all know it’s hard to write when you’re tired). Women have fewer mentors than men (NPR 2011), and mentorship helps people develop professional skills and connections. These are just a few token examples of inequalities in writing-related resources that disproportionally affect members of oppressed groups. I haven’t even mentioned things like unequal access to library resources, the Internet, electronics, editing services, healthcare, safe housing, etc.
Rather than giving people tips on how to write philosophy, I think it’s my job to highlight the structural inequalities that have given rise to such a non-diverse and unequal philosophical community. If you can’t finish your writing assignment, maybe it’s not your fault – maybe academic and broader social institutions aren’t giving you what you need. I would also point out that procrastination, which is typically seen as a vice, can instead be viewed as a potent form of protest against the brutal capitalist, perfectionistic, competitive environment in which we live. Defying the demand for Protestant work ethic is a revolutionary choice. We can reframe ‘laziness’ as fighting against capitalist oppression, ‘procrastination’ as refusing to comply with capitalist labour demands, ‘sleeping in’ as extracting racial reparations and/or subverting patriarchal caregiving expectations, etc. In general, we should reframe writing difficulties as an institutional, not an individual, problem. This isn’t to say that no one’s responsible, but that we shouldn’t blame the victims. Are you having trouble completing writing projects? Maybe you’re entitled to blame someone or some institution that isn’t giving you the support or respect that you deserve.
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The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
