Conference Agenda

The talk considers the categorization of affective injustice as a form of pure structural injustice and its consequences for guilt, blame and responsibility. Starting from the premise that affective injustice is a form of structural injustice according to Young, the talk argues that a paradigmatic form of affective injustice (“uptake injustice”) qualifies as pure structural injustice according to McKeown. This means that there are no agents who have the power to directly change the social structures relevant to the injustice. At the same time, and contrary to other forms of pure structural injustice, the individual manifestations of this injustice are not blameless. It is possible to hold individuals responsible for the harm caused, because the relevant harm has an individual cause as well as a structural one. Accordingly, moral responsibility can exist where theories of structural injustice only locate political responsibility. These hybrid causes of the harms of certain forms of affective injustice show that the relations between power, guilt, blame and responsibility in theories of structural injustice must be further differentiated.

In this paper, I discuss social hierarchies as a phenomenon of the occupational division of labor. Social hierarchies rank individuals and social groups according to status and esteem. While democratic–egalitarian societies subscribe to the idea that all humans are equals, our social world is still full of status asymmetries: professors, managers, and physicians are ranked above students, cleaners, and nurses. These rankings are a function of a system of division of labor. Through a division of labor, we produce the goods needed for social reproduction, but at the same time it creates different types of labor, and with it, different social roles. Some of these roles are intuitively higher than others, a ranking that expresses normative valence, which in turn is indicative of social hierarchies. This is a moral problem for a society of democratic equals. Does the occupational division of labor necessarily constitute a social hierarchy? If it does, then division of labor is incompatible with the idea of democratic equality. If it does not, the question arises what distinguishes social hierarchies from morally more benign social asymmetries, and whether and how we can turn the former into the latter.

Dieser Vortrag leistet einen Beitrag zur Analyse sexistischer und epistemischer Unterdrückung, indem er ein Konzept männlicher Ignoranz entwickelt und in den Zusammenhang bisheriger Debatten um epistemische Ungerechtigkeit stellt. Er argumentiert erstens, dass Charles Mills‘ Konzeption Weißer Ignoranz und männliche Ignoranz sich als verschiedene Formen privilegierter gruppenbasierter Ignoranz insofern analogisieren lassen, als dass die beiden Unterdrückungssysteme Race und Gender Nichtwissen in ihren Epistemologien enthalten, die die jeweilige Unterdrückung perpetuieren und sichern. Zweitens wird im Zusammenhang mit anderen Formen epistemischer Unterdrückung dafür argumentiert, dass Ignoranz das grundlegendere und kausal vorgelagerte Phänomen ist, weswegen ein Konzept männlicher Ignoranz dazu beiträgt, andere Formen epistemischer Ungerechtigkeit in Bezug auf Gender aufzudecken und zu kritisieren.

Philosophers engaged in the debate on cultural appropriation have observed that such appropriation appears morally problematic when it affects oppressed cultural groups but not when it affects dominant ones. In this talk, I will focus on a specific kind of cultural appropriation called style appropriation. Style appropriation occurs when members of one cultural group adopt styles distinctive of another, such as certain clothes, hairstyles, adornments, or designs. The aim is to offer a novel argument for why style appropriation is morally problematic when it affects oppressed but not dominant cultural groups. The argument proceeds in three steps: (i) Style appropriation can cause the silencing of people who use culturally specific styles to communicate their cultural identity. (ii) This silencing is morally problematic when it affects members of oppressed cultural groups because it undermines vital interests linked to their group’s social status. (iii) In contrast, such silencing isn’t similarly problematic for members of dominant cultural groups because, due to their group’s status, they don’t have these same interests.

Historical theories of gender (Bach 2012; George & Briggs manus; Godman 2018; 2021) claim in different ways that gender is a historical kind. I examine the prospects of such theories of gender in terms of their theoretical grounding in cultural evolutionary theory and their ability to do justice to the experiences of trans* people, especially non-binary people, with gender.

I argue that those historical accounts proposing that gender kinds are culturally reproduced lineages of women, men, non-binary people, etc. (cf. Bach 2012; Godman 2018; 2021) have unrealistic empirical implications and cannot do justice to the complexity of the experiences of trans*, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people do with gender. There are no culturally reproduced lineages of women, non-binary people, etc. but rather at best culturally reproduced lineages of individual gendered traits and practices.

Furthermore, I argue that a multi-level analysis, i.e., acknowledging the different levels of (social) organization on which evolutionary processes occur, is necessary when looking at the cultural evolutionary processes surrounding gender. This enables viewing gender categories as features of social groups that depend on the cultural reproduction of social practices and gendered traits of individuals, and divorcing the membership conditions of gender categories from cultural reproductive processes.