Blameworthiness, Autonomy, and Oppressive Structural Systems
Is an agent blameworthy if they perpetuate oppression while acting under oppressive conditions?
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am sitting in on a two-semester long philosophy class on the topic of Autonomy, which is the locus of major debates in moral philosophy with consequences for practical politics. The November 21st class was the second of two classes on the idea of adaptive preferences, an idea that has garnered significant debate among theorists. My Question for Consideration (QFC)1 was the cause of some really great classroom discussion, and so, partly in an effort to help me further understand the material, partly out of a desire to share philosophical work with my readers, I have decided to summarize the discussion and then open it up for my readers to add their two cents.
Before I give a brief explanation of adaptive preferences and why they matter, let me just briefly say that the conception of autonomy that I’ll be working with is largely liberal in orientation, and seems to be the most common conception in the literature.2 Assume with me, then, that
A person is autonomous just in case they
Are the author of their own lives
Have a minimally coherent concept-of-self
Would, upon reflection, endorse the choices they have made
The first condition is an agency condition - to be an agent is to be capable of making a decision to take or not take some moral action. The second condition is what gives rise to the actions taken by an agent: not only is an autonomous person capable of moral action, but they do to in accordance with some minimally coherent sense of self, some sense of ‘who they are.’ Finally, the third condition allows the autonomous person to say that the actions taken in accordance with a minimally coherent sense of self are fully and truly theirs.
One of the most significant problems for liberal conceptions of autonomy is how to understand the status of a person’s autonomy under oppressive conditions. You don’t even have to ‘go woke’ to see how this might play itself out - consider a cult member, say someone taken in by Keith Raniere and NXIVM. By now well-publicized,3 Raniere essentially kept a harem of women that he would use for his own sexual gratification, several of whom were convinced, through various means, to submit to having their pubic region branded with his initials. What is more, after the branding was publicly exposed, some of the women maintained to the media that they not only consented to the branding at the time, but that they did not regret their choice; upon reflection, they maintained that they would do it again. How is it that, several years before, many of the women caught up in his snare were fully functional members of society, making reasonable, everyday decisions, just like you and me, only to find themselves in a situation where they, seemingly willingly, endure the painful experience of being branded with a hot iron.
In an attempt to deal with these cases - several others of which I will get to shortly - philosophers have turned to what they call ‘adaptive preferences.’
Adaptive preferences are preferences that someone develops in response to adverse situations or environments. In the literature this is referred to as being ‘under oppressive conditions.’
The example used (and re-used, and re-used) in the literature is the story of the Fox and the Sour Grapes from Aesop’s Fables in which a fox comes upon a grape vine with plump, delicious, ripe-looking grapes heavy on the vine. The fox wants the grapes really badly, but he cannot reach them. In an effort to assuage his frustration, the fox convinces himself that the grapes on the vine, no matter how amazing they look, are actually sour. Since they’re sour, the fox reasons, he doesn’t actually want the grapes anyway. Should some benevolent human come along and offer to pick him some grapes from the vine, the fox would refuse the offer, having convinced himself that the grapes are actually sour.
On this story, then, the fox seems to change his mind about something he badly wants. In the first instance, ceteris paribus, he wants to eat the grapes. In the second instance, ceteris paribus, he does not want to eat the grapes. Returning to our conception of autonomy above, in both instances - both when he wants the grapes and when he doesn’t - the fox seems to meet all three conditions.
In case you find the Fox and Sour Grapes example unpersuasive (don’t worry, that’s me!), there are many real world cases for us to choose from that feature actual cases of oppressive environments.
I want to stop here and recognize that many of the examples found in the literature suffer from an important shortcoming that needs to be acknowledged. These examples, authored mostly (but not exclusively) by educated white men in the western world, frequently deal with ‘othered women’ in the global south. Recognizing that there is a valid discussion to be had around the negative impact of the male colonial gaze and its deleterious effect on understanding of the lived experiences of women and girls all over the world, most philosophers still think that some of these examples nonetheless serve to illustrate real problems, that affect real people.
Karl Marx is famous for saying that philosophers have thus far only interpreted the world, but point is to change it. It is precisely because these problems affect real people that I hope that the experiences of women in the global south are not only fodder for philosophical water cooler talk, but that these discussions will bring about positive, long-lasting change for women and girls across the world. If we truly care about oppressive environments, we should take care not to unwittingly perpetuate them in our academic work.
David Enoch, in a juggernaut of a 50 page paper,4 wants to get at a particular reason why the existence of adaptive prefences is such a problem for standard accounts of autonomy. In setting up his primary claim, he appeals to a common example of entrenched patriarchy resulting in negative outcomes for the women unfortunate enough to live under such conditions, that is, the stereotypical case of an ‘oppressed Muslim woman in an unnamed Middle Eastern nation.’ As I noted above, the examples exhibit a certain type of colonial gaze that might not necessarily mean that the conclusions normally reached are, in any way, correct. However, the example that Enoch raised in his writing actually prompted a meaningful classroom discussion: Enoch’s example - and the extension of it raised by my question - was congruent with the experiences of a classmate.
Enoch writes,
The woman who prefers to malnourish herself so that her husband and male children can have more food than they need, where this preference was shaped by injustice—when she chooses yet again to deprive herself of some food, does that choice of hers manifest the value of being the author of one’s life? Is there more value in her life, as it were, even pro tanto, in virtue of making this choice? Is a life that consists of many central choices that are like this one a paradigmatically autonomous life? I submit that the answer to all these questions is a clear “no.” And this, it seems to me, is the most important way in which it matters that a preference is adaptive (in the specific, injustice-involving way)—it deprives acting on it from the positive autonomy value it otherwise would have had. (p. 196, emphasis added)
He continues,
… the mere realization that the value of autonomy is not present in this kind of choice is in no way an insult to the person making the choice. The fault rendering that choice nonautonomous in the relevant sense is not in her, but in the situation she finds herself in, perhaps in the others putting her in that situation.
As I considered these two particular paragraphs, I started to wonder why Enoch did not address situations where someone said to be living with adaptive preferences - that is, preferences developed and reinforced due to oppressive conditions - isn’t merely a neutral receiver of oppression but also participates in perpetuating the oppression itself? Enoch alludes to it in passing, but I expanded a bit on it for my Question for Consideration (QFC).
My QFC:
Does this mean that she is not blameworthy for less than optimal choices made as a result of having adaptive preferences? At the risk of abusing the paradigmatic case, let us assume that this woman not only treats her husband and sons better than herself, providing them with the choicest foods and clothing, but she also treats her daughters more poorly than she treats herself, not just allocating the remainder of the available resources, but specifically choosing the worst of the remaining resources to give to her daughters. Or, without even considering resource allocation, think about the inhumane practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). In many cases, it is not men who hold down young girls as their genitals are mutilated, but instead a select group of honoured women in the community, doing so in part because it is believed to be a rite of passage into womanhood. In short, if moral responsibility is at all relevant, then it seems that we must, at the very least - despite the fact that her choice is not an insult - consider some non-autonomous acts as blameworthy.
In short, my concern can be formulated as follows:
If:
The agent finds herself responding - that is, making deliberate choices - to adaptive preferences under oppressive conditions, thereby rendering her choices nonautonomous;
She suffers no insult for her nonautonomous actions, since, to use Enoch’s words, choices made ‘nonautonomous[ly] in the relevant sense is not in her, but in the situation she finds herself in…’
Those adaptive preferences result, as a consequence, in non-neutral, plausibly oppressive, realities for other independent agents,
Then, it seems to me that while the agent may not be autonomous when she makes her choices, she is still, nonetheless, blameworthy for the continuing perpetuation of oppressive conditions. But this doesn’t square with our intuitions about blameworthiness under nonautonomous, oppressive conditions. If there is no insult to an agent for making decisions based on adaptive preferences, then shouldn’t blamelessness also follow?
After a bit of back and forth in class, one of my classmates mentioned that my example was a live question in her ethnic community.5 She explained that her grandmother, despite living in Canada for years, not only gives her husband, sons, and grandsons the choicest of foods, but she also chooses the worst of the foods for her daughters and grand-daughters. My classmate explained that her grandmother had been repeatedly confronted about it, especially by her female grandchildren, but to no avail. She shocked the rest of the class - mostly white men - by arguing that her grandmother was, in fact, blameworthy for perpetuating oppression. In this case, as an immigrant to Canada who arrived decades ago, her granddaughter argued, and after being repeatedly told that it was wrong to disproportionately feed the men the good food and to disproportionately keep the worst food for the women, she deserved to be held to account for her actions.
While we talked a little bit about the FGM cases, most of the class was pretty uncomfortable thinking that a bunch of white philosophy graduate students sitting around a table in an ivory tower in Canada could be in any position to say, one way or the other, whether blameworthiness was applicable or not. We all agreed, however, that it was a despicable practice and that, in so far as sexual health education can make a dent on the problem, it should be attempted in a culturally appropriate manner.
About this time we ran up against the clock and the class ended. But, as you can see from the fact that I’ve done all this writing, I haven’t stopped thinking about the question of blameworthiness in situations where autonomy is said to be compromised by oppressive conditions.
This is where I turn it over to you.
What do you think? Do you think that these kinds of examples should even be used, given that the affected individuals are often othered in the name of advancing an argument? Are questions of blameworthiness even valuable questions to be asking, or do they muddy the water? Is someone who lives in opporessive conditions lacking in autonomy?
All I ask is that we keep the comments respectful, understanding that the purpose of asking these kinds of philosophical questions is to learn how to better understand each other and how we live our lives.
For each class, each student is responsible for bringing a Question for Consideration (QFC) based on one of the papers assigned that week. From the syllabus: “QFCs should be approximately 300-500 words. The idea is to raise an interesting text-focused question that is worth having a discussion about, and to say at least little bit about how you think the question might be answered. Then we'll discuss it!”
Much of the philosophical literature on autonomy is new to me, and thus my understanding of the concept is definitely not the whole picture. Part of the purpose of writing these posts is to help me to better expand my understanding of the important concepts.
The NXIVM story was first broken by the New York Times in 2017. Since then there have been two award winning documentary series produced which tell the story from the perspective of the women involved.
Enoch, D. (2020). False Consciousness for Liberals, Part I: Consent, Autonomy, and Adaptive Preferences. The Philosophical Review, 129(2), 159–210. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-8012836
I will be maintaining , to the best of my ability, the anonymity of my classmate, for obvious reasons.