Oxford Political Theory Research Seminar

This term, along with my colleague Jesse Tomalty, I am organizing the political theory research seminar in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University  of Oxford. From 2 May onwards, we will be meeting every Thursday at 5pm in Seminar Room B of the Manor Road Building to hear a speaker present a paper. The speaker will talk for about forty minutes, after which there will be about forty minutes of discussion. The seminar is usually followed by a drink in the King’s Arms pub, and then a visit to an affordable local restaurant for anyone who wants to come along.

As you will see below, we have a great schedule of speakers lined up, talking on a diverse and interesting range of topics. All are welcome to attend, so if you are in Oxford on any of these dates please feel very welcome to come and join us!

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Political Theory Research Seminar
Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford
Thursdays, 5pm, Seminar Room B, Manor Road Building

FIRST WEEK: NO SEMINAR

SECOND WEEK: Thursday 2 May – Fabienne Peter (University of Warwick)
‘The Epistemic Circumstances of Democracy’

THIRD WEEK: Thursday 9 May – Kit Wellman (Washington University in St. Louis)
‘Procedural Rights’

FOURTH WEEK: Thursday 16 May – Suzanne Uniacke (University of Hull)
‘Opportunistic Terrorism’

FIFTH WEEK: Thursday 23 May – Veronique Munoz-Darde (University College London)
TBA

SIXTH WEEK: Thursday 30 May – Chris Brooke (University of Bristol)
‘Towards a New History of Distributive Justice’

SEVENTH WEEK: Thursday 6 June – Cecile Laborde (University College London)
‘Some Thoughts on Ronald Dworkin’s “Religion Without God”‘

EIGHT WEEK: Thursday 13 June – David Miller (Nuffield College, Oxford)
‘Majorities and Minarets: Religious Freedom and Public Space’

The objectivity of oppression

In my post yesterday on intersectionality and identity politics, I tried to argue that the internal logic of identity politics is flawed, and though motivated by good intentions, can’t actually yield a practical vision of politics that makes people’s lives better. I now realize that there is an assumption in this argument that I didn’t elaborate on sufficiently, and yet is crucial to the point, namely: the fact that oppression is objective. This is a fact that many intersectionalists seem to want to deny. Yet they can’t, because the very fact that we can talk about oppression at all relies upon its being in some sense objective.

Suppose Joey claims that Chandler has broken his arm. Joey might be in the best position to know how his arm feels, and so the first thing we need to do is listen to Joey and find out how his arm feels. However, there’s no reason to assume that Joey is best placed to know whether his arm is broken. Just because he feels like it is broken, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is – Joey’s interpretation can be mistaken. A doctor will listen carefully to Joey’s testimony, but will ultimately appeal to independent criteria to determine whether Joey’s arm is broken, and it is to these independent criteria that we should appeal when determining whether or not Chandler is guilty of arm-breaking. We can all agree that Joey is not the final authority with respect to whether his arm is broken. Yet some proponents of intersectionality seem to want to suggest that he could be the final authority with respect to whether he has been the victim of oppression or not. But just because in practice, diagnosis of oppression is inevitably more controversial and appeals to less well established facts, does not mean that is in principle any less objective.

The idea that we should listen closely to people’s testimonies and try to learn as much as we can from their experiences often seems to lead people to the conclusion that this subjective form of knowledge – people’s particular narratives and experiences – is the only kind of knowledge we can have, and the only kind of knowledge that can inform political action. And if that’s true, then we shouldn’t try to generalize from those personal experiences to more abstract, seemingly objective principles, because these principles will never be objective – they will only be the particular, subjective beliefs of dominant people, and will serve the interests of the powerful. This conclusion is, I think, mistaken. Of course, we always need to engage in careful examination of our norms and principles, to try to ensure that they are objectively valid, and not just a reflection of the interests of powerful individuals or groups. But unless we acknowledge some objectivity in our definitions of what constitute oppression or injustice, there can be no foundations for eradicating these, or for making people’s lives go better.

The reason for this is that there is no way to make sense of concepts like oppression or injustice, unless we understand them as having some objective criteria – that is, criteria that determine whether an action oppressive, independently of how it is experienced by those subject to it. If it did not – if oppression was entirely a matter of whether or not a person feels they have been oppressed – then there would be no way to distinguish between action that is oppressive, and action that I just don’t like very much. And clearly, when people claim to have been oppressed, they think they are saying something different, and more compelling, than merely “I don’t like this”. There are lots of things people could do (or refuse to do) to me that I wouldn’t like very much. I might like to win the lottery, or to borrow your car. We can all agree that the fact I would like to get these things but don’t get them is not oppression, no matter how strongly I might feel about it. And when I say I am being oppressed by something you do, I believe I am saying more than just “I would have liked you to do this”; I believe I am saying, “I have a right to this, and you ought to do it”. And the fact that you ought to do it does not depend on how I feel about it, or on the fact that I would like you to do it; because if it did, there would be no difference between you oppressing me, and you not lending me your car. As soon as I claim to be oppressed, I am appealing to some objective criteria of oppression, criteria that are independent of my subjective feelings and interpretations.

Of course, we still need to determine what those criteria are. And listening to people’s narratives and experiences will be very useful here, for any plausible account of what oppression is presumably needs to fit reasonably well with our intuitions and considered judgements about what oppression is like. These criteria need not be set in stone – they can be open to constant revision. And (hopefully) obviously, the dialogue where we determine what these objective criteria should be needs to be open to as many different voices as possible, especially those who have typically been marginalized and oppressed.  But ultimately, we need to try to come to a set of objective criteria about what constitutes oppression. And once we do, then we can use these criteria in specific cases to judge whether a particular claim to be oppressed is correct or not. This leaves open the possibility that the person who feels oppressed may in fact be mistaken. While she may feel strongly and in good faith that she has been the victim of oppression, this is not sufficient for it to be true that she has. She may well have been; but this is determined objectively, independent of her experience, interpretations and feelings. So therefore, it is at least possible for people to be mistaken about their own oppression. Trying to ensure that our beliefs about oppression and injustice are as objective as possible is essential, and I do not mean to deny that less oppressed people frequently fail to recognize the ways in which their beliefs about oppression are clouded by their own unchecked and unacknowledged privilege. In real life politics, this is by far the bigger problem facing social justice activists – people in positions of power and privilege frequently fail to examine the ways in which their privilege has shaped their views abut what justice and oppression are. Without a doubt, people with privilege have much to learn from the voices and experiences of the oppressed. My point is simply that the knowledge they gain is only of use if it informs general and objective principles that guide future political action.

The problem with some versions of intersectional identity politics is that, in elevating subjective experience above objective knowledge, they dissolve the possibility of making coherent, meaningful claims of injustice or oppression at all. On this logic all complaints are reduced to an expression of one’s personal preference or feelings, with no way to distinguish genuine injustice from mere dislike. If we want to hold on to the concepts of injustice and oppression, and if we want them to have real political weight and to signify actions and practices that need to be altered, then we have to understand them as having objective criteria that are defined independently of how any individual experiences them. The intersectionalist demand to attend to people’s narratives and to learn from people’s experiences can, at its best, shed a great deal of light on difficult concepts like oppression and injustice, and help us to understand the forms they take and the remedies they require. But at its worst, it descends into solipsism and narcissism, where we mollify oppressed people with the consolation that they are being listened to, but where we and they ultimately lack any resources with which to end their oppression.

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For a more theoretical discussion of this line of argument, you might want to read this great post by Matt Bruenig: What does identitarian deference require?

Intersectionality and identity politics

I’ve been avoiding wading into the more-heat-than-light discussion about feminism and intersectionality, partly because more than enough bytes have been expended on the topic, but mainly because I don’t really fancy the backlash. But the pedantic, smart-arse side of me can’t keep quiet any longer, and I’m arrogant enough to think that what I have to say might fall into the light-generating rather than heat-generating category, so I’m giving it a go.

There’s clearly some deep misunderstandings going on amongst feminists and other lefty progressive types about what intersectionality is and what it demands. After all, the people who are troubled by the discourse of intersectionality are not white supremacists or Westboro Baptist style homophobes, but tend to be people with egalitarian political principles and a strong commitment to social justice. The more vocal proponents of intersectionality often explain this unease the rest of us have with it by reference to our implicit biases, and by the fact that those with power and privilege are usually reluctant to give it up, or feel uncomfortable having our prejudices pointed to out to us. While there is undoubtedly some truth in that, I think the intersectionality sceptics do have valid reasons to resist the doctrine, or at least, to resist it in the form in which its proponents usually present it. Privileged though white, middle class feminists may be, it’s rather uncharitable to assume that any discomfort with intersectionality is merely a symptom of our desperate (albeit implicit) desire to hold on to that privilege.

As I understand it, intersectionality refers to the fact that people have multiple aspects to their social identities and therefore experience multiple and complex forms of oppression. People can be oppressed on some dimensions while being privileged on others, and the various parts of our identities and the oppressions we face will interact in complex ways to create unique experiences of injustice. So far, so uncontroversial. It would be pretty difficult to deny that even though I experience some societal oppression as a woman, I am also advantaged by being white, middle-class and non-disabled, and that other women who don’t share these features of my identity will experience forms of domination and marginalization that I do not.  As far as I can tell, there aren’t many people, feminist or otherwise, who would argue against this specific part of the intersectionality story.

I don’t agree with those who say that the problem with intersectionality is that it’s a difficult, academic concept that ordinary people can’t possibly be expected to understand. It’s true that I don’t much like the word ‘intersectionality’. It’s a big, new, difficult sounding word to describe something that is actually a remarkably straight-forward and common sense idea, and that always gets my hackles up, as I suspect it’s often done in an attempt to make the obvious and mundane seem complex and profound. But I’m not going to fight with anyone about that. It’s useful to have a phrase to describe this simple idea, and if intersectionality works for you, then that’s fine – and, for better or worse, it looks like we’re stuck with it now. (It also seems worth mentioning that in my time as an academic I have never heard or read the word. Perhaps other academic disciplines use it, but it is never used in my field, and I had never encountered it until I started reading feminist stuff online.) So while there may be some initial resistance or confusion when meeting the term for the first time, I don’t think the reason to object to the discourse of intersectionality is that it’s just far too academic and complicated for normal people to understand. It’s actually incredibly obvious and easy to comprehend that if you’re a non-white woman, you’re going to be subject to both sexism and racism, which is a different experience from being subject to only one of these, and so on and so on, for other forms of prejudice.

So if this is what intersectionality is about, then I don’t believe many people on the left have any problem with it at all. I think the problem lies not with the idea of intersectionality itself, but with the identity politics that some of its proponents believe follows from it. We are told that if we accept intersectionality – which we ought to – then we also ought to accept a radical form of identity politics that says we can never generalize from people’s particular experiences, can never legitimately speak for any one other than ourselves, and where personal narrative and testimony are elevated to such a degree that there can be no objective standpoint from which to examine their veracity. This is an unattractive – indeed, an incoherent – picture of what politics should be like, which followed through to its logical conclusions is entirely self-defeating. And as we are sold this vision of politics as part of the intersectionality package, if we can’t accept it we are told that we must reject the intersecting oppressions story too. But this is a mistake.

Starting from the uncontroversial idea that our identities are comprised of many different elements, resulting in complex, possibly unique experiences of oppression for each individual, comes the quite plausible sounding claim that each individual is the best judge of her own experiences. Given that we all have these multifaceted identities and experience multiple and intersecting forms of oppression, each person is likely to be best placed to recognize and understand the oppression she faces. I think this is likely to be true, or at least, most of the time, we should assume it to be true. And if we believe that, then we ought to pay close attention to people’s testimonies, listen carefully to oppressed people, and let them use their own voices to share their experiences and understandings of the injustices they have faced. This is all very sensible and attractive. Any attempt to eradicate injustice and improve the lives of oppressed people ought to begin by listening to those people and learning from their experiences.

But this desire to listen to oppressed people’s testimonies and respect their particular experiences, although motivated by only good intentions, often seems to lead to a wholly counterproductive and self-defeating approach to politics that can’t offer any practical guidance, and can’t do anything to make oppressed people’s lives any better. Listening to people’s stories is important. But if it is to have any value, besides satisfying people’s desire to be heard, then we need to do more than listen. We need to be able to generalize from those stories to more abstract principles, which then inform our action and guide policy. Particular experiences and personal testimonies are of political importance because they can help to illuminate general principles; they cannot trump those general principles.

Suppose two women disagree about whether a certain action is sexist or not – one experiences it as discriminatory or oppressive, while the other does not feel this way about it. While it is useful to know how they feel about it, it doesn’t get us very far in deciding how to judge that action and whether to allow it or not. If we want to do more than satisfy people’s desire to be listened to – if we actually want to eradicate unjust practices – then we need to determine who is right and who is wrong. The two women presumably don’t think they are merely expressing their personal preferences about the action in question, in the way they might express a preference for tea over coffee. They both believe there is a right answer about whether the action is sexist, and that the other is mistaken. They can’t resolve this by reference to their personal testimonies and experiences alone. They will inevitably have to appeal to some beliefs they share, some general principles about what makes an action sexist. And as soon as they do this, they are having a discussion that anyone can contribute to, including men. They are appealing to abstract considerations and invoking a general argument that is in principle available to anyone, regardless of their personal experience. Once we’re doing that, men can contribute to a conversation about whether something is sexist, white people can contribute to a conversation about whether something is racist, cisgendered people can contribute to a conversation about whether something is transphobic – and they won’t necessarily be wrong, just because they lack personal experience of these forms of oppression.

Some intersectionality advocates seem to jump from the reasonable and probably true premise that people are best placed to recognize their own oppression to the unreasonable and clearly false premise that people can never be mistaken about their own oppression. It may well be true that women are best placed to define and recognize sexism, and that non-white people are best placed to identify racism. What is clearly not true is that women can never be mistaken about whether a particular phrase or action is sexist or not, or that whenever a non-white person thinks she has been the victim of racism, then she has. I may be accused here of erecting a strawman argument, that no intersectionalist actually thinks this. And yet in practice, I see this assumption at work all time, when men who question whether something is sexist are dismissed as ‘mansplainers’, or when accusations of racism are believed without evidence because it is a person of colour making the accusation. The danger with this line of thinking is that it really does lead to an Oppression Top Trumps, where we have to preface all our arguments with extensive details of our identities and past experiences to prove our oppression credentials before we are entitled to an opinion, and where personal feelings and experience trump abstract arguments and general principles.

While we ought to begin with listening to people’s stories, we cannot stop there, for on their own, people’s stories tell us nothing about what we ought to do, what policies we ought to prefer. And yet the logic of the intersectionalist’s identity politics tells us that we must stop at listening to people’s testimonies, because to do any more would be oppressive and unjust in itself. As soon as we start to abstract away from those stories, and form general principles, we risk oppressing the people who would disagree with those principles because they don’t quite fit with their own experience. But this is a totally fruitless and nihilistic approach to politics. On this logic, we couldn’t implement laws against sexual assault, for example, as all victims of assault will experience the harm of it differently, and indeed some victims might not experience it as harmful at all. On this logic, we couldn’t have a rule that punished breaking someone’s leg more severely than pinching someone’s arm, because there may be some people who find arm-pinching as distressing as a broken leg. Taken to its ultimate conclusion, in this vision of politics there could be no room for movements like feminism at all. For feminism assumes some degree of commonality among women, which the logic of this identity politics must deny. As soon as you call yourself a feminist, you are identifying yourself as part of a movement that speaks for and represents others. And yet these others are all radically and irreducibly different, from you and from each other.

It’s not obvious to me why speaking for others is inherently oppressive. Perhaps it would be better if all people could clearly and accurately express their views and experiences. But some people are always going to be more skilled at doing that than others. For some especially weak and vulnerable people, it may be physically impossible for them to speak for themselves. And crucially, it’s inevitable that some people are going to be better than others at highlighting the relevant connections between different stories, at drawing out the general features of people’s experiences that will enable us to construct our principles and guide our action. While one person may well have the best understanding of her own experiences, it’s possible that others will be in a better position to draw general conclusions from those experiences about what we ought to do.

Recognizing that there are multiple and interacting forms of oppression, and wanting to work to eradicate the negative effects of this on the most oppressed people, can and must divorce itself from this incoherent, self-defeating, nihilistic identity politics. It we are going to do anything to make people’s lives better, we have to be able to draw general conclusions from people’s experiences, and be allowed to represent those who cannot represent themselves. The implication of this is that sometimes, we may have to tell an oppressed person that they are mistaken in their judgement about particular cases of injustice. But the payoff is a vision of politics that allows us to do more than just listen to people’s stories, but actually implement policies and engage in action that makes people’s lives better.

Victim blaming and logical fallacies

I’m writing this with a bit of trepidation, as it’s likely to be unpopular. I am hugely sympathetic to the political standpoint of the people whose arguments I’m targeting here. But the philosopher in me can’t bear to witness sloppy reasoning and logical fallacies, even when called into the service of a good and rightful cause. Philosophy is prior to politics, and the pursuit of truth should be prior to any convictions or ideology to which we are committed. It’s for this reason that I want to explain why one very frequently advanced claim is simply false, the product of a basic error in reasoning. This is the claim we most often see in discussions of rape and other sexual offences: that engaging in certain forms of activity or behaviour does not increase one’s likelihood of being a victim of these types of crime.

I have seen many comments along the lines of: “most people who are victims of rape are not drunk when it happens, so it’s not true that being drunk increases your chances of being raped”. Or similarly: “most people are raped by somebody they know, often in their own home, so walking late at night in a deserted area doesn’t make it more likely that you will be raped”. Now, I fully understand and feel the force of the sentiments that motivate this kind of argument. The worry about victim blaming is a legitimate one, and the problem of victim blaming is real and persistent. There are still many people who think that if a woman behaves in certain ways – gets drunk, wears certain clothes, walks home late at night – that she is somehow responsible or blameworthy if she is attacked. That she somehow had it coming, or ought to have expected it. This has serious implications for all manner of questions – how we punish convicted rapists, how we go about tackling rape as a societal problem, etc. And of course, it also has a serious impact on those who are assaulted. Not only are they victims of the first injustice, that of the assault; they are victims of a second injustice, when they are blamed for what happened to them, with all the suffering and pain this causes. So I fully agree that we need to avoid blaming victims for the crimes they have experienced. Unfortunately, the aforementioned argument is not the right way to go about this. It is an invalid argument, built upon a basic error of reasoning, so that its conclusion does not follow, and is probably false.

To be specific: in logical terminology, the error of reasoning that occurs in this argument is the fallacy of denying the antecedent. The fallacy occurs in this form:

If P, then Q.

Not P.

Therefore, not Q.

This conclusion - not Q – does not follow from the premises; therefore, this argument is not valid. The premises cannot be held to support the conclusion. (That doesn’t mean that the conclusion is definitely not true, either; it just means that we can’t deduce that it is true, from the premises given).

The argument given above, invoked to avoid the danger of victim blaming, can be laid out in this form:

If you are drunk, then you are more likely to be the victim of rape.

Most victims of rape are not drunk.

Therefore, it is not the case that drunk people are more likely to be victims of rape.

Now, it might not be immediately apparent why this is a fallacious argument. This is pretty much the argument that one often hears, and so it may on the face of it seem valid. However, we only have to tweak it slightly and the error becomes obvious:

If you are drunk, then you are more likely to crash your car.

Most people who crash their car are not drunk.

Therefore, it is not the case that drunk people are more likely to crash their cars.

Hopefully now it’s clear why this argument doesn’t work. The fact that the majority of people who are in car accidents were not drunk does not mean that driving while drunk does not increase one’s likelihood of a crash. This argument has the exact same structure as the previous one, and yet we can see that it is invalid; the premises do not support the conclusion.

In the case of drink driving, we know that as a matter of fact, the conclusion is false, because the empirical evidence tells us that the first premise is true – it is a fact that being drunk increases your chances of crashing your car. Now, I should make it clear that I am not stating that the first premise in the argument about rape is known to be true. That too is a question that empirical evidence will support one way or the other. The facts will tell us if it is indeed the case that being drunk or walking home alone late at night or wearing high-heeled shoes or whatever increase one’s likelihood of being victim of an attack (intuitively, some of those seem more likely factors than others).

But the point is this: the fact that most people who are raped were not drunk does not in itself tell us anything about whether getting drunk increases your chances of being raped. We know it is the case that the vast majority of rapes that take place occur within the home, or between people who know each other; and so in those cases, drunkenness is not a determining factor. But from that it just doesn’t follow that if you are wanting to minimize your chances of being the victim of rape, not getting drunk won’t help you. It is an empirical question – but it seems a plausible hypothesis to think that in any given situation, holding everything else equal, being drunk will make you more vulnerable that you would otherwise have been. And if that’s so, then to reject the claim that being drunk increases your chances of being victim of crime is just a mistake, and is an example of putting our politics ahead of the facts of the matter.

It’s crucial to note what is being said here, and what is not. Saying that being drunk makes it more likely that you will be a victim of a crime does not entail anything about whether you are therefore blameworthy for that crime or responsible for it. But to avoid that conclusion, we need to develop a coherent and intuitively compelling theory of blame and responsibility (and this would hopefully be able to make some important distinctions between causal responsibility and moral responsibility).

Equally, saying that being drunk makes it more likely that you will be a victim of a crime does not entail anything about what is the best way to go about eliminating that crime – whether you understand best to mean morally appropriate, most effective, or something else. I completely agree with those people who say that rape prevention far too often places the onus on women to avoid being victims of rape, rather than on targeting men’s behaviour. And I also agree that this is a dangerous move to make because it increases the tendency towards victim blaming. I happen to think that women have a right to get as drunk as they please, wear as short a skirt as they like, and walk home through dark and deserted areas without being assaulted; none of those factors could ever justify somebody assaulting them. But what I do have a problem with is people moving from that essentially moral position to the factual claim that being drunk or walking home alone doesn’t increase your chances of being attacked, because that just doesn’t follow.

I worry about all of this because the perfectly legitimate desire to avoid victim blaming then often becomes an outright attack on people who are trying to give factual advice about how to avoid being the victim of a crime. I can see why analogies with leaving one’s windows open and burglary seem crass and offensive to many people. But as the proponents of those kinds of analogies often stress, it is not a moralized claim; it’s a purely factual one. The empirical question of what makes a certain event more likely to occur is entirely distinct from the moral question of what makes a person blameworthy or not. Telling women not to get drunk probably will, everything else being equal, reduce their chances of being raped. Whether or not this is the morally right way to go about reducing those chances is an entirely different question.

Civility and charity in public discourse: interpret others as you would have them interpret you

There has been a lot of discussion in the past couple of months about issues relating to civility and politeness in online debate. Much of that discussion has focused on the the expression of anger and the recourse to insults and abuse in debate – understandably, because this is perhaps the most visible aspect of civility, and the aspect that has the most effect on people engaged in debate. I think that’s a discussion worth having – we need to find some compromise between using norms of politeness as a tool for silencing dissenting voices, and endorsing an anything goes approach where people can be as abusive, hurtful or threatening as they like. But I also think this misses out on a more important, because more fundamental, aspect of civility, namely: the principle of charity. Acceptance of and compliance with the principle of charity is a basic requirement of civility and should be regarded as a necessary condition for engaging in public debate – if someone is not prepared to be charitable, then we shouldn’t be prepared to debate with them.

As critics of notions of civility and politeness rightly point out, these norms have always been used as a tool to exclude some people from the discussion. Indeed, that is their function – they serve to exclude the uncivil, and therefore to allow debate to proceed without being derailed or disrupted. And it is true that these norms have often been interpreted in such a way as to justify the exclusion of people raising difficult questions, or to stifle dissent. One very quick and easy way of discrediting one’s opponents, or excluding them from discussion before it has even begun, is to label them as somehow unreasonable, and therefore not worth our time arguing with. And of course, historically it has often been members of oppressed or disadvantaged groups who have been labelled unreasonable. Particular groups, such as women or ethnic minorities, are socially coded as ‘emotional’, and therefore irrational or unreasonable; this is then used to justify excluding them from discourse. They are told: “we are prepared to talk to you, if you would only calm down and be reasonable!” This occurs even though such groups are no more prone to anger or emotional outburst than others. They have just been culturally defined as emotional; and even though such groups may have legitimate cause for anger or outrage, and may be entirely justified in feeling anger, and expressing it. So it is easy to understand why some people are unhappy being told they need to be more polite before we will talk to them about their concerns, and why many activists reject all calls for civility in discourse as an attempt by the dominant and powerful to silence dissent and exclude troublesome voices.

But this is too quick. We cannot possibly proceed to have a discussion without some ground rules, if only to allow us to discuss anything without the conversation being derailed by irrelevant concerns. Whenever we engage in debate, we all implicitly accept a rule that says we will try to stay broadly on topic, and only make points that are relevant to the matter at hand – hence why feminists are so frequently frustrated with responses to their arguments that simply say – “well what about men, they have a tough time too!” Similarly, we all implicitly accept a general norm of truth-telling – those who break this rule and tell lies are only able to do so by virtue of the fact that we have all accepted the norm of truth-telling, which is what enables the liar to be believed. Even those who argue for allowing a broad range of expressions of anger and other emotions would presumably want to draw the line at threats and ad hominem attacks (and indeed, most of those who want to allow aggression and abuse as expressions of anger tend to apply this only to the side of the argument they believe is right, and therefore justified in being angry. Few people are happy to let the powerful and the privileged be aggressive and abusive to their opponents; it is regarded as a tool to be used by those lacking in privilege.) So, once we’ve accepted all this, we are already well on the way to acknowledging that there need to be rules governing civility and politeness in debate – we just have to agree on what those are.

I think there are good reasons for us to restrict certain forms of expression on the grounds that they are excessively aggressive, hostile or abusive, for reasons that have surely been elaborated on elsewhere – it’s disrespectful, hurtful, and it’s counterproductive. But before we even get to the stage where we are levelling insults or being aggressive, we have a more fundamental duty of civility to apply the principle of charity.

The principle of charity is fundamentally a methodological presumption of rational argument that has various formulations, but says something like: we ought to try to understand any position in its strongest, most persuasive form before we attack it. But I think we should also consider it a moral obligation that we owe to anybody we engage in debate with, in whatever forum that debate may take place: we owe it to them to try to interpret them and their views in their strongest, most persuasive, and most reasonable light. Rather than imputing to them the view we believe that people like them usually hold, or the view we want them to hold because it’s easiest to attack, we should make a good-faith, sincere attempt to understand what it is they might actually mean, assuming that they, like us, are reasonable people.

A lot of work is done in this principle by the notion of reasonableness. In the context of public debate, I think reasonableness has two elements: first, respecting others as equal parties in the discourse; and second, arguing in good faith and making a sincere and genuine attempt to persuade others of the rightness of your views, or to get to the truth. If you don’t meet either of these conditions, then you are not a reasonable participant to the discussion, and other reasonable people are perfectly entitled to exclude you.

As a reasonable person, you ought to accept and uphold the principle of charity when debating with others. This principle requires you to do the following things:

1. Assume that the person you are talking to is reasonable, just as you are reasonable. Of course, this assumption may be overriden by good evidence that the person you are talking to is not reasonable – if they’ve just called you a stupid bitch, for example, they’ve clearly indicated they don’t respect you as an equal participant to the discussion. If they’ve obviously lied to you, then you are justified in assuming they are not making a good faith attempt to engage in debate. But until there is strong evidence to the contrary, charity requires you to assume the person you are debating with is reasonable, until they prove themselves to be otherwise.

2. Given that you are assuming them to be reasonable, try to interpret what they are saying in the most reasonable light. What is the most reasonable possible explanation for what this person has said? So for example, we should assume someone to be well-intentioned and yet misguided and ill-informed, rather than leaping to assume they are bigoted or malicious. This requirement is something like Hanlon’s Razor - don’t attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. If someone asks questions, we should assume that they are genuinely meant in the spirit of inquiry, rather than motivated by more malicious or sinister intentions. Furthermore, we should assume that the person is arguing in good faith and is sincere – that they genuinely believe the view that they profess to hold. (Unless, of course, we are trying to work out whether a particularly obnoxious viewpoint is being sincerely professed or is an attempt at satire – in these cases, charity would have us interpret it ironically, until we have good evidence otherwise). We should also recognise the scope for reasonable disagreement – that is, that there are issues on which people can hold opposing views, and yet neither one be unreasonable.

3. Assume that the person you are talking to is rational, just as you are rational. That is, assume that they have the same capacities for rational thought, reasoning and logic that you have, and that these are operating properly. Again, this assumption can be overridden in the light of good evidence, but until we know either way, we should assume our interlocutors to be rational and well-informed, and assume that like we do, they seek to hold a set of beliefs that is logical, consistent and rationally grounded.

4. Given that you are assuming them to be rational, try to interpret what they are saying in the most rational light. Try to reconstruct their argument in its most logical, coherent, consistent form, and then attack that where appropriate. This means we avoid erecting straw men versions of people’s positions to be gleefully knocked down.

This might all seem rather obvious; and indeed, if you are a decent critical thinker then it should be obvious, as it is an important presumption in our reasoning processes. But I was motivated to write about it because in online debate, I see the principle of charity being violated daily; people interpreting others’ well-intentioned but misguided statements as evidence of bigotry; people twisting and interpreting others’ words to make them seem malicious or sinister. (On a charitable interpretation of this failure of charity, this happens unintentionally; being less charitable, I suspect some people deliberately misread and distort others’ views.) And it is this, as much as anything, that leads to feuds and fallouts and the outpourings of fury and vitriol we have seen recently. Being interpreted uncharitably is a form of injustice, and makes people angry. Particularly when this uncharitable interpretation is accompanied by abuse or insult, they are likely to respond in a similar fashion, and before we know it, a vicious and unpleasant war of words has broken out that is upsetting on all sides. A lot of this could be avoided before it’s even begun if we kept the principle of charity in mind when engaging in debate, and thought of it as a moral constraint on our interactions with others that it is up to us to police.

So as a rule of thumb, I propose a Golden Rule for public debate: Interpret others as you would have them interpret you.

Lex talionis in the experience machine

When it comes to punishment, I imagine that even the most progressive of us, and even the most consequentially minded of us, continue to hold some pretty strong retributive intuitions. Even if you are thoroughly convinced that the primary justifications for the practice of punishment are forward-looking considerations like deterrence or rehabilitation, you probably still feel the pull of more retributive concerns – the idea that some people ought to be punished because they somehow deserve to be punished; that because they have inflicted suffering on others, it is appropriate that they suffer in return.

Unsurprisingly, I tend to have this retributivist response most strongly with respect to particularly violent crimes or crimes that involve the deliberate infliction of especially painful and long-lasting suffering, and where the perpetrator shows little remorse. For example, the real-life case that most strongly elicited this response in me was that of the two men convicted of throwing acid into the face of model and television presenter Katie Piper. This attack inflicted a huge amount of physical pain and psychological suffering, as well as permanent disfigurement. Indeed, this was the objective; the attack served no other purpose, and can only have been motivated by a desire to inflict suffering and cause permanent damage. Furthermore, the perpetrators of this crime have never expressed any remorse or regret for their actions. When I read the details of this crime, and others like it, the feeling of injustice makes me understandably angry. The fact that these people have knowingly and intentionally inflicted such a huge amount of pain and suffering on an innocent person, and yet do not appear to be suffering in any real sense themselves, feels to me to be a real injustice. It seems to me that it would be a better state of affairs if they could experience the kind of suffering they have inflicted; if they could feel and understand the pain and damage they caused. Not only because this would hopefully deter them from committing future attacks, but also because I can’t help feeling that they deserve to feel pain equivalent to the pain they have inflicted.

Now of course, you may dismiss this response of mine as simply an emotional desire for vengeance which, no matter how understandable, has no place in a civilized society and certainly ought not to be incorporated into our practices of punishment. There are legal systems in some parts of the world where lex talionis is enshrined in law, and inflicting physical suffering on a perpetrator equivalent to that caused by the original crime is a possible form of punishment. In a literal case of an eye for an eye, Iranian courts ruled that as punishment for disfiguring and blinding Ameneh Bahrami by throwing acid in her face, her attacker Majid Movahedi should be punished by having acid dropped into his eyes (although this punishment was never carried out, as Ms Bahrami pardoned Movahedi at the last minute). I share the abhorrence that was most people’s reaction to the initial ruling, and believe that no judicial system ought to punish people by inflicting this kind of physical harm on offenders, no matter what their crime. What I’m interested in though, is the reasons why we believe this kind of judicial punishment is wrong. Is it wrong because it is always wrong for the state to inflict the subjective experience of physical pain on to offenders? Or is it wrong because of the objective harm that would be caused by dropping acid into the offender’s eyes, and the likelihood this would cause lasting, permanent damage? To try to work this out, I’d like to make use of a thought experiment.

Suppose we really had access to experience machines, like the one that Robert Nozick devises in Anarchy, State and Utopia. That is, imagine that there are machines that we can be plugged into, like the people in The Matrix, that are programmed to stimulate our brains in such a way as to replicate any experience. While you are plugged into the machine, you aren’t aware that the experiences are a simulation – you think these events and experiences are actually happening. After a certain amount of time, you can be unplugged, and go back to your normal life. Now let’s imagine that these machines are routinely used as a form of judicial punishment, as a way of enacting a type of lex talionis punishment that, while inflicting the experience of physical pain and suffering, does not cause any long lasting harms. So for example, as punishment for committing an acid attack, the perpetrator would be plugged into the machine, and in the machine, have the simulated experience of having acid thrown into his face. He would feel the same physical sensations that such an attack tends to cause in the real world. Furthermore, he would, in the machine, have the appearance of being physically disfigured, and experience the psychological anguish and distress that usually accompanies this. During his time plugged into the machine, he would not realise this is a simulation; he would believe he was actually having this experience. After a given amount of time – however long we deemed was an appropriate length of time for him to suffer – he would be unplugged from the machine, physically unharmed.

Could such a form of punishment be justified? If we think it could, then that suggests that what is wrong with judicial corporal punishment is not the infliction of physical pain itself, but rather causing objective, long-lasting, possibly irreversible harms. But if we think that lex talionis in the experience machine is wrong, then that suggests that what we think is wrong about judicial corporal punishment is simply that it causes the subjective experience of physical pain, irrespective of any objective or long-lasting harms it inflicts. This may be right – it might be the case that the state ought never to inflict physical pain upon its citizens, no matter what offence they have committed. But this position leads to familiar worries about why the infliction of physical pain is considered unacceptable when the infliction of psychological distress is considered legitimate – clearly for many people, having their liberty restricted by being sent to prison is likely to cause a great deal of psychological suffering, and yet we tend to think this is ok. So the person who thinks lex talionis in the experience machine is an impermissible form of judicial punishment will need to explain why causing subjective psychological pain is acceptable, while causing subjective physical pain is not.

As a tentative conclusion, I’m inclined to think that the reason to object to judicial corporal punishment is that it inflicts forms of physical damage that are objective, that is, that are harmful independently of how the subject experiences the harm. This is why it would be wrong for the Iranian judicial system to have carried out their punishment of dropping acid into the offender’s eyes – this would have blinded him, which is an objective and irreversible harm. But perhaps if we could simulate the pain and suffering caused by having acid thrown in one’s eyes without actually inflicting this objective harm, then this would be an acceptable form of retributive justice. Lex talionis within the experience machine might be a permissible form of punishment.

Shirkers versus strivers: luck, fairness and cognitive errors

By now, we’ve all noticed the proliferation of powerful political rhetoric drawing clear distinctions between society’s ‘strivers’ and its ‘shirkers’. Decent, hard-working, struggling people who want to get ahead and provide for their families are contrasted with those lazy, idle, feckless benefits-scroungers who sit at home all day with the curtains drawn, watching plasma televisions paid for by decent, honest taxpayers. These kinds of tensions between the poor and the middle-classes aren’t new, of course. But in recent weeks and months there has been an upsurge in the appeal by politicians to these familiar depictions of strivers and shirkers. And hence, rather unsurprisingly, recent evidence suggests that a large proportion of people grossly overestimate the percentage of the social security budget that is spent on unemployed people or fraudulent claims, and that a large proportion of people support the implementation of caps on benefits for working-age people.

The official justifications for the proposed annual 1% cap on benefits being voted on on Tuesday in the welfare uprating bill are related to deficit-reduction and the value of fairness – the need to distribute the costs of essential deficit-reduction measures fairly. We could dismiss this as mere posturing, disingenuous gesturing towards important moral values like fairness or social justice, when in reality they can be explained by far more cynical motives – the standard version of this response suggests the explanations are part ideological, in the form of a neo-liberal drive to roll back the activities of the state, and part pure self-interest, out of the need to appease wealthy donors, or the desire of Conservative politicians to preserve their own privilege and fortune. This uncharitable interpretation might be the correct one, though of course we will never know for sure, the precise nature of people’s intentions and the contents of their characters being difficult to do more than speculate about. I find it a rather implausible hypothesis, given that it has to attribute to Cameron, Osborne et al both brazen, barely concealed pursuit of self-interest, as well as a complete lack of concern and compassion for the suffering of those who are badly off. Much as I dislike many of the coalition’s spending cuts, I find this explanation of how they have been arrived at rather unbelievable. Few people are so wicked as this story requires senior members of the government to be. But anyway, even if it were true, this still leaves us with the question of why many ordinary people – many of those who will be hit hardest by the benefit cuts being proposed – continue to support them. This is not a new phenomenon either: political scientists, as well as commentators on the left, have long pondered the mystery of why so many voters support political parties or policies that do not promote their interests, and indeed seem to serve the interests of those who are already pretty affluent.

I have a theory about why this is. I think the same theory that explains why David Cameron and George Osborne believe that placing caps on benefits is the fair thing to do, is the same theory that explains why many people believe that increases in, for example, inheritance tax are unfair, even though those taxes are redistributive in purpose - that is, they aim to redistribute wealth from those who have more, towards those who have less. I want to stress that this is just a theory, one that I have been pondering for a while. It is essentially a psychological theory, and although I am reasonably well educated, I’m certainly not a psychologist. So a lot of this is speculative, and tentative. But nonetheless, I’m putting it out there.

I think Cameron and Osborne are probably being honest when they say that they believe it is unfair that some people receive as much in benefits as others earn from paid employment, in the same way many people think that high rates of income tax for large earners, or large rates of inheritance tax are unfair, even though they pay neither of these high rates themselves. I think this can be explained by reference to a near universal cognitive bias that we are all susceptible to, and yet is ultimately an error, that leads us to make serious errors in our judgement of ourselves and others.

First of all, many people (perhaps most people) share the intuition that at least part of what fairness is about is making sure that nobody is made worse off as a result of things for which they are not responsible, because they were things over which they had no control. This might not be the whole story of what it means to treat people fairly, but most people have some intuitive thought along these lines – it is unfair if people suffer when it is not their fault that they suffer. This is why we think anti-discrimination laws are generally a good thing: it would be unfair if I suffered as a result of my race or gender, when these are things I could not control, and am not responsible for. Following on from this, we would probably also think that it is unfair for people to receive rewards or benefits for things they weren’t responsible for. So many people would share the view that a fair distribution of resources is one where people acquire a share that in some way tracks their responsibility; where people are rewarded or punished for their efforts and for the things they could control, and not rewarded or punished for the things that were outside of their control.

Whether or not this is the correct way of understanding fairness, it is at the next step where the errors of reasoning arise. My belief is that the vast majority of us, perhaps even all of us, are susceptible to a cognitive bias whereby we drastically overestimate the extent to which we are responsible for where we end up and the things that happen to us. That is, we seem to be predisposed to significantly overestimate just how much our achievements and our outcomes are truly down to our own efforts and hard work, and therefore are things we are responsible for; while at the same time we significantly underestimate the extent to which these things came about through factors that were ultimately beyond our control – that is, through brute luck. I don’t know why we tend to make this mistake. Perhaps evolutionary psychologists could give some reasonable explanation for why we all seem prone to this bias. Perhaps, for the same reasons it was evolutionarily advantageous to see patterns and faces where these don’t exist, it was also advantageous to develop the belief that we have control over our lives and our environments; that we are purposive agents who can effect real change in the world, rather than being buffeted by fate, chance and random forces of nature. Whatever the explanatory story, the consequence is that nearly all of us have a tendency to believe that the primary factor explaining how we have come to achieve and obtain the things we have is through our own efforts and resourcefulness, rather than recognising that to a large extent, we got where we are – good or bad – predominantly through brute luck.

None of this should be understood as a denial of free will or the possibility of agency. It is simply to say that of all the factors that could explain how I got to where I am now, luck is overwhelmingly the most important one. I was born to a particular set of parents, in a particular geographic location, and with a particular set of natural talents, none of which I am in any way responsible for. Sure, I had to work hard to develop these talents in certain ways; but it should hopefully be obvious that hard work alone cannot explain successes, as without a great deal of good fortune my hard work would have amounted to nothing. We can’t hope to untangle what proportion of my outcome can be attributed to my hard work and what proportion came down to good fortune, since luck is closely intertwined with effort at all stages (and of course, having the propensity and ambition required to work hard may be a natural endowment for which we aren’t responsible either).

But because of the cognitive error, whereby we attribute far too much weight to our efforts while disregarding the far more significant role played by brute luck, we fail to recognise this. Particularly if we have been successful, we attribute this to our extraordinary hard work, resourcefulness and chutzpah. And indeed, we are likely to take exception to the suggestion that it is mostly good luck that got us here. Furthermore, we do the same thing with other people. If I have been successful and acquired a lot through my hard work and resourcefulness, then those who are unsuccessful or have failed to acquire a lot must have been lazy and unresourceful. If I am responsible for my achievements, then others must be responsible for their relative lack of achievements. And if fairness is about rewarding people for the things they are responsible for, then it is only fair that those who have worked harder should end up richer than those who are lazy.

I think this is something like the story that explains why people like Cameron and Osborne believe cuts to social security are essentially fair, and what explains the perennial appeal of the shirkers versus strivers story – it seems to us, cognitively biased as we are, plausible to think that those who claim benefits must not be trying hard enough, and therefore are undeserving of a greater share of resources. What’s especially interesting about all this is that it is not only those who have been more successful who tend to believe the story. The poor, as well as those described by Ed Miliband as the ‘squeezed middle’, often seem to endorse this explanation too. This helps to explain why even those in the lower socio-economic classes often report being against high levels of income and inheritance tax, even though they would stand to be beneficiaries. (A piece of anecdata – whenever I ask my undergraduate students whether we ought to tax Premier League footballers more highly, they overwhelmingly object that this would be unfair, as footballers work so hard to get to that level and therefore deserve whatever the market is prepared to pay for their talents. I suspect this answer would be given by many people asked the same question.)

A further consequence of this error of judgement is that many people are unwilling to accept the idea that they might end up contributing more to the collective pot of resources than they take out. It is rare to encounter people who would think it fair if, over the course of their lives, they end up being net contributors, rather than net beneficiaries, of social welfare. Generally speaking, there is a widely shared assumption that fairness requires that what we all get back from the state is roughly equivalent to what we put in; and so if throughout the course of my life l consistently pay high levels of income tax, while making little use of social security and publicly funded services, then this regarded as somehow unfair. The political implications of all this is that it is very difficult for politicians of any stripe to gain popular support for redistributive programmes, and relatively easy to obtain support for policies such as caps on benefits payments.

If I am right about all this, then our mistaken belief in the extent to which we and others are responsible for our destinies is a serious barrier to realising social justice. Misguided ideas about what fairness requires, grounded in the illusion that we all have far more control over our achievements and outcomes than we actually do, stand in the way. So what can we do about it? We can start by recognising the extent to which our own situation was influenced by factors for which we are not responsible, and is therefore to a large extent a matter of luck. Those of us who are in a position to pay high levels of income tax, who do not claim social security, who perhaps have enough money to use private healthcare and send our children to private schools, ought to recognise that none of this is unfair. Rather, we should realise that these facts about us are themselves evidence of how much good luck we have had – how circumstances beyond our control, that we are not responsible for, have contrived to provide us with a higher level of income than many other people can hope to achieve. In other words, paying high levels of income tax and not claiming benefits is itself evidence that you have been fortunate, when others have been less so. And that being the case, the reasonable response is to pay higher levels tax gladly, and to vote for parties that propose tax increases to fund welfare benefits and public services, even if these are things that, because of our good fortune, we don’t currently use ourselves. Those of us who have had good luck in life’s lottery should therefore acknowledge that there is no unfairness if we end up paying more in to social welfare than we take out. But ultimately, the onus lies on politicians on the left to challenge the dominant view, rather than merely appeasing it. We need to educate citizens about the strength and pervasiveness of the cognitive bias towards the illusion of control and responsibility, and encourage people to question their intuitively plausible yet false belief that we are all essentially responsible for our outcomes and achievements. Once we recognise that the primary factor explaining where people end up is brute luck, we are far less likely to think that it is fair to cut benefits to the poorest in society, or to preserve the wealth of the richest, as neither are really responsible for what they have.

Some thoughts on ‘groping’: naming uninvited touching

Just over a year ago, at an academic conference, something unpleasant happened to me. I would like to be able to tell people about it. I wanted to tell people about it at the time, as it seemed like the kind of thing that should probably be reported to the conference organizers. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure what it was that had happened. Thirteen months and a great deal of pondering the incident later, and I’m still not. As you can imagine, that makes telling people about it rather difficult.

I can describe the incident in detail, of course. Over a period of perhaps twenty minutes, another delegate at the conference – repeatedly and without my consent – touched my head, hair, neck, lower back, inside of my forearms, all the while indifferent to my distress and discomfort. (I want to go into lengthy detail here to try to explain why I didn’t tell him not to touch me or otherwise put a stop to it, but I’m going to resist.)

There have been many other incidents like this in my life, and I would be so bold as to claim that all women have several of their own versions of this story – most far worse than mine. I can give you a pretty accurate physical description of the incident. And I know that what this person did was wrong, because it is wrong to touch someone without consent. But what I am not sure about is what type of incident this was; what label to give it, what category to assign it to.

Once I had extricated myself from the situation I tracked down the conference organizers and tried to tell them what had happened. But I found myself lost for words. I didn’t possess any vocabulary to accurately report what had happened to me. I was upset and angry, which won’t have helped. But in the time that has elapsed since, I still haven’t figured out what I should have said. After much stopping, starting and stuttering, I eventually told them that the man in question had ‘sexually harassed’ me. I didn’t think that was right at the time, and I still don’t. I just didn’t know what else to say.

The other possibility that immediately springs to mind is ‘sexual assault’. My knowledge of the law and its correct interpretation is not good enough for me to comment on whether incidents like this are legally regarded as sexual assault. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 states that intentional touching is sexual assault if the touching is sexual, the person being touched does not consent, and the person does not reasonably believe that they have consented. The issue here would be whether stroking someone’s neck, back or inner arm constitutes ‘sexual touching’. I don’t know, and don’t want to speculate, because it’s not really the legal situation that I’m most interested in here. Rather, what I’m concerned with is the social meaning of events such as these – the label we collectively give them, the category to which we as a moral community assign them.

I didn’t describe this incident as sexual assault to the conference organizers, and whether or not legally it would be regarded as such, it feels to me that it would be inaccurate to use that term. To me – and I think to most people who hear that phrase – sexual assault denotes something much more serious and traumatic than the mildly obnoxious unwanted touching I experienced. If this person had touched the more obviously sexual areas of my body, then I would consider that to be sexual assault. But it just doesn’t seem correct to call unwanted touching of my arm, neck and back to be sexual assault. Not only does it feel overly dramatic and an exaggeration to refer to it in such terms; it also seems to me that to call it sexual assault is to diminish the experiences of other people who have been victims of serious sexual assaults. To equate the mild distress of someone stroking my neck with the trauma and shock that must accompany serious sexual assaults feels attention-seeking, and somehow disrespectful.

Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe it’s symptomatic of how widespread such incidents are, and how acceptable our culture considers them, that even their victims resist labelling them as sexual assault. But even if that’s true, the fact remains that I am uncomfortable with that label. It just doesn’t feel accurate to describe these incidents as sexual assaults, and I feel pretty confident that most other people would share that intuition – if I were to say I had been sexually assaulted, and then describe what happened in detail, they would think I was being misleading and melodramatic. The other possible remaining terminology is to say I was ‘groped’, a phrase that’s being employed rather a lot in the popular press just now. But I am not sure if that is correct either – ‘groping’ is a very vague and ill-defined term and I’m not sure exactly what it refers to. Must groping involve only the obviously sexual areas of the body, or can you grope someone’s neck, arms or legs? Is groping different from stroking? Although I have some vague hunches myself about how to answer these questions, the fact I’m asking them suggests there is no clear consensus on what groping is.

So what follows from all this is that I don’t have any label to give to this incident, and others like it. I know what happened; but I don’t know what type of thing happened. And this is a further harm to suffer – not only has an unpleasant thing happened, but I am also unable to name what that unpleasant thing was.

The problem of lacking terminology by which to identify these kinds of minor assaults seems to be a paradigm case of what philosopher Miranda Fricker calls ‘hermeneutical injustice’. This is the injustice that occurs when ‘some significant area of one’s social experience [is] obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization’. Hermeneutical marginalization occurs when members of a particular disadvantaged group – in this case, women – are prevented from participating as equals in the creation of social meanings. Members of powerful social groups are in a privileged position with respect to the construction of our collective hermeneutical resources. That is, they have more influence over the creation of the social frames of reference by which people make sense of their lives and their experiences, while members of less advantaged social groups have less influence. The result of this marginalization is that there is a gap in our collective frameworks for interpreting and making sense of the social world, a gap which prevents some people – in this case, women – from being able to understand and make sense of their experiences. Historically, women have been under-represented from those jobs or roles that are central for the construction of social meaning – jobs in politics, law or the media, for example. They have therefore been marginalized from the processes whereby we come to recognize and label certain practices or events and place them within a framework of meaning. As a result, they are prevented from understanding or communicating the things that happen to them. As Wittgenstein famously said: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The very fact that our collective hermeneutical resource – that is, our shared frameworks of meaning and reference – lacks vocabulary for describing the kind of thing that happened to me at this conference suggests that this form of injustice has taken place. It is startling that we do not have the language to adequately capture this kind of event, when it is such a commonplace feature of women’s lives. Most, if not all, women will experience this kind of uninvited physical contact several times in their lives; and yet we don’t have any terminology with which to discuss it. And the crucial claim is that this is an additional injustice – in addition to the wrong of being touched without one’s consent, a further wrong occurs when the victim of this touching is left without the interpretive resources to describe and make sense of what has happened to her. Not only is she unable to accurately report her experience to others. She is unable to understand it herself, and in interpreting it has to rely on the existing set of social meanings – which, in the case on unwanted touching, often represents this as harmless flirtation. This can lead to confusion and distress, as well as a sense of being alone in our experiences, when in fact they are examples of a wider pattern of behaviour for which we currently have no name. Indeed, lacking the interpretive resources to make sense of our experiences can be extremely damaging to our selfhood and identity. On a plausible account of personal identity, we are all engaged in a process of self-understanding, trying to make our actions, beliefs and emotions coherent and intelligible – first to ourselves, and then to others. If the existing set of social meanings – and of course, this is the only set we have to draw on – lacks the resources for us to make sense of the things that happen to us, it denies us the capacity to work our how it is appropriate for us to respond, and denies us the ability to render our own behaviour and emotional responses intelligible. This has a dramatic impact on our identities and sense of self.

So how can we remedy this injustice? I’m not sure, but one possibility (as some feminist bloggers have suggested) is to insist upon calling these incidents sexual assaults, and to try to raise consciousness among both men and women that this is what uninvited touching is. While I am happy with the implication that both men and women ought to be encouraged to take these incidents more seriously, I still worry that calling these minor incidents sexual assault may have the consequence of diminishing the seriousness of other, more obvious cases. So I don’t claim to have the solution. But I’m happy enough here to have highlighted the double injustice that these forms of uninvited touching involve –  first in the wrongness of the touching itself, and second in the effective silencing of those who suffer it.

No More Page 3

If like I did, you grew up in the UK, or have lived here at any point since 1970, you will be familiar with the existence of Page 3 in The Sun and other tabloid newspapers. For many people, I imagine that Page 3 is a feature of British life that they do not question or reflect upon. Or if they do think about it, they file it alongside Carry On films and saucy seaside postcards as an eccentric but ultimately benign quirk of our national identity.

Something that intrigues and amuses me is to imagine what non-British people must make of Page 3 when they encounter it for the first time. How completely baffling and perplexing it must be to learn that there is a British newspaper – indeed, the newspaper with the largest circulation of all – that every day, prints a full page photograph of a young, attractive, glamour model showing her breasts, for readers to enjoy during their commute or tea break.

Since its inception, Page 3 had starkly divided opinion. During her time as an MP Clare Short famously campaigned against it, and was duly vilified as a fat, ugly, jealous killjoy by The Sun. That particular movement was unsuccessful, but for those who oppose the daily objectification of women in the media, the discontent has never completely disappeared. Just lately, there have been rumblings from a new generation of feminists, launching an internet campaign to petition the editor of The Sun, Dominic Mohan, to abolish Page 3 for good.

Information about the campaign can be found here, and I urge you to go and read it. In this post, I want to persuade you that if you are a reasonable person who is committed to equality between the sexes, then you ought to support this campaign – at the very least, by signing the petition. I’m going to try to do this by addressing three very common objections you often hear to campaigns like this, and show you why all of them are mistaken.

Assertiveness and testimonial injustice

I have been contemplating beginning to blog for a while now, but have finally been motivated to take the plunge following an exchange with one of my favourite people on Twitter.

She was uncomfortable with the themes in a television programme she had watched, and tweeted her concerns. Out of a desire not to appear overly aggressive or confrontational, she preceded her thoughts with a disclaimer along the lines of: “now maybe it’s just me being oversensitive, but…”. A dissenter immediately replied, calling her view stupid, and using that disclaimer against her: “you said it yourself; you’re oversensitive”.

This led to my friend feeling silenced and not taken seriously; her attempts to explain her reasons for objecting to the themes of said tv show were ignored, as she was dismissed as stupid and oversensitive. But crucially, she blamed herself for having been treated in this dismissive way. She thought she had brought it on herself for expressing her opinions in an apologetic, self-effacing manner. By preceding her thoughts with the caveat “maybe it’s just me”, she had invited rude and aggressive responses along the lines of “yes, it’s just you, idiot”.

This got me thinking about my own behaviour, because I do just this sort of thing all the time. Especially in philosophy seminars. When I need further clarification of a point, I will often begin: “sorry, I didn’t quite understand, can you explain point X a bit more for me?” Or “I’m sorry, perhaps you addressed this point and I missed it”. Often this is genuinely done from lack of confidence in my own capacities – I frequently worry that I’m not as smart as the other people in the room, and hence that I don’t know, or don’t understand, something they do. But I also do this at other times. Even when I’m reasonably confident that the question I’m asking isn’t a stupid one, or the comment I’m offering is valuable and interesting, I still frequently preface my contribution with some kind of apologetic, self-effacing caveat.