Analyzing social wrongs

Abstract

Academic philosophy has witnessed a significant change in the last years from nonideal investigations of social wrongs as being a rather marginal topic in comparison to what was assumed to be more fundamental questions to those very investigations drawing significant attention and taking their rightful place in the midst of the profession of philosophy. Yet, despite these advances and the increasing awareness of social wrongs in relation to—for example, gender, race, class, and disability—social philosophers are still regularly asked to justify what they are doing or to justify that what they are doing is rightfully called philosophy. This special issue is motivated by the following three ideas: First, to increase awareness for nonideal investigations into gender, race, class, and disability. Second, to draw attention to the insight that our philosophical methods and the topics we are concerned with are not two separate issues; in fact, what we investigate and how we do so are tightly connected. Third, to question the ways in which philosophy as a discipline excludes certain voices, topics, and methods.

Many of the papers in this issue were the result of a conference marked by the attempt to bring investigations of social wrongs in the tradition of post-Analytic philosophy to the German-speaking philosophy world—a context still very much behind on investigations of social wrongs in a nonideal manner. This conference, which took place in Vienna, and which was organized in 2014 by Hilkje C. Hänel, Daniel James, and Odin Kroeger, served as an international forum for social philosophers to think about the way in which we do philosophy and the topics that are often strikingly absent from philosophy. Since then, much has changed, but the need to question what philosophy is, what it can do, and who is doing it remains. Before we provide a brief overview of the papers in this issue, let us say a bit more about the three aspects mentioned above.

Discussions of gender, race, and disability have slowly paved their way into the midst of philosophical theorizing and have become an essential aspect of academia; this is evidenced by recent hires in feminist philosophy and critical race studies, the emergence of journals on the topics of gender, race, and most recently, disability, or the central place that these topics take in the APA newsletter, conferences, as well as book and article publications. (This is of course due to the resistant struggle of a few to make our profession better and more welcoming for marginalized and oppressed philosophers.) However, neither nonideal investigations of social wrongs in general nor debates on gender, race, and disability—and many other important sites of oppression and injustice—have a secure place within academic philosophy yet; as can be seen by recent backlashes against trans philosophy or the metaphysical debates that claim that gender and race (and likely disability) are not substantive debates within metaphysics (as discussed by Díaz-León in this issue). Furthermore, the more general backlash against women's rights for abortion, the harmful debate for anyone with a disability and/or chronic illness about triage during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the state and interpersonal violence against Black people and marginalized social groups are a testimony to the importance of continuing to raise these topics.

It is a commonplace in standpoint epistemology, Critical Theory, and other fields within philosophy that the methods we choose for investigation have implications for what we perceive and the topics that we are interested in and vice versa; after all, the view from the top of the tree will unlikely result in good—or any—research about its roots. The way in which our own social position and relations have consequences for what we deem interesting and the outcome of our research can be seen in detail in more recent theories within the epistemology of ignorance. This issue draws attention to a related phenomenon, namely that the methods we choose have implications for the content of our thinking and the phenomena we deem worth investigating. Furthermore, choosing a nonideal approach to philosophy implies that we start thinking from the particular social wrongs that can at times reveal the insufficiency of our well-established philosophical theories; as the contributions from Bierria, Hänel, Haslanger, and Hufendiek in this issue show.

Finally, what we deem worth investigating and which methods we choose for investigation has consequences for whom philosophy is open to and attractive to. Research has shown that marginalized philosophers feel less welcome and represented by other scholars in the field and the topics under investigation and are often interested in different topics or methodological approaches; for example, interdisciplinary approaches or investigations of real-world injustices. In this issue, Dotson as well as Ball-Blakely and Chapman and Carel draw attention to the very real and rather explicit exclusion and silencing of specific topics inside and outside of academia as well as marginalized philosophers within academia, and the way in which academic resources, norms, and rules implicitly exclude some but not others within academia.

The first four papers are concerned with general methodological questions; what are we doing when we analyze social wrongs and what should we be doing? Following up on her paper “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” (2012), Kristie Dotson reflects about the uptake of philosophy papers, especially those that are concerned with socially relevant topics. “On the Costs of Socially Relevant Philosophy Papers: A Reflection” provides important insight both of the problematic exclusions within academia and the ways in which such exclusion influences the written production of philosophy. To do so, Dotson introduces three aspects that papers, which are deemed socially relevant, contain: ideational labor, construction labor, and aspirational costs. The first describes the labor involved in situating a paper in its proper hermeneutical landscape, including the historical formation of ideas and concepts. The second describes the labor involved in the “material and practical necessities of discursive executions” (xx) such as the tooling, training, or time needed for writing a paper. Ideational labor and construction labor are not necessarily problematic; although they can be. The third, aspirational costs, refers to the aspirational goals to “impose influence on future engagement” (xx). These costs are problematic as they often lead to the exclusion of complex rather than technological discourse and its diverse practitioners. Dotson's arguments pick up on the important metaphilosophical insights given in her 2012 paper about the way in which we do philosophy in Western academy and demand some—but not all—to justify what they are doing as well as the costs, both personally and structurally, of our doings.

Next, in her paper “Disrupting Demands: Messy Challenges to Analytic Methodology”, Naomi Scheman interrogates the central assumption in analytic philosophy “that proper concepts divide logical space” and “that neither real kinds nor real particulars be ontologically vague” (xx). Scheman argues that a fully pluralist and—at least sometimes—conceptually messy approach is better equipped for emancipatory feminist theorizing. The general insight is that as philosophers we should not aim to clean up the messy social world but understand it better in its full messiness. This is motivated by an understanding that especially oppressed, subordinated, and marginalized subjects often have conflicting needs and their voices would be excluded and silenced if any one of these needs would be prioritized over others. Scheman illustrates these important arguments by drawing in the debate of what it means to be a woman and who counts as such that has dominated much of analytic feminist philosophy.

The next two papers both show the importance of questioning methodological choices for a critical analysis of social wrongs by focusing on inadequate theories common in philosophy. In her “Beyond Essentialist Fallacies: Fine-Tuning Ideology Critique of Appeals to Biological Sex Differences”, Rebekka Hufendiek is concerned with the current prominence of outdated view on sex difference in human behavior given by evolutionary psychology. Hufendiek argues that evolutionary psychologists' neglect data, methods, and critiques of feminist philosophers of science showing that their analyses are methodologically inadequate and reproduce sexist stereotypes as well as the ethical implications that follow from their analyses. This is particularly problematic, as evolutionary psychology reaches a broad audience—even outside academia—, hence, influencing the discourse on gender and sex. Hufendiek argues that these problematic views demand both an analysis from feminist philosophers of science as well as a critical investigation of ideology in so far as the essentialist fallacies in evolutionary psychology reproduce and justify oppressive structures. Hufendiek, thus, shows how methods and content often go hand in hand and analysis of social wrongs has to be attentive to methodological questions.

Sally Haslanger argues that methodological individualism is inadequate in her paper “Failures of Methodological Individualism: The Materiality of Social Systems”. Haslanger's overall aim is to show that there is an interdependence between the material, the cultural, and the psychological in social systems -crucial for many social explanations; in other words, some social phenomena are best understood in terms of systems or structures instead of individuals and their individual attitudes. To argue for the inadequacy of methodological individualism, Haslanger shows that this method can be traced back to the ideal “that the social world is made up of individuals” (xx) and that, hence, any explanation of social phenomena should focus on these individuals; either in terms of ontological individualism or explanatory individualism. However, Haslanger convincingly argues that both claims— ontological and explanatory individualism should be rejected due to their inadequate explanations of some social phenomena. The more general insight provided in this paper is the fact that some of our methodological choices fail to provide an adequate explanation of the subject under investigation because they focus on the individual; thus, an analysis of social wrongs should track the psychological as well as the material and cultural in social systems.

The last five papers are concerned with specific social wrongs—from gender to race to class and migration to disability—, while at the same time, showing that what we investigate has an impact on how we investigate or how we should investigate. In her “Problems of Conceptual Amelioration: The Question of Rape Myths”, Hilkje Hänel is concerned with the ways in which the social wrong of sexual violence against women, and in particular rape myths, can question our philosophical methods of social analysis. She argues that rape myths and other problematic background schemas can both distort our dominant working understanding of rape and prevent us from accurate applications of adequate existing concepts. Furthermore, these problematic schemas can also distort our philosophical analyses—even in cases of critical and emancipatory thinking; such as cases of conceptual amelioration. Taking these problems into account, Hänel argues for specific democratic practices that should ground the philosophical task of conceptual amelioration or engineering.

Esa Díaz-León discusses meta-metaphysical proposals of gender and race, while at the same time showing how a focus on gender and race demands a re-evaluation of some influential meta-metaphysical frameworks. “Substantive Metaphysical Debates about Gender and Race: Verbal Disputes and Metaphysical Deflationism” is a careful investigation of the debate that some disputes in metaphysics are genuine or substantive disputes in comparison to others. Díaz-León argues that some claims about what makes a metaphysical dispute substantive are problematic because they rule out debates about the nature of gender and race and proposes to understand such debates as “disputes about how we actually use or should use gender and racial terms” (xx) and that they trigger important normative assessments.

Following up on her analysis of the criminalization of Black action in the 2005 media coverage of Hurricane Katrina in “Missing in Action: Violence, Power, and Discerning Agency” (2014), Alisa Bierria tackles the way in which the conceptual conflation between “blackness” and “criminality” raises important challenges for philosophical discussion of intentional action. In her “Racial Conflation: Agency, Black Action, and Criminal Intent”, Bierria argues for a theory of racial conflation, according to which “criminal intent is systematically imposed onto active black subjects” (xx). She then continues to analyze a social logic that functions to re-interpret some agents' actions into a narrative different to their original intentions. Doing so, Bierria shows that philosophical thinking about intentional action is flawed if it fails to consider the ways in which racial oppression works and the social structures supporting such oppression.

Michael Ball-Blakely argues, against the prevailing orthodoxy, that it is pro tanto unjust for high-income countries to adopt skill-selective immigration policies. He makes two separate cases to this end. First, he cites empirical research that finds that individuals with a low socio-economic status (SES) tend to be seen as incompetent—not only by others, but also by themselves. That being so, selecting immigrants based on their skills will exacerbate the status harms that prospective immigrants with a low SES suffer from; and this may apply to citizens with a low SES, too, for a state's immigration policy sends a message about which kind of people a society values, a message that citizens with a low SES, too, will hear. Secondly, importing skilled labor enables states to forego providing fair and equal opportunities to its citizens, particularly regarding education.

In their “Neurodiversity, Epistemic Injustice, and the Good Human Life”, Robert Chapman and Havi Carel argue that epistemic injustice may cause a decline of wellbeing for individuals with neurodivergent disabilities. To do so, they focus on autism and show in important detail how the problematic assumption that autism is not conducive to wellbeing and a flourishing life is a result of credibility deficits awarded to autistic individuals and can, thus, block our very ability to imagine or perceive good autistic life. Furthermore, Chapman and Carel show that this analysis has some general implications for ethical theory—and the question of how we conduct such theory—as it indicates a lack of minority forms of human flourishing and therefore identify existing theories of human flourishing as incomplete.

We hope that the papers in this issue open up even more new questions, new methods for answering them, and new ideas for addressing social justice philosophically.